Screening applications against a real vacancy
professional-services firm · Gulf
The shape of this problem
A human reads it and types it in again
This is one of our own builds, not a client engagement. It is capability evidence and it is described as such.
The problem
Recruiters needed to compare CVs against job descriptions beyond keyword overlap. Keyword matching rewards the candidates who wrote their CV to mirror the posting rather than the ones who can do the job, and it penalizes anyone who describes the same experience in different words. At volume, the screening pass is also where fatigue does most of its damage, because it is the stage that receives the least time per document and the least scrutiny afterwards.
What we built
We built a workflow that extracted CV content, generated semantic representations, evaluated relevance against the stated criteria, and ranked candidates for recruiter review.
What moved
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Time to a ranked shortlist from a 300-CV posting | ~9 hours | 25 minutes |
| Qualified candidates surfaced that keyword screening had ranked below the cut | † | +23% |
| Recruiter agreement with the top-20 ranking | not measured | 86% |
† Measured against the prior level of the same measure. The source publishes the size of the movement, not the figure it moved from.
Time to a ranked shortlist from a 300-CV posting
Qualified candidates surfaced that keyword screening had ranked below the cut
Measured against the client's own prior process, indexed to 100. The source publishes the size of the movement, not the absolute figure it moved from.
Recruiter agreement with the top-20 ranking
86%
Recruiter agreement with the top-20 ranking
The ring is the whole of that measure. The grey arc is the other 14%.
Figures are drawn from the practice's own delivery records for the engagement named, measured against the process that preceded it. They have not been through third-party audit, and none is presented as an average across clients.
What it turned on
Ranking for review rather than filtering is the distinction that matters - the recruiter still sees the pool and the reasoning, so the system reorders attention instead of quietly removing people from consideration. Relevant to any high-volume hiring process whose first pass is currently keyword search.
- Service line
- HR & Shared Services AI
Start here
Which of the four is yours?
Tell us the documents and the monthly volume and we will send the two closest records, with the proof behind each and the honest note where the match is partial.
You get a reply within one working day, from the engineer who would do the work - not a sales sequence.