See which of ten resumes actually fits the brief

This is the part most screening tools quietly skip. The ranking can only be as structured as the requirements it was given. A description that says the ideal candidate is a self-starter with a passion for excellence contains nothing a screener can check a resume against, so the ranking that comes back will be close to arbitrary and will look confident anyway.

A description that produces a useful ranking states the discipline and seniority, names the tools and technologies specifically rather than by category, gives a location and whether it is remote, hybrid or on-site, separates must-haves from preferences explicitly, and says what the person will actually be doing in the first six months. Ten lines of that beat two pages of company boilerplate every time.

Read the breakdown before the order. The order is a summary of the breakdown, and the breakdown is where the mistakes are visible. A candidate marked absent on a requirement they clearly hold usually means the resume phrased it differently, which tells you something about the resume rather than the person.

Treat the bottom of the list with more suspicion than the top. Ranking systems are generally better at recognising a strong obvious match than at recognising an unusual one, and the candidate who changed sector two years ago is the one most likely to be under-ranked. If a requisition is hard to fill, the bottom half of a screened list is often where the interesting reads are.

The ranking is a review order. It saves you the first pass through a pile, and that is the whole claim being made for it.

Surhires holds the same boundary in the free tool that it holds in the product: automated scoring orders a human review, it does not end anybody's application. There is no threshold below which a candidate is discarded, no auto-reject setting, and no output that says do not proceed. The screener produces a sequence and a reason for it.

That boundary is partly about hiring quality and partly about what regulators are now asking. Where an automated employment decision tool is in scope, the questions asked are which candidates were scored, on what basis, and what the tool's output actually determined. A tool that only orders a review is a much simpler thing to answer for than one that closes a door. It is still your decision to use it, and your responsibility to know whether your jurisdiction treats it as in scope.

The screener will process the text you paste in order to produce the ranking, and will not retain it once the result has been returned. Nothing you paste into the free tool will be written into a Surhires candidate database, added to a talent pool, used to market to those candidates, or used to train a model. If you are not signed in, there is no account for it to be filed against; if you are signed in, saving a candidate to your database will be an explicit action you take, never a side effect of running the screener.

Now the part that free tools usually leave out. A resume is another person's personal data. Pasting it into any free web tool, ours included, is a processing decision you are making as the controller of that data, and the candidate's expectations, your privacy notice and your jurisdiction all apply to it. We can tell you what we do with the text; we cannot make that decision lawful on your behalf, and nobody who publishes a free screener can.

If you are unsure, the safe pattern is the same one experienced recruiters already use for anything sensitive: redact the name and contact details before pasting. The requirement matching does not need them, and the ranking is unaffected.

It will not take more than ten resumes, so it is a triage tool for a single requisition rather than a way to process a database. It will not read a candidate's history across previous applications, because it has no database behind it. It will not check right to work, verify a claim, contact a referee or assess anything a resume does not state.

It will not predict performance. A resume is a document a candidate wrote about themselves, and no amount of processing turns it into evidence of how someone will do the job. The screener tells you what the resume claims and how those claims line up against what you asked for. Everything after that is an interview.

The free screener handles one requisition and ten resumes with no memory. Inside Surhires, the same matching runs against your whole database rather than a paste box, so the first search on a new brief looks at the candidates you already have before you spend anything on sourcing. Scores are stored on the record, so you can see why a candidate ranked where they did six months later when the client asks.

The product also keeps the audit trail the free tool cannot: which requisition, which version of the brief, who reviewed the list, what disposition was recorded and by whom. If your screening ever has to be explained to somebody outside the desk, that trail is the thing that does the explaining.