First product update 🚀
We’ve been busy making First faster, smarter, and easier to use. Here’s everything that’s new.
🌟Refreshed assessments – Quickly understand each candidate’s strengths, experience, and fit, so you can prioritise high-quality talent without missing a beat.
⚡ Faster human reviews – You stay in control of every decision, with tools that help your team review and move candidates faster.
⚙️ Simpler criteria setup – Build your perfect role faster. Check right-to-work, use AI to spot relevant experience, and quiz candidates on key skills.
🔗 Set up roles from your integration – When creating a new role, just choose “From Integration” to import it directly from your ATS, saving time and avoiding duplicate setup.
🚫 Reject means reject– First automatically updates your ATS and notifies candidates when you reject them, even matching rejection reasons based on their assessment.
🌟 New! Refreshed assessments
The new At-a-Glance Criteria View lets you instantly see every candidate’s skills, experience, and requirements all in one place. You’ll spot strengths and gaps right away, making it easier to decide who’s a perfect fit and who needs a reassessment when criteria change.
Spot top talent in seconds!
You can now see exactly how many criteria each person meets with colour-coded highlights: Green highlights top matches, yellow shows partial fits, and red marks those who don’t meet your minimum requirements. This makes it quick to understand where each candidate stands, helping you move the right people forward, bulk progress or reject in one view, and stay confident in every decision.
See every criteria at a glance
Our new At-a-Glance Criteria View gives you a crystal-clear snapshot of every candidate’s employment requirements, skills, experience, and shortlist criteria, all in one place.
Each profile clearly shows how well a candidate matches your role, highlighting where they meet or fall short of specific criteria, so you can quickly see their strengths and any gaps.
With all this information visible at once, you can assess fit faster, compare candidates more confidently, and make smarter hiring decisions without switching between screens or lists.
Updated criteria? No problem, just reassess!
You can easily see when a candidate needs to be reassessed. Review them against the new criteria to ensure they still qualify, and don’t miss out on your top talent!
When you update criteria for a role, First shows which candidates need to be reassessed. You can quickly review them against the new criteria and confirm whether they still qualify.
This helps you stay organised, maintain consistent standards, and ensure you never lose sight of great candidates as your needs evolve.
⚡ Faster human reviews
We’ve updated how candidate reviews work to give your team more control over every decision.
Candidates now default to the Inbox or Shortlist until someone on your team manually rejects them, either individually or in bulk. You can also clearly see where candidates start falling below your minimum criteria, making it easier to identify who to progress and who to bulk reject with confidence.
By keeping every decision human-led and transparent, this update ensures more accurate outcomes, prevents unwanted auto-rejections, and gives candidates a fairer, more consistent experience.
⚙️ Simpler criteria setup
We’ve streamlined the way you create and manage criteria to make setup faster and more flexible.
You can now easily add right-to-work checks, use AI to identify relevant experience, and quiz candidates on key skills, all in just a few clicks. The new setup flow makes it simple to fine-tune what you’re looking for.
This means less time configuring and more time focusing on qualified candidates.
🔗 Set up roles directly from your integration
When you click Create New Role, simply choose “From Integration” and select the role you want to import. All its details are pulled in automatically, so there’s no need to fill out the same information again. (Requires integration setup.)
This update keeps your systems in sync, reduces manual work, and lets you focus on hiring the right candidates.
🚫 Reject means reject
We’ve upgraded rejection syncing so you only need to take action once to keep all your systems up to date.
When you reject a candidate in First, they’re automatically rejected in your ATS, and candidates can also be notified by email if needed. Rejection reasons are matched automatically based on their assessment, so everything stays consistent across platforms.
This saves time, eliminates duplicate work, and ensures your candidate records are always accurate, letting your team respond faster and focus on the right talent.
