Assigning Reviewers

Ph.D. admissions committees, faculty search committees, etc. need to review dozens to hundreds of applications for a limited number of positions, and need to do so in a way that gives each applicant a fair review and keeps committee workloads manageable.
The way we’ve done this in a couple of committees I’ve been on is to implement two-stage review: each application is first read by two committee members, and if at least one of them thinks it merits further consideration, it moves to the next stage (full committee review, involving potential advisers, etc.). This requires us to assign those initial reviewers, however.