By Roger Lear
Does your inbox ever look like a game of Tetris, but instead of colorful blocks falling neatly into place, it’s 1,000 resumes stacked to the ceiling, jammed into your ATS, waiting for someone (probably you or your team) to sort them out?
We’ve all been there. You log in, coffee in hand, and think: “Somewhere in this digital haystack is my perfect hire… but where do I even start?” Good news, you don’t have to play recruitment Tetris anymore. Enter Filter Then Feel, a simple new framework I am promoting that’s making talent acquisition leaders breathe a sigh of relief in 2025. It is the “gold rush” for new AI startups promising pretty much hands-free hiring. This is not a thing however, some parts of AI can drastically help.
Sleep better knowing that AI is a superpower, but your human contribution to hiring is even more important for your company. AI has no empathy!
Here is the filter then fell method.
Step 1: Filter – Let AI Do the First Pass
Your ATS has been doing heavy lifting for years. As you know, even ATS tools can leave you staring at hundreds of “maybe” candidates. This is where AI becomes your recruiting superpower. The challenge most companies have is they don’t have this tool (many different options) and if you don’t, you need to talk to the CEO.
- AI can scan 10,000 resumes in under 2 minutes, surfacing top matches you’d otherwise miss.
- It automates scheduling, pre-screens applicants, and helps you focus on the best 10% of candidates. Again, this scares many people but, in the filter, and feel method, for higher level jobs, you may only use AI to screen. All jobs are not the same.
- It reduces bias and keeps your pipeline organized so you’re not drowning in data. This is true only if your AI can focus on skills and not names, schools, race, age, etc. Can it do this better than a human? Yes, but only if it is trained correctly.
Step 2: Feel – Where the Human Magic Shines
AI might be fast, but it can’t build trust, spot leadership potential in a shaky first interview, or know when a candidate’s joke lands just right with your team culture.
Here’s what you bring that no algorithm can:
- Empathy: Understanding a candidate’s story beyond bullet points.
- Culture Fit: Seeing who’ll thrive on your team, not just survive.
- Intuition: Those “this is the one” moments that AI will never fully grasp.
We all have had interviews with the “perfect” candidate on paper only to find out their soft skills don’t exist.
The Smoothie Analogy (Because Who Doesn’t Love Smoothies?)
Recruiting without AI is like making a smoothie with a butter knife: slow, messy, and frustrating.
Recruiting with “filter than feel” is like having a high-speed blender:
- AI tosses everything in, does the heavy chopping, and hands you a perfectly blended shortlist.
- You, the human, taste, tweak, and add the finishing touches, turning “just ingredients” into the perfect recipe for your team.
Want some proof? Unilever used AI on 250,000 applications, reducing their hiring timeline from 4 months to just 4 weeks and saving 50,000 hours of labor—but only because skilled recruiters reviewed finalists and made judgment calls on fit and attitude en.wikipedia.org This is pretty cool!
With filter than feel, you’re not handing over your hiring decisions to robots, you’re simply letting technology clear the clutter, so you can spend more time doing what humans do best; connecting, understanding, and choosing wisely.
So next time your ATS feels like a recruitment Tetris nightmare, remember this simple mantra:
Filter first, then feel your way to the perfect hire. Because hiring is still a people business… and always will be.