Recruiting firm screens 4x more candidates without adding headcount

The client

A boutique recruitment firm in Bangkok placing mid- to senior-level roles across Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Eight recruiters, well-respected in their niche. Their inbound application volume had grown faster than their team could keep up with, and good candidates were going stale in the queue.

The problem

A typical role attracted somewhere between sixty and a hundred applications. Each had to be read, the candidate’s experience matched against the role’s requirements, the obvious mismatches set aside, and the credible candidates moved into a first conversation. With eight recruiters working twenty active roles, around half the applications were not getting a proper first read inside a week.

The approach

The build ingested every application (LinkedIn, agency portal, email referrals) into Airtable through Zapier, normalized the candidate data, and then passed each application against the role’s criteria using an LLM tuned with the firm’s historical placement patterns. The output was a structured score, a short explanation of fit, and a flag for any concerns (employment gap, mismatched seniority, location issues).

The top quarter of candidates got drafted personalized outreach automatically, queued for the recruiter to review, edit, and send. Mid-tier candidates got a polite holding response. The bottom tier got a friendly decline. Edge cases (strong but unconventional profiles) were escalated for direct recruiter review.

The result

Candidates screened per recruiter per week went from roughly fifty to over two hundred, while the time spent on each viable candidate went up rather than down. Average time-to-first-conversation for credible applicants dropped from nine days to two. The firm took on six new client engagements without adding any recruiters.