By Stevien Jimmy, Co-Founder of KitaLulus and KitaHQ
AI can help companies screen hundreds of CVs in minutes. But what if all that efficiency simply helps employers overlook good candidates faster?
After five years in recruitment technology and hundreds of user-research conversations with jobseekers across Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, I have come to question whose time we are actually saving.
I co-founded KitaLulus to improve job access in Indonesia and now build KitaHQ, an AI recruitment platform that helps employers improve early-stage screening. Working on both sides of hiring has changed how I see the problem.
Recruiters have too many applications to review, and hiring managers want good candidates quickly. I understand those pressures.
But candidates face a different reality. They rewrite CVs, tailor messages, enter the same information across job portals, prepare for interviews, and wait. Often, they never hear back.
For someone who is unemployed, that cycle can be especially difficult. Every application carries hope with it.
The question is no longer just how much faster AI can make recruitment. It is whether that speed makes hiring better for the people going through it.
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A Good Candidate Can Still Look Average on Paper
One person I spoke with made this particularly clear to me.
He was a mid-level manager in advertising who had been looking for work for around a year. He had solid experience and a strong work ethic, but his CV was fairly ordinary. It listed what he had done without really showing what made him good at his work.
Eventually, he found other routes into conversations, including through his network, and landed another role.
What stayed with me was how easily a capable person could look average when reduced to a two-page PDF.
That matters as recruitment becomes more automated.
If AI simply helps companies process CVs faster, it can also help them overlook candidates faster when those candidates have not packaged their experience well.
Candidate quality and candidate presentation are not the same thing.
Employers regularly tell us they want more quality candidates. On the other side, I have met good candidates who struggle to communicate their experience in the format hiring systems expect.
This is one reason KitaHQ and KitaLulus invest in candidate education on CVs and interviews. Helping candidates present themselves better also helps employers make better hiring decisions.
Faster Recruitment Has a Cost. Who Pays It?
I understand why recruiters optimise for speed. In high-volume hiring, they are under pressure to fill roles quickly. When hundreds apply, responding personally to every unsuccessful candidate is difficult.
But the cost of that efficiency is often carried by the candidate.
For the company, an unsuccessful application may be one row in an applicant tracking system.
For the candidate, it may represent hours spent updating a CV, completing forms and preparing for an interview, followed by days of uncertainty.
Recruiter efficiency matters. But it cannot be the only measure of whether recruitment technology is working.
Good technology should remove friction for candidates too, not just make the employer’s workflow faster.
When AI Interviews Give Candidates More Control
One area where I think technology is genuinely useful is first-round interviewing for high-volume and more junior roles.
Candidates cannot always attend an interview at 2 pm on a working day. Some work shifts. Some cannot leave their workplace easily. Others are interviewing discreetly because their current employer does not know they are considering another job.
We see the impact in KitaHQ’s own data.
Around 70% of candidates invited to our online interview flows complete them. For offline interview processes requiring candidates to appear at a specific place and time, we have seen completion closer to 20%.
I would not present those figures as a universal industry benchmark. They are observations from our own hiring flows. But the gap reinforces something we hear repeatedly from candidates: flexibility matters.
An AI video interview lets someone participate after a shift or in the evening rather than choosing between work and an interview.
Employers benefit too.
At Mind Stretcher, moving first-round interviews into an asynchronous process helped cut the hiring cycle by 50% and saved around five hours of recruiter time per hire.
That is the kind of efficiency I find useful: time saved on both sides.
But Would You Ask an Executive to Meet AI First?
I would draw the line differently for senior hiring.
I do not think AI interviews should be the first meaningful touchpoint for managerial and executive candidates.
Strong senior candidates are often already employed and may not be actively looking. The first conversation is therefore not only about assessing them. They are assessing the employer too.
They want to know who is behind the company, where it is going, what the leadership believes, and whether there is chemistry.
They need to ask questions, challenge ideas, and understand the company’s vision from another person.
AI cannot replace that exchange.
Not every hiring problem should be automated in the same way.
An AI video interview can make sense when a company needs to collect consistent information from hundreds of applicants. A senior hire is different. The relationship begins during the interview itself.
Final Thoughts: AI Can Inform Hiring Decisions. It Shouldn’t Own Them.
AI can help organise candidate information, structure responses and give recruiters a more consistent way to review large applicant pools.
What it should not do is remove human accountability from hiring.
A CV does not fully explain a person. Neither does a recorded answer or an assessment score.
After five years working in recruitment technology, I have become less interested in asking how much of hiring AI can automate.
The better question is where automation genuinely improves the experience for both sides.
At KitaHQ, that means using technology to remove repetitive work and unnecessary scheduling while giving candidates more flexibility to show what they can do.
Recruiters should have better evidence and more time to consider it. Candidates should spend less time fighting the process.
Speed matters in hiring. But whose time we save matters just as much.
Editorial Note
This article was adapted from an opinion piece contributed by Stevien Jimmy, Co-Founder of KitaLulus and KitaHQ. It has been edited and restructured by NewInAsia into a third-person editorial feature. The experiences, observations and company performance figures presented are drawn from his original contribution. The article preserves his central perspective on AI recruitment, candidate experience and human accountability in hiring.
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Read the Chinese article here.
