AI-Powered Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with Smart Screening

Client Profile

A nationwide retail chain managing high volumes of applications across retail stores and corporate roles.

Business Challenge

The recruiting team faced significant challenges:

• Thousands of resumes per job posting created a backlog and delayed response times.
• Manual screening was inconsistent and time-consuming
• Good candidates were often lost to competitors due to slow hiring cycles
• Lack of standardisation led to inconsistent evaluation criteria

The company sought to enhance its ATS with AI-driven resume parsing and ranking to improve speed, consistency, and fairness.

Solution Approach

We augmented the existing ATS with an intelligent AI screening module.

Key Features

• Resume Parsing & NLP Processing:
  • OCR and NLP were used to parse diverse resume formats into structured data.
  • Resume content was compared against job descriptions using a transformer-based classifier and a custom scoring algorithm.
• Smart Candidate Scoring:
  • Factors like experience, education, keyword match, and inferred soft skills (e.g., leadership traits) were analysed.
  • An LLM-powered skills ontology and keyword match engine ensured precise filtering.
  • Bias controls ensured the exclusion of demographic indicators (e.g., names, gender).
• Tiered Candidate Ranking:
  • Candidates are grouped into Highly Qualified, Potential Fit, and Under-qualified using intuitive colour-coded tiers in the ATS.
• Summarised Profiles:
  • GPT-4 generated 1-2 sentence summaries for top candidates (e.g., “5 years retail experience, exceeded sales targets”).
• Adaptive Learning Loop:
  • The AI improved over time based on recruiter selections and outcomes, refining its scoring logic.

Results & Benefits

• Initial screening time reduced from 2 weeks to 2 days.
• Time-to-fill dropped by 40%, accelerating hiring and improving offer acceptance rates.
• Over 10,000 applications screened in 3 months.
• ~300 recruiter hours saved from manual triage.
• Retention rate of new hires increased by 15%, signalling better alignment with role expectations.
• Greater diversity in shortlists, surfacing skilled candidates who may have been overlooked manually.

Recruiters reported lower burnout, higher efficiency, and the ability to focus more on candidate engagement and employer branding.

User Impact

Initial concerns around AI “replacing” recruiters turned into appreciation:

“It’s like having a colleague who instantly reads every resume and tells me where to look first.”

• Recruiters remained in control of final decisions.
• Human judgment focused on interviews and relationship-building, not screening grunt work.
• Faster applicant response times improved the overall candidate experience.

What’s Next

Following success in retail roles, the company is:

• Scaling the AI screening company-wide across all departments.
• Extending the system to internal job postings to identify talent for promotions.

The upgraded ATS with AI screening proved to be a strategic enabler for faster, fairer, and more effective hiring at scale.