What’s holding back your hiring pipeline (and how to fix it)

Great news: you wrote an amazing job description, you posted it to job boards, and your ATS is filled to the brim with applicants. Not so great news: you’re not finding the qualified candidates you need to fill the position. So where is the breakdown? It can be easy to blame the top of the funnel: low quality applicants, not enough exposure, etc. But every hiring pipeline is bound to have a few leaks, and it can be difficult for overworked hiring teams to identify them. That’s why we’re breaking down some of the most common hiring process blockers and what your team can do to fix them–without adding more to their workload.

Problem #1: Screening out instead of in

75% of resumes are never seen by a human.

It’s not hard to understand how this happens: most SMB job listings get upwards of 200 applications, and most hiring teams would be lucky to have the time to review even 50 of those. In order to stay on time and on budget most hiring teams rely on ATS filters and search functions to decide which resumes to review.


But most ATS platforms rely on rigid qualification filters and keyword-based search functionality. That means missing out on candidates just because their resume doesn’t have the exact words, job titles, or terminology. They can also filter out candidates based on outdated hiring red flags like career gaps or industry changes that might not be important to your team.

CLARA uses ethical, neuro-symbolic AI to analyze all application materials and create comprehensive candidate profiles. Candidate profiles go beyond keywords and match applicants on experience, qualifications, hard skills, and soft skills. CLARA also scores how well a candidate meets the criteria set by your hiring team. It can also automatically generate and send follow-up questions that help you gain a deeper understanding of a candidate’s skills, abilities, and experience.


Since CLARA has integrations with applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse and Lever it’s easy to add this advanced screening without breaking existing workflows. In minutes, you can surface the best candidates with assurance that every applicant has gotten a fair review.

Problem #2: Bias baked into the process

Even the most well-meaning recruiters and hiring managers have biases. Everyone does, and hiring teams can find themselves unwittingly favoring candidates from specific backgrounds. They might also be unconsciously dismissing candidates over arbitrary factors like having the same name as someone they dislike, attending a rival school, or maybe just using a font they can’t stand. 

CLARA can help your team combat unconscious biases with tools that automatically anonymize and standardize candidate summaries so every candidate can be evaluated purely on merit and skill fit. CLARA measures applicants based on the per role standardized criteria your team sets, so all applicants can be viewed in the most important context: whether they’re a great match for the job.

Problem #3: Taking too long to get back to candidates

On paper, getting a lot of applicants for a job listing sounds like a great problem to have. But in practice, more applicants mean more time spent reviewing applications. Surveys show that the average recruiter spends somewhere between 8 seconds and 15 minutes reviewing each resume that comes across their desk. Neither of these extremes is ideal: 8 seconds is not enough time to fully understand a candidate and 15 minutes means days or weeks of resume review.


But a great candidate is rarely applying to just one job, and the longer your hiring cycle, the more likely a skilled candidate is going to accept an offer from another company. Worse yet, research has shown that longer hiring cycles lead to increased turnover as other employees try to take up the slack of the vacant role.

Tools like CLARA dramatically reduce time-to-hire by automating several time-consuming aspects of the hiring process. Automated resume review dramatically cuts down initial evaluations, and automated follow-up questions can provide information that is normally gathered during a phone screen. That saved time adds up and allows teams to identify the top candidates quickly. Recruiters using CLARA have reported saving 7 minutes per resume and a 26% increase in qualified candidate visibility.

Problem #4: Your team can’t agree on what “qualified” means

It’s not unusual for recruiters and hiring managers to walk out of a kickoff meeting with very different ideas of what a great candidate looks like. One might prioritize soft skills and growth potential, while the other wants specific titles or credentials. Without a shared definition, you end up with inconsistent shortlists and a lot of back-and-forth that slows everything down.

CLARA helps teams align from the start by translating job requirements into measurable evaluation criteria. It scores every candidate against the same set of standards and shows its work, so everyone is on the same page about why someone made the cut. That shared language helps hiring managers and recruiters collaborate more effectively, and it reduces the time spent second-guessing decisions.

Problem #5: You’re spending too much on tools that don’t talk to each other

Hiring tools are supposed to make things easier, but when they live in separate systems and require separate logins, they end up creating more steps instead of more clarity. Jumping between platforms to find candidate notes, scoring criteria, or hiring feedback adds friction at every stage of the process.

CLARA integrates with the ATS your team already uses, like Lever, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, and TeamTailor. That means your team can access deeper candidate insights and screening results right where they already work. No extra tabs, no duplicate data entry, just smarter decisions made faster.

A smarter pipeline starts with a smarter screen

Most hiring teams don’t need to throw out their whole process—they need to fix the leaks. Addressing what’s broken at the top of the funnel can make the rest of your pipeline faster, smoother, and more fair. With tools like CLARA, your team can make better early-stage decisions without adding more work.

Want to see what’s slowing down your hiring? Get a demo of CLARA and connect with our team to start hiring smarter today.