Abstract Shortlisting of candidates—selecting a group of “best” candidates—is a special case of multiwinner elections. We provide the first in-depth study of the computational complexity of strategic voting for shortlisting based on the most natural and simple voting rule in this scenario, `-Bloc (every voter approves ` candidates). In particular, we investigate the influence of several tie-breaking mechanisms (e.g. pessimistic versus optimistic) and group evaluation functions (e.g. egalitarian versus utilitarian) and conclude that in an egalitarian setting strategic voting may indeed be computationally intractable regardless of the tie-breaking rule. We provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the computational complexity landscape of this neglected scenario