Build an AI Recruiting Assistant for Your Email Inbox
Yes, manually processing resumes from email is a common breaking point for small recruiting teams. Automating this process prevents missed candidates and centralizes applicant data without a full ATS.
Syntora designs and builds custom AI systems for small recruiting teams to automate resume screening from email, preventing missed candidates and centralizing applicant data. These systems integrate with existing workflows and tools, providing a tailored approach to managing job applications.
Syntora can design and build a custom system that parses email attachments, summarizes candidate experience, and logs details in your preferred applicant tracking or project management tools. This is a focused AI automation project, not an off-the-shelf product. The scope of such an engagement depends on the number of roles you hire for, the specific data points you need extracted, and the volume of applications your team processes. We've built similar document processing pipelines using Claude API for financial and legal documents, and the same architectural patterns apply to handling resumes.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Most teams start by creating Gmail filters to label or star emails containing the word 'resume'. This organizes the inbox but does nothing to extract the information from the attached PDF or DOCX files. The core bottleneck, manual review and data entry, remains unchanged. You still have to open every file, copy-paste key details, and create a card in Trello or Asana.
Then, teams try an email parsing tool. These services can pull text from attachments, but they are brittle. An uncommon file format like a .pages document or a password-protected PDF breaks the entire workflow, creating a silent failure. The extracted data is often just a wall of unstructured text, leaving you to manually find the candidate's phone number or years of experience. This simply trades one manual task for another.
A 4-person agency we worked with had a dedicated admin spending 10 hours a week processing applications into Trello. When a key client requested an urgent candidate search, their inbox received 40 applications in one day. The admin fell behind, two top candidates were not contacted for 72 hours, and one had already accepted another offer. The cost of their manual process was a lost placement fee.
How Would Syntora Approach This?
Syntora would approach this problem by first understanding your exact hiring workflow, target roles, and the specific data points most valuable for your team. The first step in building the system would involve configuring an Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) rule to forward incoming applications from your jobs@ email address directly to an AWS Lambda function. This event-driven architecture would process each application as it arrives, avoiding delays associated with polling an inbox. A Python function, utilizing libraries like pypdf2 and python-docx, would extract raw text from resume attachments, covering common document formats.
The extracted text would then be sent to a language model API, such as Claude 3 Sonnet, with a prompt engineered to act as an expert recruiter. This prompt would guide the model to identify specific fields like contact information, work history, education, and skills relevant to your open positions. The model would return this data as a structured JSON object, along with a brief summary of the candidate's qualifications. Syntora has experience engineering and optimizing prompts for information extraction from diverse documents.
This structured JSON data would then be used to integrate with your chosen applicant tracking system or a tool like Trello. Syntora would develop an API integration to create new records or cards, populating them with the candidate's name, the AI-generated summary, extracted skills as tags or labels, and the original resume as an attachment.
To keep your team informed, the system could post a notification to a dedicated Slack channel via an incoming webhook. This alert would include key candidate details and a direct link to the newly created record. Syntora would configure monitoring with CloudWatch Alarms to alert your team of any system errors, ensuring ongoing reliability.
A typical engagement for a system of this complexity usually takes 4-8 weeks to build and deploy. For this, your team would need to provide access to your email service, Trello (or equivalent), and Slack for integration, along with example resumes and job descriptions for prompt engineering and testing. The deliverables would include the deployed cloud infrastructure, source code, and documentation.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Go from Email to Trello in 15 Seconds
Stop waiting on manual data entry. Every application is parsed, summarized, and logged in your project management tool in near real-time, 24/7.
Fixed Build Cost, Near-Zero Upkeep
A one-time project fee to build the system. After launch, AWS hosting costs are typically under $20 per month, not hundreds in per-seat SaaS fees.
You Get the GitHub Repository
We deliver the complete Python source code and deployment configuration. The system is yours to own and modify, not a black-box rental.
Proactive Error Monitoring Included
We build in logging and alerting with Amazon CloudWatch. If an API fails or a resume format is unreadable, you get a Slack alert instead of a silent failure.
Direct Integration with Your Tools
The system connects directly to Trello, Asana, Slack, or any tool with an API. No third-party connector platform adds another point of failure or cost.
What Does the Process Look Like?
Workflow Mapping (Week 1)
You provide examples of good and bad resumes and define the exact fields you want in Trello. We deliver a technical specification document outlining the entire data flow.
Core System Build (Week 2)
We write the Python code for parsing, AI summarization, and Trello integration. You get access to a staging board to review the output and request adjustments.
Deployment and Go-Live (Week 3)
We deploy the system to AWS Lambda and switch the email trigger to your live inbox. We deliver the full source code to your private GitHub repository.
Monitoring and Handoff (Weeks 4-6)
We actively monitor system logs for two weeks post-launch to handle any edge cases. You receive a runbook with instructions for monitoring and common troubleshooting.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What does a typical AI recruiting automation project cost?
- Pricing depends on the number of systems to integrate (e.g., Trello plus a calendar for scheduling) and the complexity of the data extraction. A standard system that parses resumes from email and creates Trello cards is a 2-3 week build. For a detailed quote based on your specific needs, book a discovery call at cal.com/syntora/discover.
- What happens if a resume is unreadable or the summary is wrong?
- If a file cannot be parsed, the system automatically forwards the original email to a designated person for manual review, along with an error message. The AI summaries are highly consistent, but for an extra layer of quality control, we can add a human approval step in Slack before the card is created in Trello.
- How is this different from buying an Applicant Tracking System like Greenhouse or Lever?
- An ATS is a complete recruiting platform with features for compliance, reporting, and candidate lifecycle management. This system solves one specific, high-pain problem: the initial intake and screening from an email inbox. It is for teams who are not ready for the cost and complexity of a full ATS, which can run into thousands of dollars per year.
- Where does our candidate data get stored?
- Candidate data is processed in-memory by the AWS Lambda function and is passed to the Claude API and Trello API. We do not persist any personally identifiable information in our own databases. Your data exists only in the services you already use. We can use API providers that have zero data retention policies for added privacy.
- What if we use Asana or another tool instead of Trello?
- The core logic for parsing and summarization is separate from the destination system. As long as your tool has a public API for creating tasks or records, we can integrate with it. We have built similar systems that log candidates in Asana, Notion, and Supabase databases. This is a common and straightforward modification.
- Do we need our own AWS account to run this?
- You can choose. We can deploy the entire system into your company's AWS account, giving you full control and direct billing. Alternatively, we can host it within our Syntora AWS account and you pay a small monthly maintenance and hosting fee. In both scenarios, you receive full ownership of the source code.
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