How ZeroFit works

ZeroFit is the model behind the Resume Assessment stage of a Zero Hiring hiring flow. It reads each candidate's résumé against the role's description and gives a fit score from 0 to 100, so your team sees the closest matches first. This page explains what it reads, what the score means, and what it never decides on its own.

What happens to a résumé

1. We read the text the candidate gave us. ZeroFit works from the full text of the résumé the candidate uploaded. For a candidate we found on your behalf who has no résumé on file, it uses the text of their professional profile.
2. We remove personal details first. Before ZeroFit sees anything, we strip the candidate's name, pronoun declarations, email address, phone number, links and profile handles, street address and postcode, and labelled personal fields such as date of birth, age, gender, marital status, nationality, religion, ethnicity and photo, in English and around twenty other languages. If that step fails, the résumé is not scored at all. The résumé your team sees is unchanged.
3. We remove text copied from the role description. Passages copied word for word from the role description are taken out before scoring, so pasting the role description into a résumé does not raise anyone's score.
4. ZeroFit compares meaning, not keywords. ZeroFit is a language model fine-tuned for matching résumés to roles. It turns the résumé and the role description into numerical representations of what they say and measures how closely the two align. Experience described in different words from the role description still counts, and repeating keywords does not.
5. The result is a score from 0 to 100. A higher score means the résumé is a closer match to the role description. It is a measure of alignment, not a percentile ranking against other candidates and not a probability of being hired.

How the score is used

• Ordering your pipeline. Candidates are ranked by score, so the closest matches are reviewed first.
• The interview invitation threshold. On the Resume Assessment stage you set the score at or above which candidates can receive interview invitations. Where automatic invitations are switched on, candidates who reach it can be invited without anyone having to click.
• A record of every decision. Each score is stored with the model version and the threshold in effect at that moment, so you can see later exactly what was decided and why.

What ZeroFit never does

• A score never rejects anyone on its own. A candidate below your threshold stays in your pipeline for your team to review. Rejecting a candidate is a decision a person makes: Zero has no feature that rejects candidates by score, and the platform refuses any rejection based on an AI assessment that a person has not authorized.
• It never guesses. If a résumé or role description is too short to assess fairly, the candidate is shown as not scored rather than given a low score. If scoring fails for a technical reason, it is retried and shown as pending, never as zero.

What the score can't tell you

• ZeroFit measures how well a résumé matches the role description as written. A specific description gives a more useful score than a vague one.
• It does not verify what a résumé claims, and it cannot see anything the candidate did not write down. That is what the interview stages are for.
• Removing personal details reduces what the model could pick up about who a candidate is, but it does not remove everything. Employment and graduation dates stay in, because they are how experience is read.

Treat the score as a way to decide who to look at first, not as a verdict on a candidate.

Candidate data and model training

How candidate data is used to improve our scoring models, with direct identifiers removed, and how a candidate can object, is set out in section 4 of our Privacy Policy.

Questions and human review

Candidates can ask for a person to review any automated assessment, and for an explanation of it, through Your data & privacy or by emailing privacy@zerohiring.com. Employers with questions about ZeroFit can reach us at the same address.