A recruiter has one to three minutes to convince a hiring manager that a CV is worth a phone call. In outsourcing and staffing, that same recruiter also has to convince a candidate to choose one company over another offering the exact same role. Fernanda Morais, Head of Talent Acquisition at KWAN, manages both problems every day. In a recent conversation with Marco Pincho, founder of Sprint CV, she shared how her team thinks about recruitment speed and CV quality, why transparency with both sides of the process builds a stronger pipeline, and where AI genuinely helps and where it doesn’t.
TL;DR
- A strong CV does not guarantee a hire, but a weak one guarantees a candidate never gets the chance to prove themselves.
- Recruiters and hiring managers spend one to three minutes reading a CV before deciding whether to call a candidate.
- KWAN already gives clients an aggressive delivery commitment, and pushes internally to move roughly twice as fast.
- KWAN is scaling while keeping recruitment transparent with both candidates and clients.
- Around 20% of hires come from referrals, a direct result of how candidates are treated during and after the process.
- AI is useful for sourcing, outreach, and re-engaging past candidates, but Fernanda is skeptical of AI in interviews.
- None of it works without a well-organised process and a clean candidate database behind it.
KWAN’s Growth Plan and the Pressure on Talent Acquisition
KWAN develops outsourced software projects for clients in Portugal, across Europe, and in parts of North America. Most of its roughly 300 consultants work in software development and related roles. The company has set a target of 500 people within a few years.
That kind of growth puts direct pressure on the talent team, and on the client growth team responsible for bringing in new business. Fernanda was candid about the market conditions behind the number.
“We had very good times back on 2023, 2024, 2025, but at the beginning of this year, we had some difficulties as well regarding new hires. The market has shifted a bit. But by the end of this second quarter of the year, it was really good, so very good perspectives for the second semester. We still plan to hire around 100 people till the end of the year.”
Fernanda Morais, Head of Talent Acquisition, KWAN
Portugal’s IT outsourcing market adds its own layer of difficulty. It is a small market with a lot of players frequently competing for the same clients and the same candidates, and post-pandemic remote work has made it easier for qualified people in Portugal to take jobs abroad. Standing out in that environment, Fernanda said, comes down to how differentiated the recruitment process itself is.
Why Being Upfront With Candidates Builds a Stronger Pipeline
KWAN’s culture centres on a team called People Experience Embassadors, dedicated to managing consultants’ professional journeys and, in Fernanda’s words, sometimes reaching into the personal side of their lives as well. The practical result is a level of openness that is unusual in outsourcing.
“If a consultant is working for a client and is not happy, I’ll talk with the client and let them know the consultant is not happy because of those reasons, so I’ll start looking for another project, unless the client is in a condition to change the things that are not making the consultant happy.”
Fernanda Morais, KWAN
That transparency runs in both directions. KWAN also tells candidates the salary budget as soon as they ask, rather than delaying the conversation until later in the process. Fernanda’s reasoning was direct: there is no advantage in running a full recruitment process only to lose the offer at the finish line over something that could have been clarified at the start.
The payoff shows up in how candidates arrive in the first place.
“We receive references coming from our current employees, but we also receive references both from alumni and from people that never worked with us but know us from social media or have some contact with someone that in the past worked with us.”
Fernanda Morais, KWAN, on referral hires
The Recruiter as Coach, Not Filter
One distinction Marco drew during the conversation is worth sitting with, particularly for anyone hiring inside consulting, staffing, or outsourcing rather than for a single employer.
“I see a recruiter, especially in the outsourcing sector in consulting, more as a coach than as a filter. Because when you are in a final customer, usually you just receive applications and you filter them out. In consulting and outsourcing and staffing, you try to get the best results with the candidates that you have, meaning coaching, CV preparation, interview preparation. I think you act much more as a coach in many cases, and then just as a recruiter to try to find people and to place them in a project.”
Marco Pincho, Sprint CV
This shows up when a candidate receives competing offers for the same role at the same client, through two different outsourcing companies. Fernanda described this as a fairly common situation, and said the deciding factor is rarely the offer itself. It tends to be the brand, the culture, and how the candidate was treated throughout the process.
Why Delivery Speed Still Matters
KWAN already commits to an aggressive delivery timeline for clients. Internally, the team pushes itself to move roughly twice as fast, treating that margin as room to react before a client’s interest cools.
“We actually have an SLA for our delivery, which is a few days. It’s our internal SLA for the client. Usually we deliver a candidate, or we compromise ourselves to deliver a candidate, within a period of a week. But internally for us, it’s a few days, because that’s what we believe is an ideal time to market.”
Fernanda Morais, KWAN
Fernanda confirmed how real the cost of delay is: candidates who wait too long simply sign with someone else. She also pointed to a quieter risk on the client side, where a hiring manager who does not see candidates quickly enough starts to wonder whether the role needs to be filled at all.
Why the CV Still Decides Who Gets an Interview
Marco and Fernanda spent a large part of the conversation on a single document: the CV a candidate is ultimately submitted with. KWAN never forwards a candidate’s original CV. Every submission is built on KWAN’s own template, aligned to the job description the client actually provided.
How much does CV quality actually affect getting an interview?
It is close to the entire decision.
Fernanda put the number at effectively 100%. A recruiter or hiring manager spends between one and three minutes reading a CV, scanning for specific technologies or keywords tied to the role. If those words are not visible in that window, the candidate does not get a call, regardless of what they can actually do.
“Everybody knows that both a recruiter or a client or a hiring manager takes around between one and three minutes to read the CV. They are looking for specific words, usually for specific technologies, if we are talking about the IT market. If in three minutes they don’t find the exact words they are looking for, they won’t call the candidate, and that’s it.”
Fernanda Morais, KWAN
Marco summarised the asymmetry in a single line that Fernanda agreed with immediately.
“A good CV doesn’t guarantee you the position, but a bad CV will guarantee you that you don’t get that position.”
Marco Pincho, Sprint CV
Fernanda acknowledged she has personally passed on strong candidates because their CV did not communicate what they had actually done. Recruiters, in her experience, need to coach some candidates directly on this point, since many underestimate how much a document can shape a career they otherwise deserve to advance in.
Turning CV Preparation Into a Repeatable Process
Behind the client-facing CV sits a fair amount of admin work: updating the applicant tracking system, capturing interview notes, and building the final version that actually gets sent. Marco’s point was that every one of those steps should be treated as a process worth optimising, not an unavoidable cost of doing recruitment.
“If you earn 15 or 20 minutes on adjusting the CV, that can be the difference between submitting before your competitors and the candidate being called for interview, or arriving too late when the client already says: I already have five good candidates, I’ll only call more if they don’t work out.”
Marco Pincho, Sprint CV
KWAN also does something many outsourcing companies leave to the candidate: building the CV itself, rather than asking the candidate to adapt it to each role.
“I know there are other companies that share these responsibilities with the candidates, asking them to adapt the CV to a specific role. At KWAN, we do it by ourselves. We receive a CV from the candidate, which needs to be a good CV, because otherwise we won’t probably call the candidate for the first interview. But then we manage all the other steps internally, and we use Sprint CV for the CV preparation and for the CV delivery to the client. We cross information coming from the interview, with the information coming from the job description, and also with the information that our colleagues from the client growth team collected during the contact with the client. There are a lot of sources giving us information about things we need to be very clear on the CV.”
Fernanda Morais, Head of Talent Acquisition, KWAN
Reading a job description well, in her experience, often means ignoring the title entirely and focusing on the actual day-to-day responsibilities the client needs covered.
“We are really happy with Sprint CV. It actually saved us a lot of time since the moment we started using it a couple of years ago, and the product is getting better and better and is helping us a lot.”
Fernanda Morais, KWAN
Where AI Actually Helps in Recruitment, and Where It Doesn’t
AI in recruitment, in Fernanda’s view, lands in a specific place: genuinely useful for some parts of the job, and not yet a fit for others.
“There are some specific parts of the recruitment process that can actually be done by AI, meaning sourcing, outreach. I think this kind of stuff can easily be replaced by an agent. But when you actually enter the interview stage or the human contact, I’m not sure that this can be done by an agent. There are already some studies showing that people don’t like to be called by agents, and they don’t like to be interviewed by agents either.”
Fernanda Morais, KWAN
Can AI replace recruiters in the interview stage?
Not according to KWAN’s experience.
Fernanda pointed to studies and her own observations showing candidates respond poorly to being contacted or interviewed by an agent. Sourcing, scheduling, and re-engaging past candidates in bulk are a different story, and both she and Marco see those tasks as well suited to automation.
Marco agreed that matching a job description against a candidate database is something AI can already do well, provided the underlying data is solid. Fernanda was equally direct about the precondition.
“If you don’t have a good database, there’s no AI that’s going to help you. And they will have the opposite effect. They’re going to tell you AI is not helping, and that’s not AI’s fault, it’s because you don’t have a good starting point.”
Fernanda Morais, KWAN
Marco framed the same idea from the product side: Sprint CV’s own roadmap uses AI to identify gaps between a candidate’s profile and a role, to ask candidates simple questions about which projects they worked on, and to help them practice technical questions before an interview, evaluating their answers automatically. The tool speeds up the process, but Marco was clear that the process itself has to be sound first.
“AI is really a great tool. If it’s applied correctly, it can save a lot of time and automate the boring parts, freeing up time for people to give their added value: coach, identify the gap, be faster. But it’s a very good medicine that needs to be applied correctly. If not, you’re not healing anything.”
Marco Pincho, Sprint CV
Fernanda’s read on the future of the profession follows the same logic. She expects some of the more repetitive parts of talent acquisition to shift to AI, and thinks recruiters who develop real fluency with these tools, beyond asking a chatbot to draft a job ad, are the ones who will move forward in the career.
- ✓Sourcing and outreach at volume are strong candidates for automation.
- ✓Re-engaging past candidates from an existing database can run largely hands-off.
- ✓Matching profiles to job descriptions works well once the underlying data is clean.
- ✓Interviews and direct human contact still perform better with a person.
- ✓None of the above works without a properly organised process behind it first.
What This Means for Recruitment and Staffing Teams
What comes through in Fernanda’s account is that recruitment speed, CV quality, and candidate transparency are not separate problems to solve one at a time. Treated as parts of the same system, each one makes the others easier to sustain.
The same principles hold for most staffing and consulting teams, regardless of size or market. A process built around clear communication, a fast internal turnaround, and a CV that actually reflects the candidate tends to hold up well under pressure. Teams working through similar gaps in CV management for consulting and staffing companies often trace the slowdown back to the same source: a process that was never redesigned for how fast the market now moves.
Recruiters preparing profiles for tenders or fast-moving client requests face a related version of the same challenge, covered in more depth in how consulting companies reduce time-to-submission by 10x. And for teams wondering how much of their candidate matching genuinely needs AI, it is worth reading why you don’t need AI to search your candidate database before assuming the fix has to be automated.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do candidates choose one outsourcing company over another for the same role?
Usually not the offer itself. Candidates weighing identical opportunities from different companies tend to decide based on brand reputation, culture, and how they were treated throughout the recruitment process.
Why do recruiters lose good candidates even with a strong pipeline?
Delay is the most common cause. Candidates who wait too long for feedback often sign with a different company in the meantime, particularly in competitive markets where several outsourcing firms are chasing the same profiles.
Does CV formatting really affect whether a candidate gets an interview?
Yes. Recruiters and hiring managers typically spend one to three minutes reviewing a CV, scanning for specific skills or technologies tied to the role. If those terms are not immediately visible, the CV is set aside regardless of the candidate’s actual experience.
Can AI replace human recruiters?
Not in every part of the process. AI is well suited to sourcing, outreach, and re-engaging candidates in a database. Interviews and direct candidate contact still tend to work better with a person, since candidates generally respond poorly to being interviewed by an agent.
What makes AI-based candidate matching actually work?
A clean, structured candidate database. Without accurate skills and experience data behind it, AI matching produces poor results, and the tool gets blamed for a problem that started with the underlying data.
Why do outsourcing companies rewrite candidate CVs instead of forwarding the original?
A candidate’s own CV rarely matches the exact structure or terminology a client’s job description uses. Rewriting the CV to align with the role, using information from the interview and the job description, increases the odds it gets read and understood within the short window a hiring manager actually spends on it.
Final Thought
Nothing in Fernanda’s account relies on a single lever. Speed, CV precision, and honest communication with both candidates and clients reinforce each other, and removing any one of them weakens the rest. Her view on AI also lands in a useful place: genuinely helpful for sourcing and matching, less so for the human moments where a candidate decides whether to trust the company on the other end of the process.
