From 500 Resumes to 5 Shortlisted — In 60 Seconds

When TechNova, a mid-stage SaaS startup, posted a Senior Backend Engineer role, they expected a manageable trickle of applications. Instead, they received 500+ resumes in 72 hours. Their two-person recruiting team was drowning.

The Challenge

TechNova’s hiring process was typical:

1. Post job on LinkedIn and their careers page
2. Manually review every resume in a shared spreadsheet
3. Phone screen the top 30-40 candidates
4. Technical interviews for the top 10
5. Final round with the CTO

The bottleneck? Step 2. Their recruiters were spending 15+ hours per role just on initial resume screening. And they had 8 open roles.

Enter Aram

TechNova integrated Aram into their workflow in under an hour. Here’s what happened:

Automated Parsing

All 500 resumes were parsed and structured within minutes. No more squinting at PDFs or trying to decipher creative resume formats.

AI Matching

Aram’s matching engine scored every candidate against TechNova’s specific requirements:

• Go and Python proficiency (weighted heavily)
• Distributed systems experience
• Startup experience (nice-to-have)
• Remote work capability

The AI didn’t just keyword-match. It understood context — a candidate who “designed and implemented a microservices architecture serving 10M requests/day” scored higher than one who simply listed “microservices” as a skill.

Smart Shortlisting

Within 60 seconds, Aram produced a ranked shortlist of 12 candidates, with detailed match explanations for each. The recruiters reviewed the top 12 (instead of 500) and selected 5 for async voice briefings.

The Results

Metric	Before Aram	With Aram
Time to shortlist	15 hours	60 seconds
Candidates reviewed manually	500	12
Quality of hires	Good	Excellent
Time to fill	34 days	12 days

What TechNova’s Head of Talent Said

“We were skeptical about AI screening — worried it would miss great candidates or introduce bias. The opposite happened. Aram surfaced candidates we would have missed in manual review, including our eventual hire, whose resume format would have been filtered out by a traditional ATS.”

Key Takeaways

1. AI screening doesn’t replace judgment — it focuses it on the right candidates
2. Speed matters — top candidates accept offers within days, not weeks
3. Consistency beats gut feel — every resume evaluated against the same criteria
4. ROI is immediate — TechNova reclaimed 100+ recruiter hours in the first month

Want similar results? Get started with Aram today.