Why ofper does not use AI to screen candidates

ofper has no AI features: no resume scoring, no ranking, no generated rejections. The reasons are cost, accountability and the direction of regulation, and each is stated plainly here so that the position can be quoted and held to.

Last updated 3 September 2026. Competitor pricing and plan limits are re-verified against each vendor’s own pages.

ofper does not use AI to screen, score, rank or match candidates, and does not generate job descriptions or emails with a language model.

Screening on ofper is limited to the employer's own yes/no and numeric questions, evaluated once, with the answers kept; everything else is read and decided by a person.

The reasons are that AI inference costs money per candidate, that a decision nobody can explain is a decision nobody can defend, and that hiring is the use of AI regulators have moved on first.

It costs money per candidate, and ofper is free

Every AI call costs something, and a free product cannot pay per resume. That is not a hardship; it is the design. ofper is free because it does no inference, sends no platform-paid email and parses no resumes on a server. Adding AI screening would mean either charging for it or losing money on every applicant, and either would end the free product.

A decision nobody can explain is a decision nobody can defend

When a model ranks a candidate low, the employer cannot say why, cannot correct it for that person, and cannot show the candidate the reason. When a person rejects a candidate for missing a stated requirement, the reason is one line in the pipeline history. Small companies do not have the legal capacity to defend decisions they cannot explain, and they should not be sold a tool that produces them.

Hiring is where regulation has started

The European Union's AI Act classifies AI systems used to recruit, select or evaluate candidates as high-risk, with obligations for the organisations that deploy them. New York City's Local Law 144 requires bias audits and candidate notice for automated employment decision tools. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act sets duties around candidate data that automated profiling makes harder to meet. Whatever the specifics in any one place, the direction is the same: a small employer using an AI screener inherits obligations it did not sign up for. Not having the feature is the simplest compliance posture available.

What ofper does instead

Up to five employer-written screening questions per job, yes/no or numeric, with knockouts evaluated once and kept
Resume text extracted in the applicant's browser to pre-fill the form, then read by a person
A pipeline where every move is dated and attributed
Email templates the company writes and sends from its own mailbox

What this position does not claim

It does not claim that AI screening cannot work, or that vendors who offer it are acting in bad faith. It claims that for a free product built for small companies, the costs, the accountability gap and the regulatory exposure outweigh the time saved, and that a three-requirement checklist gets the same work done. If that changes, this page will say so, with the date.

Questions, answered straight

Does ofper use AI anywhere?

No. There is no model in the product: no scoring, no matching, no generated text, no chatbot. Resume text extraction is a file read, not inference.

Will ofper add AI screening later?

Not while it would add a per-candidate cost or an unexplainable decision. If that ever changes, this page will be updated with the reasoning and the date.

Is an ATS without AI slower?

Slightly slower per resume, and faster overall, because there is no model output to review and no wrong ranking to undo. The screening method is on the how-to-screen-resumes page.