Shortlist Before You Read a Single CV
The move in short
Connector — When a hiring round closes, the studio director pastes the job description and each applicant's cover-letter text into Claude in a single prompt session with a standing evaluation rubric, and receives back a ranked longlist with a one-line rationale per candidate and a flag on any whose portfolio request should be prioritised — before a single CV is read in full.
The Company
Altaverde Architecture is a 55-person practice based in Lyon. They do mid-to-large commercial and public projects — schools, cultural buildings, urban mixed-use schemes. They've grown steadily over the last eight years and they hire every year or two when a significant project comes in. They're good at what they do, they have a clear identity, and people want to work there.
The Pain
Marianne is the studio director. When a hiring round opens, the applications come in by email. Sometimes 80 of them, sometimes more. Each one is a PDF portfolio, a cover letter, sometimes a CV attached separately. There's no system. It lands in her inbox.
She doesn't get dedicated time to deal with it. She goes through them on Friday afternoons, or on trains, or in the gaps between client calls. Six weeks into a round she's read maybe a third of them properly and she's quietly anxious about the ones she hasn't. Some rounds she suspects she's made decent hires. Others she wonders if she missed someone better because she ran out of time and just went with who she'd seen.
The Move
When the application window closes, Marianne opens Claude. She pastes the job description in first. Then she pastes a short rubric she's written once and keeps — four or five things she actually cares about: project scale, collaborative process, where they are in their career, that kind of thing. Then she pastes in the cover letters, one after another, each one labelled with the applicant's name.
She asks Claude to rank them against the rubric, give one line on each explaining where they landed and why, and flag anyone whose portfolio she should look at before the others.
She gets back a ranked list. Most of the cover letters haven't told her much she couldn't have read herself, but she doesn't have to read them first anymore. She starts with the ten or fifteen that look genuinely promising. The portfolios she pulls up on day one are the ones most likely to be worth her time.
She's not letting an algorithm hire anyone. She's still making every call. She's just not spending the first two weeks of a round in a fog.
The blind spot
The cover letters feel important, so it feels like she should be the one reading them carefully. Delegating that step to a tool feels like she might miss something. But she's not delegating the decision, just the first sort. The tool isn't telling her who to hire. It's telling her who to look at first, and why, based on criteria she set herself.
The pattern
The same move fits in a lot of ordinary situations where you've got a pile of unstructured text and a clear sense of what you're looking for.
- A bid manager with twelve tender documents, trying to work out which two are actually worth pursuing this month.
- A managing partner reviewing unsolicited partnership proposals that have been sitting in a shared inbox for weeks.
- An operations lead going through client feedback from a survey, trying to spot which complaints are one-offs and which ones keep coming up.