Screen applicants on the job, not the person

Before anything else

Screening decisions about people carry legal obligations that vary by jurisdiction, and an automated decision may need to be explainable and appealable. Check your obligations before you run this on real applicants, and keep a human in the loop on every rejection.

The honest case for this recipe is consistency. Human screening drifts: the tenth CV of the evening is judged differently from the first. A scorecard applied identically every time, with the reason recorded, is fairer than most manual processes and considerably easier to review.

Steps

Write the scorecard before you see a single CV

Requirements must be observable from an application. "Strong communicator" is not screenable; "has written for a technical audience, with a sample" is.

Must have, all required: - 3+ years in a similar role - Demonstrable experience with [specific technology] - Work authorisation for [location] Nice to have, scored: - Experience in our industry - Has worked at similar company size Judge only against these. Do not infer seniority from company names or from where someone studied.

Rule out protected characteristics explicitly

Never consider or comment on: age, gender, ethnicity, nationality beyond work authorisation, religion, disability, marital or family status, pregnancy, or any photograph. Do not infer any of these from names, dates, or activities. If a CV includes them, ignore them and do not repeat them in your assessment.

Say it even though it seems obvious

Without an explicit instruction, a model will happily reason about a graduation year as a proxy for age. Naming the prohibition is what stops the inference appearing in your written record.

Require a reason for every decision

For each applicant: ADVANCE, DECLINE, or ESCALATE. State which specific requirement drove the decision and quote the evidence from the application. Escalate rather than declining whenever the evidence is ambiguous, a requirement is nearly met, or the application is unconventional in a way the scorecard does not anticipate.

Bias the ambiguous cases toward escalation. The cost of a human reading one more CV is small; the cost of a wrongly rejected good candidate is invisible and permanent.

Watch the applicant inbox

"trigger": { "type": "watch", "plugin": "...", "event": "message" }

Set the gate

Stays human

Every message to a candidate, every rejection, and every offer. Keep candidate contact at approval permanently rather than growing into trusting it, because a rejection sent in error cannot be recalled and the candidate will remember your company for it.

Verify

Run it against a past round where you know the outcomes, and compare
Check that the person you eventually hired would have been advanced
Submit two identical applications differing only in name and confirm identical outcomes
Confirm no assessment mentions anything on the prohibited list
Confirm no candidate was contacted

When it goes wrong

It declines candidates you would have interviewed

The scorecard encodes a proxy rather than the requirement, typically years of experience standing in for capability. Loosen the proxy and raise escalation.

It escalates nearly everyone

Your must-haves are not observable from an application. Rewrite them as things visible on a CV.

Reasons are vague

Require a quote from the application for every decision. A decision that cannot cite evidence is not a decision you could defend.