Case study
Novera HireFrom application to placement: the ATS that scores, presents and steers — built for the IT recruitment firm.
The proprietary ATS that runs my recruitment firm Novera Talent: transparent AI candidate scoring, auto-generated skills dossiers, pipeline, mandate CRM and automations — verticalised for freelance and permanent tech recruitment.
- Role
- Design · Product · Development · Hosting
- End to end, solo
- Year
- 2026
- Type
- Proprietary ATS · IT/staffing recruitment
The challenge
I run Novera Talent solo — freelance and permanent tech recruitment, direct-to-client (RPO) or through staffing partnerships. Before Novera Hire, everything lived in a patchwork of tools: Notion, Excel and a free Recruitee. No objective scoring, client presentations redone by hand, no multi-mandate traceability, and margins computed case by case — therefore invisible.
The goal: an IT-verticalised ATS covering the whole funnel — from application to placement — with transparent scoring (not an opaque “match %”), AI-generated client deliverables, and margin made visible on every record.
The solution: a recruitment cockpit
Eight connected modules cover the full cycle, from application to placement.
CRISPE AI scoring
0-100 score, GO/REVIEW/NOGO verdict, sub-scores and evidence — transparent, not a “match %”.
Kanban pipeline
Custom stages, drag-and-drop, tracked transitions.
Skills dossier
AI-generated PowerPoint dossier, anonymised in staffing-partner mode.
Firm CRM
Clients, contacts and mandates — multi-client, multi-mission.
Pricing & margin cascade
Target margin firm → mandate → role, visible on every record.
AI client presentation
Branded professional email, generated in draft or auto mode.
Email automations
Stage-change rules: follow-ups, rejections, booking.
AI interview kit
Contextualised interview guide, then note analysis into GO/review/NO_GO.
The design
A design system aligned with the Novera Talent brand: deep navy, cornflower blue for actions, azure blue reserved for AI moments, and a light lavender background. Semantic colours (green/amber/red) are kept for GO/REVIEW/NOGO verdicts. Geist typeface, tabular figures everywhere — the readability of a working tool.
Navy
#17213A
Authority
Cornflower
#316EB9
Action
Azur IA
#2E90D8
AI moments
Lavande
#F0F1F9
Breathing room
Aa
Geist Sans
Headings & interface
Aa
Geist Mono
Figures & scores
Under the hood
A fully typed Next.js monolith with real production-AI discipline: every model call is validated, traced and costed. No over-engineering — guardrails where money and candidate data are at stake.
Architecture
Next.js monolith (App Router, ~96 components / ~94 API routes) with systematic Zod validation on inputs, a Supabase data layer protected by RLS, and business logic (RPO/staffing postures, margin cascade) isolated and unit-tested in lib.
Orchestrated AI scoring
CRISPE scoring in two flavours — standard, and dynamic adapted to the role (two model calls). Every evaluation is journaled (scoring_jobs table: pending → running → done/error) with a human review status, retries and exponential backoff on OpenAI.
Document generation
End-to-end skills-dossier pipeline: CV text extraction → AI section generation → branded PowerPoint render (pptxgenjs) in the firm’s colours, with automatic anonymisation in staffing-partner mode.
AI observability
An AI usage ledger records every model call (feature, tokens, cost in euros, duration, errors), with a dedicated dashboard. Real AI cost is tracked to the euro — kept under €30/month.
Guardrails & security
Upstash Redis rate-limiting (a strict bucket dedicated to scoring), strict upload validation (type, size, sanitised name), Supabase RLS policies, soft-delete on sensitive data and secrets kept out of the repo.
Storage, extension & delivery
CVs and renders on Backblaze B2 (Supabase Storage fallback), a Chrome extension that captures a LinkedIn profile into the ATS, 374 unit tests (Vitest) + e2e (Playwright), GitHub Actions CI, deployed on Vercel + Supabase cloud.
My role: everything, solo
From vision to production, I built Novera Hire alone: strategic decisions recorded as ADRs, design system, full-stack development, hosting and compliance. It’s the tool I use every day to recruit — so it’s the product whose every trade-off I own.
Product & scoping (PO)
Positioning, ADRs, roadmap, ecosystem boundaries.
Design & design system
Novera Talent-aligned identity, UI, components, tokens.
Full-stack development
Frontend, API, database, AI orchestration, tests, CI.
Hosting & data
Deployment, RLS, GDPR, AI cost monitoring.
Novera Hire is the tool I built for my own firm — and proof that I understand, from the inside, the craft of the people I recruit. Framing the need, designing the experience, writing the code, orchestrating the AI and shipping it: that complete perspective is exactly what I bring when I assess and recruit tech profiles.