The situation
A graduate scheme opens for applications and receives around 1,000 submissions for 90 places. The talent team is three people, and the same team is also running the assessment centres, the campus events and the offer process.
With AI-assisted applications, the CVs no longer separate candidates the way they used to. Every application reads well. The team's traditional filter — skim the CV, shortlist a few hundred, phone-screen as many as time allows — produces a shortlist that depends more on who applied early than on who is strongest.
A 20-minute phone screen for even a quarter of the pool is 125 hours of calls: more than three working weeks of one recruiter doing nothing else, compressed into a window where the team also needs to run assessment centres.
How the role is set up
The scheme's job description goes into Lumo360 once. The platform extracts the competencies that actually differentiate graduate performance in this business, and the team reviews them before anything goes live — adding, removing and re-wording until the framework matches what their assessors already look for.
- Every applicant gets a CV assessment against the same framework — one credit each, so cost is not a reason to skip anyone.
- The top quarter is invited to a full interview — a real conversation that adapts to each answer, completed by the candidate whenever suits them.
- Interview length is fixed by design — a set number of competencies with a set number of questions each, so every candidate gets a comparable conversation and the cost per interview is predictable.
- The team reviews scorecards, not recordings — each score links back to the transcript moments that produced it.
What it costs
Two Growth bundles (2,000 credits each, £800 apiece) cover the intake at £0.40 per credit:
| Line item | Volume | Credits | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| CV assessments | 1,000 applicants | 1,000 | £400 |
| Full interviews | 250 candidates | 2,500 | £1,000 |
| Total | — | 3,500 | £1,400 |
That works out at roughly £15.60 per hire for the entire first round — and because credits only settle when an interview completes, the 40 or 50 invited candidates who never start the conversation cost nothing.
What changes for the team
- 125 hours of first-round calls disappear from the team's calendar, and land instead on the assessment centres and offer conversations where a human genuinely changes the outcome.
- Every applicant is assessed on the same rubric — the candidate who applied on day 38 gets the same conversation as the one who applied on day 2.
- Shortlist decisions become defensible. When a hiring manager asks why a candidate was cut, the answer is a transcript and a linked score, not a recollection.
- Candidates hear back in days rather than weeks — the single most common complaint about graduate schemes.
Where this shape of problem shows up
Any intake where the pool is large, the candidates are early-career and the assessment criteria are genuinely shared: graduate and internship schemes, apprenticeships, rotational programmes, and campus hiring for professional services, engineering and financial services.
It applies less well where the hire is senior and idiosyncratic — a small pool of executive candidates assessed on gravitas and network is still a job for an experienced human interviewer, and we would say so.