Recruiter manual

Welcome. As a recruiter your job is the sharp end of hiring: reading the applications for a role, working through the ranked list and the evidence behind it, and moving strong candidates forward so your HR manager can make the call. This manual covers your surface — which is a focused subset of the full hiring flow — and points you at the HR manager manual for the parts that sit with them.

HeadHunter only ever shows you actions your role can take, so you won't see buttons for work that isn't yours. That's by design and it keeps your screen calm: a few things — creating and publishing postings, sending candidate replies, building the formal shortlist, compliance, billing, and org settings — belong to your HR manager or org admin. Where they touch your day, this manual says so plainly.

A few rules that hold everywhere

• The interface is bilingual (English / العربية) and right-to-left aware. Switch language any time; the platform keeps your place. Dates are shown as YYYY-MM-DD.
• Scoring is explainable, never a black box. Every rank is backed by evidence pulled straight from the CV — you can always see why one applicant sits above another. This is the heart of your work.
• Your actions are audited. Moving a candidate through the stages leaves an honest trail — part of what makes the whole process donor-defensible.

Getting in and finding your way

Sign in with your email and password on the login page (if your organization uses two-step verification, you'll enter a one-time code too). The first time, you'll be asked to set your own password. Your sidebar is shorter than an HR manager's — it lists only what you can reach — and at the bottom you'll find the User manual (this page), the language toggle, and sign out. Your account settings (Account → Password and Account → Security, where you can turn on two-step verification) are yours to manage.

Your dashboard — the screening queue

Signing in takes you to your Dashboard, and it's built around the one number that runs a recruiter's day: your screening queue — the count of applications waiting on you (new arrivals plus everyone already in screening). Right beside it you'll see how long the oldest one has been waiting, so a candidate never quietly ages out while you work the rest.

Below the headline, What needs you now lists the work you can act on, each a card with an exact count that jumps you to the right screen:

• New applicants to review — the freshest arrivals, straight to that posting's applicants list.
• Candidates in screening — your work-in-progress, so nothing stalls mid-review.
• Postings closing within a week — a heads-up on roles nearing their close date.

Only work that's yours appears; when the queue is clear you'll see a calm "all caught up," not an empty screen. Some of these applications arrive from your organization's public job board or from job-seekers applying with a HeadHunter candidate account — from your side they screen exactly like any other applicant (same ranking, same CV evidence); the account link just lets the candidate track their own status. You don't manage any of that; you simply screen what comes in.

Your workday: screening a role's applications

Open the role and its applicants

You can view your organization's postings — open one to see its Applicants list. You don't create or edit postings yourself; that's your HR manager's job. What you do is work the people who applied.

Open a posting's Applicants for every application, ranked against the criteria the HR manager set for that role. Two views, switchable with a toggle at the top (your choice is remembered on that device):

• List — the ranked table, best for reading scores in order (the default on a phone).
• Board — columns by stage with lightweight cards, best for seeing where everyone sits.

"Why this score" — the breakdown with CV evidence

This is where you'll spend your attention, and it's what makes HeadHunter worth using. Open any applicant's Breakdown and the score comes apart criterion by criterion — and for each one, the actual sentence from their CV that earned (or didn't earn) the points. Not "7/10 for experience," but the line in the CV that shows it. You never have to trust a number you can't explain, and neither does anyone reviewing your work later.

Read the CV, and compare close calls

Every applicant's full CV is one click away, so you can read the whole document alongside its score. When two or three people are close, select 2–4 of them and open Compare — HeadHunter lays them out in a side-by-side criterion matrix, the same evidence per cell as the breakdown, so you can weigh them directly. Compare reflects the ranking; it never re-orders anyone.

Semantic match — an optional recall aid

The criteria are keyword-based, which is precise but can miss someone who describes the right experience in unexpected words. Semantic match looks for those possible matches and surfaces them in a separate "possible matches" section of the breakdown. Two things to know: it never changes the score or the ranking, and it only appears if your org admin has opted your organization in to AI processing (it's off by default). If you don't see it, it simply isn't enabled — nothing is broken.

Moving candidates forward

Reading the list is only half the job — the other half is acting on it. You can move an application through its stages: advance a strong applicant toward shortlisted, or set aside one that isn't right. Do this from the Board (drag a card or use the status buttons) or from an applicant's row. Every move goes through the same audited action, so the trail stays honest.

Think of this as shaping the shortlist: you surface the strongest people and stage them so your HR manager can confirm the final list. You're doing the reading and the first-pass judgement that makes their decision fast and defensible.

What sits with your HR manager or org admin

So you're never left hunting for a button that isn't there, here's what's deliberately outside your role — and who owns it:

• Creating, editing, and publishing postings — your HR manager. You read them; they author them.
• Sending candidate replies and rejections — your HR manager. Closing the loop with candidates (in their own language, honoring consent) is done through the comms flow, which your role doesn't carry. You stage who advances and who doesn't; the message goes out from them.
• Building and sharing the formal shortlist, and inviting reviewers — your HR manager. You contribute by staging candidates as shortlisted; they assemble the shareable list, export it, and bring in hiring managers.
• Compliance and finalizing a hire — your HR manager or a compliance officer.
• Billing, users, the AI opt-in, audit retention, and other org settings — your org admin (see the org admin manual).

None of this is a limitation on your work — it's the separation that keeps hiring accountable. Your part is the screening that everything else rests on.

Quick reference

Your screen is focused on purpose: read the ranked list, understand every score from its CV evidence, and move the right people forward. Do that well and the rest of the hiring run — the replies, the shortlist, the hire — follows cleanly from your work.