If your inbox currently contains 250 unread CVs and a mild moderate sense of dread, you're not alone. This is one of the most common complaints we hear from hiring teams. You might be tempted to work faster, close the listing early, or, God forbid, get AI to read them for you. But none of that addresses what's actually going on.
A flood of applicants isn't actually a problem. More applicants means a higher chance that your ideal candidate is somewhere in that pile. The real question is how you find them without losing your mind in the process, and that's where a scalable screening method makes all the difference.
Receiving 200+ applications is actually a blessing, if you know how to deal with the volume
The average job posting on a major board now attracts around 250 applications. And with how easy it is for candidates to ship AI-generated CVs (around 74% of hiring managers say they're encountering them regularly), the pile is only going to keep growing.
It's easy to concede and think "ugh, too many people applied, this task is impossible". Which is true in some ways (manually going through those CVs would be hell, and no one deserves that). But a large applicant pool isn't the enemy. More applicants actually means a higher probability that your ideal candidate is somewhere in that pile. Your problem isn't the number of people who applied, it's that you have no scalable way to find out who is worth progressing to the next stage.
So if your current screening method is you personally evaluating every single person in it, then you're going to want to carry on reading this.
Common advice like closing early or using knockout questions creates new problems
Google "how to deal with too many applicants!!!!" and most of the suggestions add new problems.
Closing your listing after the first 100 applications sounds practical. If you can only handle around that amount, so why keep it open? Well, because the first 100 people to apply are not necessarily the best 100 people who would have applied. They're whoever happened to see the listing first, so you're filtering mainly on timing, not by actual talent.
That's more of a gamble, than a strategy.
Knockout questions are a similar story. Adding a question to your application form that automatically removes anyone who answers the wrong way feels helpful. And sometimes it is, if you're genuinely filtering on something legally or operationally non-negotiable. But when extra, non-essential knockout questions are used primarily to slim your candidate pool, it's not so good. You're removing candidates based on a single answer to a question you designed to thin the numbers, not to predict performance. It's a crude filter and risks discarding someone capable because they ticked the wrong box or answered a bit awkwardly.
Those sort of tactics will help you reduce the size of your applicant pile, but they don't make the pile better or highlight the best qualified. And we want to be hiring the best!
Manual CV screening at volume doesn't work
Let's pretend for a moment you could stop time and actually review 250 applications with your full attention and no fatigue. Would that really be the best way to work out who you want to interview? How would you even rank that many applicants, or stay objective about who goes through and who doesn't? It starts to make you wonder whether a CV is actually a useful tool for screening candidates at all.
Schmidt, Oh, and Schaffer (2016) compiled 100 years of research and found that years of experience correlates with job performance at around r = 0.18, and educational attainment at r = 0.10. They concluded these CV-metrics sit comfortably in "unlikely to be useful" territory. It might seem surprising seeing as CV-sifting is such a familiar method, but all the scientific studies on their correlation with employee performance show they are a relatively weak predictor of success.
Pro Tip
CVs are an especially weak predictor in early-careers, where a candidate's CV has no real depth to it outside of the school and university they went to.
A cognitive ability assessment at the top of the funnel solves the actual problem
If your "too many applicants" issue is a lack of a scalable way to screen them, then the fix is to add one. Specifically, a short cognitive ability assessment placed at the very start of your funnel, before you ever open an inbox.
Remember those validity numbers I mentioned for CV metrics earlier? Years of experience at around 0.18, education at 0.10? The same study, and pretty much every other study on the topic, found that general mental ability tests come in at a correlation of 0.65 with job performance. That's not just a much bigger number, it actually topped the list out of every selection method they looked at. Nothing else you can realistically use at the application stage gets close.
Replacing CV screening with cognitive ability screening is very simple. The most effective method is to have every person who applies complete the assessment(s) as part of the application. By the time you sit down to review the pool, you don't have 250 CVs to work through manually. You have 250 candidates listed in rank order by their ability score. You take the top 15 or 20 and move them to shortlist consideration. The rest of the process, reviewing CVs, conducting interviews, making decisions, stays exactly the same. You've just improved the worst part of it.
And crucially, this approach doesn't sacrifice the benefit of having a large applicant pool. You're not closing the listing early or discarding people on the basis of a knockout question. You're keeping the whole pool and filtering it properly. It's fully scalable, so there's no difference to your workload if 20 people apply vs 1000. The more people apply, the more likely it is that your top-scoring candidates are genuinely exceptional.
Conclusion and next steps
If you're sitting on a large pile of applications right now, it probably feels like you just need more hours, or less applicants. But manually reviewing 40+ applicants isn't effective, there are much more effective screening tools.
We've helped a number of organisations make exactly this shift, and what typically surprises them isn't just the time saved. It's the improved confidence in their hiring decisions. Moving into interviews with a shortlist ranked on a valid predictor of performance feels meaningfully different from a shortlist built on whoever survived a manual pile-sort on a busy, coffee-fueled Tuesday afternoon.
If you want to understand why cognitive ability assessments are the right instrument for this, our benefits of ability tests page is a good place to start.
Or if you can't deal with the thought of those applicant numbers rising with no end in sight, get in touch with us right now.
Joshua Hancock
Digital Marketing Manager at Test Partnership. Over 7 years experience as a writer, content strategist, SEO and digital marketer.
