A recruiter opens the résumé before she opens anything else. Two years between jobs, no explanation on the page. A college nobody in the office has heard of. A job title that doesn't quite match what the role needs. None of it rules anyone out by itself. But by the time she presses play on the interview, she already has a shape in mind for the kind of person she's about to hear. Confirming that shape takes less work than overturning it, so mostly she confirms it. The interview was meant to be the part that told her something real about the person. Instead it became the part that agreed with the page she'd already read.
Why we build it this way
Nobody sets out to decide a candidate's fate off a résumé. The bias isn't a decision anyone makes on purpose. It's just what happens once a document has been read. A page about a person forms an impression before that person has said a word. Every answer afterward gets heard against that impression, not on its own.
The usual fix narrows the document instead of removing it from the front of the queue. Strip the name. Hide the college. Redact the photo. That helps with some of it. A résumé still carries plenty that forms a verdict without meaning to — the gap, the title, the company nobody's heard of. Editing the document is still putting the document first.
We think the order is the actual problem, not the content. The first thing anyone judges about a candidate should be how they answer a real question about the job, not a page written to make them sound hireable. So the interview has to come before any document does — not a better-redacted one, none at all, not yet.
By the time you've read someone's résumé, you've already decided who you're listening for.
How it works, roughly
A candidate applies through a GetScreened link instead of sending anything in. They sit an AI voice interview whenever it suits them, and that interview happens first — before a recruiter has read a line about them. The interview itself:
- asks about the actual role, built from its description, not a generic script
- scores what the candidate says, not how an application happens to read
- checks whether the session itself holds up, alongside the answers
What reaches the recruiter is a ranked, comparable set, the recording a click away for any candidate she wants to hear for herself. If a résumé or a form exists behind it, she can still go and read one. But by then she has already heard the person. Nothing she reads afterward gets to rewrite that first impression.
A year of hiring this way is a stack of decisions made in an order that is actually fair — the person spoke first, and whatever paperwork exists came after, not before. The recruiter still listens, still overrules the score when she disagrees, and still signs off alone.
Read about GetScreened.in →