Automated screening used to be enterprise-only. In 2026 a five-person company can run structured, scored, voice-based first-round interviews for less than the cost of one recruiter afternoon. The question is no longer whether to automate screening — it's which platform matches your hiring volume. Here's an honest look at MAZ Assist, Metantz and HireVue.
The short answer
- MAZ Assist — best for SMBs hiring 1–20 roles a year who want CV screening plus a live AI voice interview live on their careers page the same day.
- Metantz — an AI interview point tool; solid for asynchronous interview capture, lighter on the end-to-end applicant pipeline.
- HireVue — enterprise assessment suite with industrial-grade compliance tooling, priced and implemented accordingly.
Setup speed
This is where the gap is widest. HireVue implementations are typically measured in weeks and involve an assigned onboarding team, ATS integration work and assessment design. Metantz gets you to a working async interview in a day or two. MAZ Assist is a paste-one-snippet embed on your existing careers page: you publish a job, the assistant reads the job description, and applicants can apply and be screened within minutes.
How screening actually works
The meaningful difference is what happens between "applicant submits" and "recruiter reads a shortlist".
- CV matching: MAZ Assist parses the résumé (PDF and Word) against your job description and scores fit before anyone spends time on it. Only candidates over your bar receive an interview link.
- The interview: a real-time voice conversation with a hard duration limit you set — 5, 10 or 15 minutes — instead of a one-way video recording. Candidates can ask clarifying questions; you get a genuine conversation, not a monologue.
- The output: score, full transcript and audio recording land in your dashboard, with an email alert per completed interview.
Cost per screened candidate
Enterprise assessment platforms generally sit in the four-to-five-figure annual contract range, which only amortises well above a few hundred hires. Point tools price per interview or per seat. MAZ Assist bundles hiring into the same plan as your other assistants, so a five-minute screening interview costs roughly the price of a few minutes of conversational voice — typically well under a dollar per candidate.
Candidate experience
One-way video interviews consistently draw the worst candidate feedback in hiring surveys: applicants dislike recording themselves into a void. A conversational voice screen with a fixed, disclosed time limit tests the same things and feels far closer to a real phone screen. It also runs in the browser on mobile, which matters for frontline and service roles.
Fairness and consistency
Whichever tool you pick, keep humans in the loop on the reject decision, use the same question set for every candidate in a role, and store transcripts so decisions are auditable. Structured, identical questioning is the single biggest fairness win automation gives you — but it only holds if you don't hand the final call to a score.
How to choose
Hiring at hundreds-of-thousands scale with heavy regulatory obligations? Take the enterprise route. Need asynchronous video capture only? A point tool works. Running a growing service business, agency or BPO where the bottleneck is time spent on unqualified applicants? Screen with CV matching plus a short AI voice interview, and spend your hours only on the shortlist.
See how the MAZ Assist AI hiring assistant screens and interviews candidates →