AI Screening by VONQ: the CV is not the candidate. June 17, 2026 You post a job on Monday. By Tuesday morning, applications are already rolling in. By Wednesday, there are dozens. By Friday, there are hundreds. On paper, that sounds like a recruiter's dream. In reality? It's a lot less exciting when you're staring at a stack of resumes trying to figure out candidates are most relevant to the role (and could be your next great hire) vs who's just good at tailoring their application. And thanks to AI, that's becoming harder than ever. Candidates can now polish resumes, refine cover letters, and apply to jobs faster than ever before. The result? More applications, more noise, and more pressure on hiring teams to quickly identify the candidates who are truly the right fit. The challenge isn't finding people. It's finding the right people. That's why JazzHR has partnered with VONQ to bring AI Candidate Screening directly into the hiring workflow. Together, JazzHR is helping hiring teams move beyond resumes and uncover the skills, experience, and role-relevancy that don't always show up on paper. In this blog, I'll walk you through why this partnership is such a game-changer, how it works, and why both candidates and recruiters benefit from it. Resumes only tell half the story. A resume is great at telling you where someone has been. It can show you their previous employers, job titles, years of experience, education, and certifications. But hiring isn't about the past - it's about the future. You're not hiring someone because they were successful somewhere else. You're hiring them because you believe they can be successful for you. That's where resumes start to fall short. Think about the candidate who taught themselves a new skill on nights and weekends. Or the military veteran whose leadership experience doesn't neatly translate into corporate job titles. Or the employee who's spent years wearing multiple hats at a growing business and developed skills far beyond their job title. On paper, those candidates might not check every box. But in practice, they could be exactly who you're looking for. As Ritu Mohanka, CEO of VONQ, puts it: "Job titles and CVs tell you what someone has done. They don't tell you what someone can do." And that's the challenge recruiters face every day. Because the candidates who look best on paper aren't always the candidates who perform best on the job. Sometimes the strongest hire is hiding behind a nontraditional career path, an unconventional resume, or a title that doesn't match your keyword search. The catch? Recruiters need to uncover those insights early. Waiting until the first interview - or worse, several interviews into the process - to learn whether someone has the right skills, motivations, or communication style wastes valuable time for everyone involved. That's why hiring teams need more than a tool for reviewing resumes and keyword matching. They need a better way to identify most relevant candidates from the very beginning. And importantly, that doesn't mean eliminating candidates faster. The goal is to screen in the right people by surfacing key skills, experiences, and role-relevancy earlier in the process - not screen people out before a recruiter even has a chance to review them. A better way to identify potential early. So how do you uncover potential before you've invested hours in phone screens, interviews, and back-and-forth emails? JazzHR found the answer for its customers in a strategic partnership with VONQ. Together, JazzHR is giving hiring teams a better way to evaluate candidates early in the process - before valuable time and resources are spent pursuing candidates who may not be right for the job. Here's how it works: Step 1: Candidates engage immediately after applying. Instead of submitting an application and wondering what happens next, candidates are invited to participate in a brief AI-powered screening conversation. Through chat or voice, they're asked role-specific questions designed to uncover information that a resume alone can't provide. Think: relevant skills, experience, motivations, and other qualifications that matter for success in the role. Step 2: Responses are evaluated against the role. As candidates answer questions, AI Screening evaluates their responses against the criteria you've defined for the position. This helps move screening beyond keyword matching and creates a more consistent way to assess applicants based on role-specific criteria that actually matter. Step 3: recruiters receive a dossier. Rather than relying just on a what a resume can tell them, recruiters receive a dossier of information on each candidate, along with a structured application summary of key insights from the screening conversation. These candidate dossiers include explainable candidate scoring, and role-aligned insights, giving recruiters a clearer understanding of why a candidate may be a strong prospect before scheduling the first interview. Every recommendation is backed by transparent reasoning, helping recruiters make informed decisions - so teams are never relying on a black-box model or unexplained scores. The goal isn't to replace recruiter judgment - or recruiter conversations. It's to give recruiters better information, earlier - so they can spend less time interpreting applications and more time connecting with the right people. Better information = better hiring. When recruiters have better information earlier in the hiring process, everyone wins. For starters, recruiting teams spend less time chasing dead ends. Instead of manually reviewing hundreds of resumes, conducting phone screens, and scheduling interviews just to determine whether someone has the right competencies, recruiters can focus all their attention on the candidates most likely to succeed. That's a big reason organizations using AI Screening by VONQ fill roles 2.5x faster. Candidate processing time drops from three weeks to just two hours, helping hiring teams move quickly without sacrificing confidence in their decisions. But the benefits don't stop with recruiters. It's easy to think that AI screening means a less personal experience for candidates. In reality, it's the complete opposite. Think about the typical candidate experience: you spend time tailoring your resume, filling out an application, hitting submit... and then? Silence. Days pass. Sometimes weeks. With AI Screening by VONQ, candidates are engaged immediately after they apply. They get an opportunity to share more about their experience, demonstrate their qualifications, and start the conversation right away. And when candidates feel engaged, they're more likely to stay invested in the process. In fact, organizations using AI Screening by VONQ see 60-75% fewer drop-offs throughout the hiring process. The result is a better experience on both sides of the hiring equation. Recruiters get faster, more informed hiring decisions. Candidates get a fairer opportunity to demonstrate what they can bring to the role. And perhaps most importantly, hiring becomes less about who wrote the best resume and more about who can actually do the job. Hiring shouldn't be a keyword contest. The best hires aren't always the people who look best on paper. In some cases, they may not even have a traditional resume to begin with. They're the people who have the skills, potential, and motivation to succeed. Whether you're hiring high-volume frontline workers, hourly employees, or experienced professionals, AI Screening helps surface the candidates most relevant to the role based on skills, experience, and role-based scoring. Ready to move beyond the resume? Table of contents. Dara Brenner. Dara Brenner is the Chief Product Officer of Employ Inc. who brings more than 25 years of executive leadership experience spanning product vision, business strategy, and organizational excellence. She has a proven track record of delivering customer-centric solutions, guiding companies through transformative growth, and building future-ready operating models. As Chief Product Officer at Employ, she spearheaded a major evolution of the company's product portfolio, including the integration of AI capabilities. Under her leadership, Dara set a new standard for HR technology, advancing the product strategy and delivering solutions that redefined how employers and job seekers connect. Dara has held senior leadership positions at ADP, Equifax Workforce Solutions, and Ultimate Software/UKG, where she shaped strategic direction, drove operational advancements, and delivered industry-leading workforce technology. Notably, she founded and scaled ADP's first Innovation Lab, pioneering the adoption of agile practices that reshaped how teams collaborated and accelerated delivery of forward-looking solutions across the organization. As CPO of Employ, Dara is committed to advancing the company's mission to reshape the hiring experience. She is passionate about driving product evolution, enabling long-term customer success, and ensuring that Employ continues to lead with innovation, integrity, and impact in the HR technology space.

VONQ named Strategic Leader in the Fosway 9-Grid(TM) for Talent Acquisition for fifth consecutive year. Rotterdam, May 28, 2026 - VONQ, the agentic recruitment automation platform, today announced its recognition as a Strategic Leader in the 2026 Fosway 9-Grid(TM) for Talent Acquisition, marking the fifth consecutive year the company has been positioned as a Strategic Leader. This positioning reflects how VONQ continues to act as a trusted partner for global enterprise and staffing organizations and leading Applicant Tracking System (ATS) providers with a single platform that powers hiring from AI job descriptions to agentic interviewing and scoring of job applicants. Why VONQ continues to lead. Built for scale and headless from day one, the company continues to work with their customers as "design partners" to deliver new AI services. EQO(R) wasn't built in a hackathon. It was built on 15+ years of infrastructure: headless from day one, outcome-based by design, and already embedded inside 85+ ATS platforms. HAPI, VONQ's API layer, is the largest headless job marketplace in HR tech, wired into thousands of integrations and distributing over 2 million jobs every month across 5,000+ channels. When VONQ's customers asked for AI, the pipes were already there. EQO is what happens when you build AI on top of real infrastructure instead of starting with a demo. Today, VONQ's platform orchestrates complex, multistep workflows, combining AI tools and deep agents to enable hiring from job descriptions to the shortlisting of candidates. This combination of enterprise-scale execution, ecosystem reach, embedded AI, and trusted partnerships reflects the qualities recognized in the Fosway 9-Grid(TM) and positions VONQ as a strategic technology partner for organizations rethinking how they attract, evaluate, and hire talent. "Five years as a Strategic Leader reflects a deliberate build, with customers who shaped it and partners who trusted it. EQO(R) orchestrates the full top-of-funnel: job description to ranked, interview-ready shortlist, inside the ATS. No extra tool. Better candidates. Full control." - Ritu Mohanka, CEO, VONQ "The talent acquisition market in Europe is more cautious, fragmented and increasingly shaped by AI-driven change," said Sven Elbert, Head of Analyst Services at Fosway Group. "Organisations are looking for solutions that improve recruiter productivity, candidate quality and hiring outcomes, while supporting appropriate governance and control. VONQ's continued position as a Strategic Leader reflects its strength in talent attraction and engagement, its embedded ecosystem reach, and its continued innovation in applying automation and AI to complex top-of-funnel hiring challenges." About the Fosway 9-Grid(TM) Fosway Group is Europe's #1 HR industry analyst. The Fosway 9-Grid(TM) is a five-dimensional market analysis model that helps organisations compare solutions based on Performance, Potential, Market Presence, Total Cost of Ownership and Trajectory. The Fosway 9-Grid(TM) for Talent Acquisition provides a unique assessment of the principal talent acquisition options available to organizations in EMEA. The analysis is based on extensive independent research and insights from Fosway's Corporate Research Network of over 250 organizations, including BP, HSBC, PwC, Sanofi, Shell, and Vodafone. About VONQ VONQ is the next-generation agentic AI recruitment technology company, helping companies hire smarter, fairer and faster. By making recruitment more predictable, efficient, and outcome-driven, VONQ connects employers and candidates through intelligent job distribution, programmatic advertising, and AI-powered candidate screening. With over 20 years of market expertise and deep integrations with 85+ ATS partners, VONQ supports more than 350 enterprise employers, global staffing firms, and technology partners across Europe, North America, and APAC, including Employ, Adecco, SoftwareOne, PwC, and Randstad, and is recognized as a Strategic Leader in the Fosway 9-Grid(TM) for Talent Acquisition. VONQ is headquartered in Rotterdam with offices in Groningen, Düsseldorf, and London. www.vonq.com.

Finland-based Duunitori has announced a partnership with Vonq, a Netherlands-based recruitment advertising platform.