For candidates →Search-first, not wait-first
Candidates on our 1.1M-candidate database have declared interests, education stages, target sectors. You search the database rather than waiting for CVs to arrive at your careers site. Inverts the volume problem.
Solutions · Hire
Your TA team is spending 60% of its week on initial screening.
And getting steadily worse signal for the time. The average graduate vacancy now attracts 140 CVs (1,200+ in finance and consulting). 71% are AI-generated. The typical ATS was built to handle 10× less volume than this, scored on keyword matching that AI has flattened, and never considered the candidate-experience downstream cost. Application Management is the early-careers ATS rebuilt for the actual workload.
The volume problem, quantified
Your signal-to-noise ratio just collapsed.
Three things have changed at once in early-careers volume. Candidate AI use has driven application count up. Application quality has flattened — everybody’s CV reads like a senior associate’s. And the keyword-matching that legacy ATSs use to triage now picks up AI-generated content as “strong matches”.
The result is a TA team spending 60% of its week reading applications, an ATS that surfaces the wrong shortlist, and a candidate-experience dashboard going the wrong way. The fix is to flip the model: stop waiting for CVs, start headhunting candidates by declared interest from the candidate-side database.
CVs per graduate vacancy
140+
UK average. 1,200+ for finance and consulting. 200–300 for technology.
AI-generated share
71%
Of UK candidate applications now use AI to write or edit. Indistinguishable to keyword screens.
Time saved
62%
Average screening-time reduction in deployed cohorts vs CV-keyword-screening baseline.
Time-to-shortlist
<48hr
Median time-to-shortlist across all cohort sizes. Sector benchmark: 8 days.
If you don't fix this
Time-to-fill goes up, candidate experience goes down, and hire quality is barely correlated with how hard the team worked.
The downstream cost of the volume problem is invisible until the year-end review. Time-to-fill stretches because the team can’t physically read 140 applications per role. Candidate experience drops because rejected candidates wait three weeks for a templated email. Offer-acceptance falls because the strongest candidates have already accepted somewhere else by the time you’ve made the shortlist. And the hire-quality outcome at the end is barely correlated with the screening effort — because keyword screening on AI-generated content is, technically, signal-free.
If your ATS is reading polished AI prose, what exactly is it screening for?
Application Management is the headhunt-model alternative. Built on TalentPortal — an early-careers ATS designed around a 1.1M-candidate database where candidates have declared their interests, education, geography and target sectors. You search for candidates rather than waiting for CVs to arrive. Behavioural-evidence shortlisting where the candidate has gone through IWX upstream. Sub-48-hour time-to-shortlist on cohorts of any scale. And the audit trail per candidate is what your D&I committee, regulator or internal audit will actually want to see.
How we deliver this
Six things that make application management actually scale.
Built for the cohort sizes the FTSE 100 actually hires at — 5,000 to 30,000 applications per cycle — with the candidate-experience and audit-trail constraints regulated employers operate under.
Featured · FTSE 100 investment bank
Case study · Graduate finance 2025
From 9,400 applications to 48 hires, in six weeks.
A UK-headquartered investment bank moved from CV-and-aptitude-test screening to evidence-first using TalentPortal and the Assessment Platform across their 2025 graduate finance cohort. Screening time dropped 64%, offer-acceptance rates climbed, first-year line-manager performance ratings beat prior cohorts by 1.6×, and diversity within the hired cohort increased 22 percentage points without any change to the role profile or the bar.
64%
Time saved
1.6×
Performance
+22pp
Diversity
What this connects to
Where this fits in the early-careers stack.
Application Management sits where the candidate moves from interested to applicant. Upstream is Candidate Attraction & Engagement (which brings them in) and Schools Engagement / IWX (which builds the brand earlier). Downstream is the Assessment Platform (which scores), Video Interviews (which structures the panel) and Identity Verification (which handles RTW and KYC).
Most clients deploy Application Management in tandem with the Assessment Platform — the two work as a pair, and the sub-48-hour time-to-shortlist depends on the behavioural-evidence scoring that lives in the Assessment Platform.
Platform
TalentPortal
The early-careers ATS — headhunt-model search, behavioural shortlist, audit-ready trail.
Upstream
Candidate Attraction & Engagement
Where well-engaged candidates are brought into the funnel.
Pairs with
Assessment Platform
Behavioural-evidence shortlisting depends on the Assessment Platform scoring.
Downstream
Video Interviews
Where shortlisted candidates progress to structured panel interviews.
Application management deployments at
FTSE 100 bank
PwC
John Lewis
Microsoft
DHL
Schneider Electric
Costa
TfL
Talk to the platform team
Got 10,000 CVs arriving in three weeks?
Most clients start with a 45-minute working session: we plug anonymised data from your last cohort into the headhunt-model search, walk through what the shortlist would have looked like, and quantify the time-to-shortlist difference. Walk away with a one-page brief you can share with TA and finance.