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 perhaps most basic voting rule in this scenario, $$\ell $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>ℓ</mml:mi></mml:math> -Bloc (every voter approves $$\ell $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>ℓ</mml:mi></mml:math> candidates). In particular, we investigate the influence of several different group evaluation functions (e.g., egalitarian versus utilitarian) and tie-breaking mechanisms modeling pessimistic and optimistic manipulators. Among other things, we conclude that in an egalitarian setting strategic voting may indeed be computationally intractable regardless of the tie-breaking rule. Altogether, we provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the computational complexity landscape of this scenario.