When does the CTO has time to be the first unit in the pipeline? How much applicants do you have?

From our experience just posting a junior web developer job gets up to 1000 resumes into our inbox. And we just a small company without an established name.

The only possible first step for us is to automatically send everyone an at home coding challenge. This narrows down the list to only about 50 developers that would reply. Only 10 of them would send working code. And only at that point we can actually start to interview.