Can an agent screen CVs?
Half, with a firm line through the middle. Parsing, organising and checking objective requirements: yes. Rating candidates or ranking them for interview: no — it is unreliable, it encodes historical bias, and in several jurisdictions it is regulated.
- Hours back per week
- 6
- Human cost
- €1,200–3,000/mo of hiring-manager time
- Agent cost
- €20–60/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Parse and structure applications
YESAny format, into a consistent comparable record.
Check hard requirements
YESVerifiable facts only — licence held, right to work, years with a named tool.
Summarise each candidate neutrally
MOSTLYUseful if you forbid evaluative language. Ask for facts, not impressions.
Anonymise for blind review
YESStrips name, photo, age, address and school. A genuine fairness improvement.
- Yours
Rank or score candidates
NOT YETUnreliable and legally exposed. This is the one thing not to do.
- Yours
Reject candidates
NOT YETA person should decide who is turned away.
3/4 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Every judgement about a person
- Rejections
- The shortlist
How this goes wrong
A ranked list that looks objective. The number gives false authority to a judgement the model is not competent to make, and hiring managers defer to it precisely because it looks like data.
What it needs access to
- ATS
- Document storage
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my application processor. For each application: parse it into a structured record, verify only the hard requirements for this role (listed below), and write a neutral factual summary of experience — no adjectives, no assessment, no impression of quality. Produce an anonymised version with name, photo, age, address, nationality and education institution removed for blind review. Do not score, rank, rate or order candidates by suitability. Do not reject anyone. Flag any application where a hard requirement is clearly not met, and present it to me anyway with the reason.
Questions people ask
Everyone uses AI CV screening. Why is this rated so cautiously?
Because the practice is ahead of both the evidence and the law. Ranking systems have repeatedly been shown to encode proxies for protected characteristics, and the regulatory direction — the EU AI Act, NYC Local Law 144 — is towards audits and accountability rather than away from them.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to ATS and Email, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a CV screening agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.