Must-have vs nice-to-have: set better screening criteria

By Screened · Researched 30 October 2026

Set must-have and nice-to-have screening criteria with the hiring manager before turning the brief into rejection rules.

Separate skills needed on day one from tools or knowledge the role can teach. Then decide what the CV must show and what is better assessed in an interview or work sample, so a teachable gap does not become an automatic rejection.

What is the difference between a must-have and a nice-to-have?

A must-have is essential for this job. A nice-to-have is an advantage, but you would still consider a strong applicant without it.

Ask the hiring manager:

Would we still consider this person if they were strong everywhere else but did not have this?

Ask what would make an applicant without it worth considering. Comparable experience might count, training might cover the gap, or the item may simply be a preference. Record that answer so reviewers know what to accept.

Specify what experience with another tool needs to show. Logging tickets demonstrates use of support software; configuring permissions, workflows and reports is different work. “Similar tools count” is only useful when reviewers know which responsibility they are looking for.

Take “Zendesk experience.” Does the manager need someone who can answer customer complaints, or someone who can set up the software? Those are different jobs. For a customer-operations role, the instruction could be:

We need someone who can find out why customer orders keep going wrong. They do not need to know Zendesk; we will teach it.

Be clear about deadlines too. Confirm when any required qualification must be held: at application, before appointment or by another specified point. An applicant expecting to qualify may be allowed to continue under your process, but that expectation does not replace the required verification.

Must it be shown on the CV, or assessed later?

Choose where to assess each essential skill. Clear customer writing may be required for the job, but the best evidence could come from a short customer-support writing task rather than the CV.

Record that planned check alongside the requirement. Passing the CV review then means the person can proceed to the task, not that every essential skill has already been established.

This gives the first reviewer a manageable job. They can establish enough evidence for the next stage without pretending the CV has verified everything needed before an offer.

How do you choose essential screening criteria?

For a customer-operations hire who will investigate recurring order problems, a copied job description might ask for a degree, five years' experience, Zendesk, retail experience, a driving licence and city residence.

Before using those six requirements to reject applications, ask what each proves about the work:

Singapore’s TAFEP guidance says selection criteria in job advertisements should relate to qualifications, skills, knowledge and experience. Carry those job-related reasons into the screening rules. A revised advertisement will not help if the tool still applies the old exclusions.

Keep requirements the work genuinely needs. Question the shortcuts. Five years at a familiar company may sound reassuring, but you still need to know what the person did there.

Decide what you can teach, and what teaching would cost

“We can teach Zendesk” needs someone to do the teaching. Name who will train the new hire, check their early work and cover tasks they cannot yet handle alone. Otherwise, the job promises support the team has not arranged.

Make the tradeoff visible for this operations role:

Confirm that the trainer has time to provide the promised support. Apply that offer consistently to applicants with the same gap, so each reviewer is assessing against the same starting requirements.

Check required licences and regulated qualifications separately. The responsible specialist should confirm what is needed, which evidence counts and when the check must be complete.

What does useful evidence of a skill look like?

A requirement is easier to apply when the team agrees what a relevant answer looks like.

For the operations role, replace “strong problem-solving skills” with work the applicant can describe:

Finds out why orders keep going wrong and checks whether the fix works.

A candidate might describe finding that the order form failed to collect a size. Ask how they discovered the problem and what happened next. Establish whether the form changed before asking how they checked its effect.

That separates the investigation from the proposed solution and its outcome. Monitoring later orders does not necessarily mean errors fell. An accurate account is more useful than an assumed success.

Ask for an example when it could resolve an important gap. Stop asking once you have the answer needed for this stage. An applicant who confirms they lack required experience presents a different decision from one whose CV leaves it unclear.

Test the requirement on contrasting applications

Check the operations requirement against these three CV passages before using it on live applications:

Relevant investigation: “Customers kept receiving the wrong size. I found that the size was missing from our order form. The manager agreed to add a size field. After it was added, I checked the next week's orders for the same mistake.”

Tool use, but unclear investigation experience: “Used Zendesk to log order problems and pass them to the operations team.”

Unclear contribution: “Helped improve our order-management process.”

The first passage describes investigation. The second describes useful system familiarity but leaves investigation unanswered. The third needs detail about the person's contribution.

Have two reviewers independently recommend a next step for each example before showing the AI scores. If one accepts logging complaints while the other requires investigating their cause, settle that job requirement with the manager first.

Then update the screening instruction and retest the contrasting examples. The intended improvement is recognising investigation while leaving genuinely missing detail unresolved, not making every example pass.

Check what a must-have does in your software

The same words can produce different outcomes across products. Find out how the system treats missing or uncertain information, not just whether it supports must-haves.

In Screened, only a requirement marked Found on resume counts as met. A must-have marked Suggested by similar skills or Not mentioned puts the application in Not a Fit, regardless of the overall score. Nice-to-haves do not disqualify someone on their own. The resume-results guide explains the behaviour. Screened sign-in is required.

Read the explanation behind Not a Fit. Does the CV leave the requirement unanswered, or does the applicant explicitly say they have not done the work? That distinction tells the recruiter whether clarification could still help.

Do not turn an essential requirement into a nice-to-have simply to change the label. Correct an unintended requirement, ask for missing evidence where appropriate or apply the genuine requirement consistently. The category should describe the job, not be adjusted until a preferred applicant passes.

Your team's decision and any automatic action are separate matters. Check whether a negative result triggers a stage move or message before testing changes on real applications.

Can a nice-to-have still exclude good candidates?

A preference can still act like a requirement when it carries enough weight. Compare the final ranking with the job's priorities.

The applicant who found the missing size field describes the investigation you need. The daily Zendesk user describes familiarity with your software but leaves investigation unanswered. If the latter keeps ranking higher, ask whether the scoring rewards familiarity more than the work the manager said mattered.

Check overlapping preferences too. “Retail”, “ecommerce” and “online orders” may award several sets of points for largely the same experience. A degree and a qualification containing the same knowledge can create similar double counting. Keep separate weight only where the distinctions matter to the job.

A high total does not compensate for a genuine essential gap. Equally, a familiar background does not establish the essential skill. Make both checks before using the score to order the shortlist.

What if you discover a screening requirement was wrong?

A live campaign may reveal a faulty instruction or an unsuitable criterion. Identify which problem you have.

Correcting an instruction to match the advertised brief is different from changing the brief. Replacing an unintended Zendesk-only rule with the promised acceptance of similar tools repairs an error. Our screening-error review guide explains how to investigate the mistake and revisit affected applications.

Deciding that previously essential experience is no longer needed changes the selection criteria. Take that change through your hiring policy and the appropriate HR or legal review. Decide which applicants are affected, what needs communicating and how the revised criteria will be applied. Do not rescue one appealing application while leaving everyone else subject to the old rule.

For recruitment in Great Britain, Acas’s shortlisting guidance likewise explains choosing fairly against the job description and person specification.

Leave the hiring meeting with a usable rule

End the meeting with instructions another recruiter can use: the essential work, the alternatives you accept, the training you will provide and what to ask when a CV is unclear.

The manager's final instruction should sound more like this:

We need someone who has investigated recurring order problems. Experience in another sector can count. We will teach Zendesk. Ask for one example where the CV leaves the investigation unclear.

Ask a colleague who missed the meeting to apply the instruction to the three examples. Can they recognise the investigation, distinguish it from routine ticket logging and identify where the applicant’s contribution is unclear? If not, revise the requirement before using it on more applications. The brief should explain the work well enough that a new tool name does not require another hiring-manager meeting.