Evaluate every candidate.
Explain every decision.
Polarok is the AI hiring intelligence that measures what people can actually do, not how a CV is worded. It scores your entire applicant pool on capability, explains every shortlist in plain language, and leaves the final call to your team. Fair by design, and ready for the EU AI Act.
Germany cannot find talent. Its hiring systems keep discarding it.
The country has hundreds of thousands of open roles, yet the tools meant to fill them quietly reject the very people who could. Polarok exists to close that gap.
Applicant tracking systems were built to filter, not to understand. They match strings of text, so a qualified candidate whose CV is phrased differently, or who took a non-linear path, never reaches a human reviewer. Under volume pressure, recruiters cannot catch what the system already discarded.
In response, many teams now paste CVs into general-purpose chat models. Peer-reviewed research is unambiguous about why that fails: unconstrained language models produce inconsistent rankings and reproduce demographic bias, which is exactly what hiring law forbids. The fix is not less AI. It is AI that is structured, constrained, and accountable.
"Naive screening, feeding a CV into a general chat model, is not deployable in hiring."
University of Washington audit, 2024 . over 3 million resume comparisons
From keywords to Contextual Capability Intelligence
Most HR systems evaluate a person through documents and the words inside them. Polarok evaluates the person. It transforms every CV and job description into a structured capability profile, a machine-comparable view of what someone can actually do.
That single shift makes consistent, multidimensional comparison possible. Two candidates with very different CVs can finally be judged on the same evidence, against the same role requirements, every time.
Today's status quo
- Rejects atypical CVs and career changers
- Rewards formatting, not ability
- Inconsistent from one screen to the next
- Opaque, with no explanation
The Polarok way
- Every applicant assessed on the same criteria
- Evidence of skills and real task exposure
- Consistent, repeatable ranking logic
- Explainable, with reasons for every result
One end-to-end pipeline. Four layers no other SME tool combines.
Each layer does one job well, and hands clean, structured evidence to the next. Together they take you from raw documents to a defensible shortlist.
No current ATS or AI screening tool combines these four layers in one deployable, SME-affordable pipeline.
A shortlist you can actually defend
See how Polarok would rank and explain a shortlist for a Senior Product Manager role in Berlin. Click any candidate to open the explainability panel. Protected attributes are masked, and the human stays in control.
This is a pre-prototype concept created to communicate the vision for Polarok. It illustrates how the product could look and function, but it is not a built, working, or final version. All candidates, scores, and results are synthetic and do not represent real people or actual outcomes.
From a raw CV to a defensible, ranked candidate
Click through each step to see exactly how Polarok turns one messy CV into an explainable, bias-controlled capability score.
- Owned B2B SaaS product roadmap end to end
- Led an activation funnel redesign, +18% conversion
- Shipped an OKR framework across three squads
- Navigated two product pivots without losing delivery pace
The whole applicant pool, screened in seconds
Polarok parses, masks and scores every CV, then surfaces only the few worth your time.
Senior Product Manager . B2B SaaS
Names, photos and dates of birth are masked before processing, in line with GDPR and AGG.
Compliance is not a footnote. It is the product.
Because recruitment AI is high risk under Annex III of the EU AI Act, Polarok is built compliance-by-design. This is no longer theoretical. In Mobley v. Workday, a US federal court certified a nationwide collective action over alleged algorithmic hiring discrimination. Human oversight, transparency, logging and fairness are part of our core, not bolted on later.
Attribute masking
Name, photo, date of birth and gender are removed before evaluation, which blocks direct discrimination at the source.
No bias inheritance
The ranking model is trained only on anonymised, capability-based data, never on historical hiring decisions whose bias AI demonstrably reproduces.
Counterfactual fairness
Fairness tests check whether protected attributes influence the ranking. Deviations are logged and corrected during final shortlisting.
Prompt guardrails
The chatbot refuses discriminatory prompts and flags proxy criteria such as "cultural fit", catching indirect discrimination.
Human in final control
Polarok shortlists and explains. A person always makes the hiring decision, with human sign-off required before export.
Full audit logging
Every evaluation records the timestamp, masked attributes, fairness result and the human reviewer, ready for documentation.
Enterprise power, without enterprise cost or complexity
Established systems are too expensive and complex for the Mittelstand. Lightweight SME tools digitise admin but offer no decision support. Polarok closes the gap in the middle.
| Capability | Enterprise ATS Workday, SAP SuccessFactors |
Polarok | SME admin tools e.g. Personio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Implementation cost | €100k to €500k+ | ≈ one tenth of enterprise | Low, admin focused |
| Capability-based ranking | Keyword led | Core function | Not offered |
| Explainable decisions | Limited | Built in | Not offered |
| Fairness controls and masking | Varies | By design | Not offered |
| EU AI Act readiness | In progress | Compliant by design | Out of scope |
| Time to deploy | Months | Rapid, SaaS | Fast |
| Full-pool evaluation | Early filtering | 100% of candidates | Not offered |
Join the first cohort of Polarok pilots
We are partnering with a small group of SMEs in North Rhine-Westphalia to validate Polarok on live recruitment workflows. Pilot feedback will directly shape the product.
- Run two to three real recruitment cycles on your own roles
- Validate shortlist quality, consistency, usability and fairness against your current process
- Work directly with the founding team, with anonymised candidate data throughout
- Get ahead of the EU AI Act before obligations begin in August 2026
Request pilot access
Tell us a little about your team. We reply personally, usually within two business days.
Hiring intelligence, built in Cologne for the Mittelstand
Recruitment is one of the least structurally transformed enterprise domains, despite decades of digitalisation. We are building the missing decision-intelligence layer: affordable, explainable and demonstrably fair hiring intelligence for the companies that drive the German economy.
Our principle is simple. AI should automate the repetitive screening, not the human judgement. Polarok frees recruiters to focus on people and decisions, while keeping every step transparent, logged and under human control.
Frequently asked
Make hiring fair, fast, and explainable.
Bring enterprise-grade hiring intelligence to your team, with compliance built in from the first decision.