A dated article in the Harvard Management Update caught my eye. The article provided some great practical advice that I thought would be good to pass on.
If you are having trouble narrowing down the number of candidates, the author suggested asking each candidate to perform a simple task. Some examples: write a description of themselves or prepare a report on some aspect of your company or industry. A sizable percentage of the candidates won’t bother to do the task thereby effectively eliminating themselves from consideration. At that point, you can spend focused time with the applicants that have followed through on your request.
This might be a great way to narrow the field down, but I would recommend asking the applicants to respond to a list of questions. Then you can use their responses to narrow down the numbers. This way you will be able to compare their answers to each other since they all answered the same questions. This approach takes very little time to initiate and will pay huge dividends in your hiring process.