Introducing automated screening without the works council is how the project dies. The questions are fair ones and they are always the same three: what is being scored, who actually decides, and what happens to a candidate who disagrees with the outcome.

Vantera operates under a works council with a formal say over any change to how staff, including new hires, are assessed. The first attempt to bring in screening software went to them without much notice.

The telecom operator hires several hundred field and support staff a year, most of them through a recruitment team of six people covering every region the company serves.

The questions, asked properly

Vantera’s council did not object to automation in principle. It objected to being shown a finished system and asked to approve it. The first proposal was withdrawn within a week of being presented.

What came back was narrower: automate the consistency of the screening step, not the decision, and put the rubric in writing before anything runs against a single candidate.

Three drafts went back and forth between HR and the council before the scope was agreed. Each one was narrower than the last about what the system was actually allowed to do, and each one took a full committee cycle to sign off.

HR wanted a decision. The council wanted a description of a step, one that could be read back to any employee representative who asked what the software actually did. The gap between those two documents was most of the delay.

Answering on the record

Vantera documented its rubric, kept every hiring decision with a named human, and used Yardstick Agents to make the screening step consistent and inspectable rather than faster in the dark.

Each screening produces the criteria applied, the evidence found and the score given. The council can read any of it at any time, and a sample is reviewed jointly with HR each quarter.

The rubric itself is published internally before a role opens, so a candidate or a council member can see what will be measured before a single application is scored. Nothing in the rubric changes mid-cycle without going back through the council first.

What a candidate can ask for

Any applicant can request the criteria used and the reasoning recorded against their application, and can ask for a human re-review. Those two rights were the condition of sign-off, not a feature added afterwards.

What sign-off required

The works council signed off on AI screening after 3 drafts, and the thing that made it work was writing the rubric down first.

Every candidate keeps 2 standing rights under the agreement: to see the criteria used against them, and to ask for a human re-review of the outcome. The council also holds 4 joint reviews of sampled screenings with HR every year.

Appeals themselves are still handled entirely by a person in HR, by design. The council was clear that automating the review of a complaint was not on the table.

What they are doing next

Vantera and the council are now scoping the same documented-rubric approach for internal transfers, where a comparable disagreement about consistency had never formally been raised.