The brief
Every open mandate pulled in hundreds of applications, and the first pass — reading, sorting, disqualifying — was eating whole recruiter days before a single conversation happened. Two additional recruiter hires were already budgeted just to keep up with intake.
The partners didn't want faster rejection emails. They wanted every candidate actually read, scored against the real role profile rather than keyword-matched, and the strong ones in an interview slot before a competing agency called them first.
What we built
- A three-agent team — intake, scoring, scheduling — processing 3,100+ applications a month
- Intake agent parsing CVs from email, portals and the website into one structured pipeline
- Role-profile scoring that reads the full CV in context — career arcs and gaps, not keyword hits
- Automatic enrichment: current employer, notice-period signals, portfolio and public work
- Shortlist dossier per mandate, delivered to the recruiter with reasoning per candidate
- Interview scheduling agent with calendar sync, reminders and rescheduling handled end-to-end
- Candidate-data handling to GDPR standard: consent tracking, retention limits, EU-hosted processing
Results
- Screening effort down 82% — recruiters start at the ranked shortlist, not the inbox
- 37,000+ applications per year read, scored and filed by the agent team
- Time from mandate to client-ready shortlist cut from 5 days to 1
- The two budgeted recruiter hires were never made — the agent absorbed that capacity
- Interview no-shows down by a third through automated reminders and self-service rescheduling
“We didn't hire the two extra recruiters we'd budgeted for. The agent reads every CV the evening it arrives, and my team spends their day talking to candidates instead of sorting them.”