AUTOMATION TEARDOWN

Automation Teardown #1 — recruiting

July 17, 2026

Automation Teardown #1: application screening, for recruiting and staffing teams.

A recruiter posts a role and applications flood in — many were never going to be a fit. Someone still opens every one, reads it, and decides who's worth a call.

The manual reality

Read each application, cross-check it against the role's criteria by hand, then trade emails just to get a qualified candidate on a calendar.

How we'd build the agent

  1. An ATS webhook (or careers-inbox parser) catches each new application and extracts structured fields — skills, tenure, certifications, location, work authorization.
  2. A language model scores those fields against the firm's written rubric, and every score has to cite the line in the application that supports it. No citation, no score.
  3. Clear fits get a scheduling link and land on the right recruiter's calendar. Low-confidence cases aren't guessed at — they route to a human review queue by design.
  4. Declines are drafted, never auto-sent. A recruiter approves each one.

Every decision is logged with the evidence it cited, and a weekly sample gets checked against recruiter judgment to catch drift early.

What stays human

The rubric is the firm's own, every decline carries a human sign-off, and the ambiguous middle goes to people. No candidate is rejected by an algorithm nobody approved.

Honest sizing

Several hours back per recruiter per week, live in a week or two.

We run free 20-minute teardowns of workflows like this. Reach out at hello@fullspecstudio.com.