As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly shortlist candidates from their CVs.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the job description and write down the essential and desirable criteria that the hiring manager has agreed before seeing the CVs.
   2. Remove names, photographs, addresses, contact details and other unnecessary personal information from each CV, then label them Candidate A, Candidate B and so on.
   3. Paste the prompt into an approved AI tool, followed by the agreed job criteria and the anonymised CVs.
   4. Check the AI's criteria list against the original job description and remove any criterion that is vague, irrelevant or not approved by the hiring manager.
   5. Compare every suggested group and explanation with the quoted CV evidence, then move any candidate with missing, conflicting or ambiguous evidence into human review.
   6. Give the evidence table and human-review list to the hiring manager or recruitment panel, and record the human reason for each candidate who is progressed or rejected.

   Prompt

   You are assisting with an initial UK recruitment screen, not making the hiring decision. Use only the job criteria and CV evidence supplied below. Do not infer or use age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, health, pregnancy, caring responsibilities, marital status, sexual orientation, political views, trade union activity, photographs, names or addresses. Do not infer any of those characteristics from education, employment gaps, language, hobbies or other clues. Do not rank candidates by writing style, school, employer prestige or career history unless that is an explicit, job-relevant and objectively stated criterion.
   
   First turn the job description into a short list of essential and desirable criteria. Mark each criterion as objective and job-relevant. Flag any criterion that is vague, potentially exclusionary or impossible to assess from a CV, and do not use it for ranking until a human confirms it.
   
   Then assess each candidate against the confirmed criteria. For every criterion, quote or precisely paraphrase the supporting CV evidence, or write "not evidenced". Do not invent missing information. Put candidates into three groups: evidence of meeting essential criteria, insufficient evidence, and evidence of not meeting an essential criterion. Within each group, do not create a fine-grained ranking unless the evidence clearly supports one.
   
   Return:
   1. the confirmed criteria;
   2. a table for every candidate showing evidence, gaps and uncertainty for each criterion;
   3. the proposed groups and a short evidence-based explanation for each placement;
   4. candidates needing human review because of ambiguity, conflicting evidence or missing information;
   5. five checks the hiring manager must complete before contacting or rejecting anyone.
   
   Do not recommend rejection solely because information is missing. Do not make a final hiring decision, infer protected or sensitive characteristics, or claim that a candidate is unsuitable beyond the supplied criteria.
   
   JOB DESCRIPTION AND SELECTION CRITERIA:
   [PASTE THE JOB DESCRIPTION AND AGREED CRITERIA]
   
   ANONYMISED CVS:
   [PASTE THE CVs, LABELLED CANDIDATE A, CANDIDATE B AND SO ON]

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.