A job post that's been live for a week leaves you with a pile of applications and no obvious order to read them in. This recipe turns that pile into a ranked shortlist you can act on — Chosen does the parsing and scoring, you make the call on the top band. It's the difference between reading forty resumes cold and reading the eight that matter first.

Nothing here is a separate task you start. Parsing and scoring happen on their own as applications arrive; this recipe is mostly about knowing they did, and what to do with the result.

What you'll need

A published job collecting applications through your careers page.
A job description worth reading. The match rating is built from it — a vague post produces a soft, uninformative score.
That's it. No integrations are required to triage applicants.

The chain

Applications arrive through the careers page. Each applicant submits their name, email, resume, and answers to your application questions. The application lands as a candidate in your candidates table on the job.
Resume parsing fills the candidate fields. Every uploaded resume runs through resume parsing in the background — name, contact, work history, education, skills, and any auto-fill custom fields. You get filled-in records instead of files to open. Cells show a placeholder until each resume finishes.
Match rating scores each candidate against the job. Once a resume is parsed, Chosen derives testable claims from the job post and scores the candidate's resume against them, producing an auditable 0–100% match rating. It runs per candidate, so scores appear as parses complete.
Sort and filter by match rating. In the candidates table, sort by the match rating column to put the strongest fits on top. Add a filter — a location, a skill, a date — to narrow the field before you read anything.
Bulk-move the top band to phone screen. Select the candidates in your top band with the checkboxes (shift-click for a range), and bulk-move them to your Phone screen status in one action. The rest stay in Applied for a closer read later.

Where it can break

A resume parsed to almost nothing. Scanned or image-only PDFs have no text to read, so the fields come back empty — and an empty resume can't be scored fairly. Chosen parses PDF and DOCX with real selectable text. More on parsing failures.
The scores are all soft and similar. That's the job post, not the candidates. A vague description produces vague claims. Sharpen the job description and the scores will spread out — and Chosen recomputes them automatically.
A strong candidate scored low. A requirement the resume simply doesn't mention counts as a gap. A genuinely strong person with a thin resume can land below a weaker one who wrote more. The match rating is a sorting aid, not a verdict — read the low scores too, just later.
The top of the list looks current but isn't. Match rating treats a five-year-old resume like a fresh one. If recency matters, that's a filter you add yourself.

Variations

Score before you bulk-move, by hand. If you want a human pass before anyone advances, open the top ten candidates and read the per-claim evidence on each match rating. Then bulk-move the ones that hold up.
Triage with HQ instead. Ask HQ to find this week's applicants for the role above a match threshold and move the strong ones to phone screen. HQ writes a plan you approve — see running HQ as a coordinator for the full version of this.
You sharpened the job mid-triage. Editing the description re-scores everyone. If you'd already saved a search over these candidates, re-run it — a saved search is a snapshot.
Reject the bottom band in the same pass. While you've got candidates selected, the bottom of the list can go to a Rejected status — see rejecting candidates kindly.