Earlier in the month I was asked to evaluate 10 different applicants for a position with a company. I was given the job description and sent the resumes and asked to give a recommendation on the preferred applicants to interview. Since the job preferred fundraising experience, and the applicants did not have direct experience with fundraising, I created a way to evaluate each applicant based upon other factors that are referenced in the job description.
I used the following four steps to rank the applicants based upon their suitability for the position:
Step 1 – Breakdown the Job Description into Tags
Read through each bullet point or each line of the job description and classify it with a tag or tags. After reading through a few different lines, you should be able to do this with little experience. Here are a few sample requirements from a job description:
- Secure financial support from individuals, foundations and corporations
- Manage the implementation of Software System and oversee staff responsible for data entry and gift processing
- Develop and maintain ongoing relationships with major donors
- Creating and executing a strategy for a large sustained base of annual individual donors
- Overseeing organization of special events
- Developing and tracking proposals and reports for all foundation and corporate fundraising
Reading through the first line, I would create a few different tags like “Finance, Sales” Finance because it describes getting monetary support from people and Sales because that’s a sales process. See, simple and straightforward. Then I would move on to the next line and create tags like “Software (or name of software if it was specific), Manager, Data Entry, Gift Processing” Each of these are the main points of the requirement.
After working through each of the lines above, I would have the following tags identified:
- Finance, Sales
- Implement Software, Project Manager, Finance, Manager, Data Entry, Gift Processing
- Customer Service, Relationships, Confidentiality, Sales
- Planning, Organizing, Strategy, Relationships
- Organizing, Event Planning
- Development, Organizing, Reports, Writing, Relationships, Sales
Using an actual job description, you will find that you will have lots more tags and lots more duplicate tags in different requirements. This is just a sample to show you how to get started. Now that we know all of the tags (for this example) lets move on to ranking the tags in order of importance.
Step 2 – Rank the Tags to Determine the Most Important Criteria for the Position
During this step, we identify which of the tags are most important – and thus should rank higher. The thought process behind this step is that the higher ranked tags should have a bigger weight in the final formula. The bigger weights will translate to a higher score for an applicant and thus equal a better applicant that is more suitable for the position.
Going through each item in the tag list, we will count how many times the tag appears in our listing. Going back to our example above, Relationships is mentioned three times as is Sales. Finance is listed twice and most others are just listed once. After counting each of the tags by how many times they appear, you can rank them in order of most used to least used. If there is a tie between two or more, then decide which is more important to the position. This will result in a listing in order of Sales, Relationships, Organizing, Finance, Confidentiality, Development, Implement Software, Gift Processing, Manager, Planning, Strategy, Writing, Project Manager, Customer Service, Data Entry, Event Planning, Reports. Now that we have that part out of the way, it’s time to review the resumes to see how many tags we can find.
Next part of this step is to assign a point value to each tag. I normally list them from most used to least used and then assign a reversed number of points. It should look like this:
| Rank | Tag | Point Value |
| 1 | Sales | 17 |
| 2 | Relationships | 16 |
| 3 | Organizing | 15 |
| 4 | Finance | 14 |
| 5 | Confidentiality | 13 |
| 6 | Development | 12 |
| 7 | Implement Software | 11 |
| 8 | Gift Processing | 10 |
| 9 | Manager | 9 |
| 10 | Planning | 8 |
| 11 | Strategy | 7 |
| 12 | Writing | 6 |
| 13 | Project Manager | 5 |
| 14 | Customer Service | 4 |
| 15 | Data Entry | 3 |
| 16 | Event Planning | 2 |
| 17 | Reports | 1 |
Feel free to change the values as you see fit. You may want to weight some tags more than others depending on how often they are used, how important that requirement is, etc.
Step 3 – Breakdown the Resume into Tags
Grab the first resume in your list and start reading it line-by-line like you did with the job description. Make sure to use the same list of tags you created in Step 1. As you are evaluating the resume – you can make marks for whether or not their experience matches the tags you created. If a line in the resume meets the tag – then they will qualify and you can move on to the next tag. What you will find, if done correctly, is that not all applicants will meet each criteria. If it doesn’t happen that way, then you should review your tags and make them more specific. After the first applicant, your list should look similar to this example:
| Rank | Tag | Point Value | Applicant #1 Results |
| 1 | Sales | 17 | x |
| 2 | Relationships | 16 | |
| 3 | Organizing | 15 | |
| 4 | Finance | 14 | x |
| 5 | Confidentiality | 13 | |
| 6 | Development | 12 | |
| 7 | Implement Software | 11 | |
| 8 | Gift Processing | 10 | x |
| 9 | Manager | 9 | |
| 10 | Planning | 8 | x |
| 11 | Strategy | 7 | x |
| 12 | Writing | 6 | |
| 13 | Project Manager | 5 | x |
| 14 | Customer Service | 4 | x |
| 15 | Data Entry | 3 | |
| 16 | Event Planning | 2 | x |
| 17 | Reports | 1 | x |
Now you can simply add up the point values for each “X” and get a final score for the applicant. In this example, Applicant #1 scored 68 out of 153. That puts them at a 44% of meeting all criteria. While its a bad idea to make determinations before all applicants have been evaluated, I would say this applicant is not very fit for the position.
Step 4 – Rank Each Applicant and Deliver Results
Now that you have seen the process on how to create tags from the job description, how to rank those tags on order of importance, and how to review resumes to see how well they meet the criteria, its time to rank all of the applicants to see which ones are the best qualified for the position. Since you created totals in the last step, it will be easy to see the leaders. In my experience, I have found that you will have 10% or so of the applicants rise above the rest – and those are the ones that I would suggest move forward in the process. If you end up with no applicants or very few that come close to meeting any of your requirements, then you should reevaluate your criteria as it was probably too stringent.
In the end, I was able to rank all of the applicants and make a recommendation based upon the job description criteria and each candidates resume. While it isn’t a fool-proof system, it atleast creates a systematic approach that can be replicated across a company. It also attempts to take keep reviewers from just going with their gut – and following a process to determine suitability.