You have an open position and you’re starting down the path of finding a replacement. The carefully written ad is placed online and doing its job.

But now it’s a good news-bad news story.

The good news is that your advertising worked! You have 134 applicants already!

And the bad news is now you have to deal with 134 resumes.

And you know going in that well over a hundred of them are going to be totally unqualified and irrelevant to you. No fun.

You don’t have anyone on the team who you think could do the screening well, so it’s up to you. That means blocking out a few hours and plowing through one by one, picking out the ones you think might have a chance in a full interview.

There is another way that can help you streamline your shortlisting task. It can work in a situation like this where you have lots of applicants.

Getting a flood of applicants is more and more common now and it’s easy to understand why – applying takes practically zero effort! It’s just a click of the mouse. And it’s obvious when you have to sort through them that many applicants don’t even bother to read the ad.

Knowing this, the challenge is to reduce the flood by designing the application process to require a bit more effort than a mouse click. One way to do this is to require the applicant to answer some questions.

There are video interviewing software packages available that take this to the next level, but you can use a DIY approach and get a good result – here’s how…

Set up a dedicated phone number with a voicemail box, either on your phone system or just get a Google voice account. Reference the phone number in your ad with instructions to call it and answer some questions. Simply doing this will weed out anyone too lazy to bother or who can’t follow basic instructions – just make it clear.

On your voice message greeting, clearly explain what you want the caller to do. Keep it simple.

State your name clearly and give your phone number.

Then answer this question – based on the description in the ad, why do you think you would be a good candidate?

You must have a well-written ad for this to work, of course, but you’ll get a smaller number of voice messages to use for screening. Now you can just listen to short messages to help you choose those that have good answers and can communicate their message to you clearly.

Follow up with the resume screen on those you pick or go right to a phone screen as you go through. Either way, you’ll cut down on the screening time and be able to make quicker, more relevant choices for your short list.