How One HR Team Used AI to Tame a 500-Application Recruitment Surge

Viktoriia Kopeikina, HR Manager at 111Techs, describes how a flood of over 500 applications for a single QA engineer role in early 2024 exposed the limits of manual CV screening, taking nearly two months to fill the position. The challenge is not unique: Djinni analytics data from June 2026 shows nearly 90,000 candidates competing for fewer than 8,000 vacancies in Ukraine's tech sector alone. To manage the volume, the team first introduced a structured Google Form to channel applications into a spreadsheet, marking an initial step toward automation. Key pain points included mass-applying candidates who ignored job requirements, mismatched seniority levels, and CVs arriving in inconsistent formats that were difficult to parse at scale. The article argues that AI-assisted screening is becoming necessary not to replace human judgment but to ensure strong candidates are not overlooked simply due to application volume.