The bar is embarrassingly low
If you've spent any time with enterprise ATS platforms or the AI bolt-ons that the big players are quietly attaching to their existing products, you'll know the experience. Six-figure price tags. Implementation projects that take months. Training sessions nobody attends because the interface is so unintuitive that you develop workarounds within a week of going live.
And the AI features specifically — dashboards full of metrics nobody uses, "insights" that tell you things you already knew, and screening outputs that amount to a keyword match percentage dressed up in a fancy chart.
The bar for what counts as a good recruitment tool is, frankly, on the floor. Which makes it both depressing and quite easy to clear.
What /avlo: actually looks like
Open /avlo:. You'll see your active roles and a candidate pipeline. Every candidate has a suitability indicator — colour-coded, immediately readable. Highly recommended in teal. Not recommended in red. Clarifying in amber, for the candidates who've been sent follow-up questions and are working their way through the loop.
No hunting. No sub-menus. No clicking through four screens to find out where an application is sitting.
The whole thing is built around the way recruiters actually work — which is to say, quickly, with a lot of context-switching, and with very little patience for software that makes simple things complicated.
The verdict is right at the top. On purpose.
Click into a candidate record and the first thing you see is the suitability verdict. One sentence. Plain English. Not buried at the bottom of a report, not hidden behind a tab, not expressed as a decimal score that requires a legend to interpret.
"Fully qualified CIMA with 8+ years' PQE and proven ownership of month-end, controls, forecasting and commercial partnering — an excellent match for this Finance Manager brief."
If you want more, it's right there below — a full candidate summary, followed by identified strengths and potential gaps laid out side by side. The recruiter decides how deep to go. But the headline answer is always immediate.
This isn't a design flourish. It's a deliberate decision about what matters most when you're moving quickly through a shortlist. Most tools make you work to get the answer. /avlo: leads with it.
Fast. And we mean it.
Screening results come back quickly. The pipeline updates in real time. The interface doesn't lag, doesn't freeze, doesn't require a hard refresh to show you what's changed.
This sounds like a low bar. In practice, for anyone who's experienced the glacial load times of legacy ATS platforms, it genuinely isn't.
Speed matters in recruitment. A shortlist that's ready before your first call is more valuable than one that arrives at 3pm. /avlo: is built on modern infrastructure specifically so that the time between "CVs uploaded" and "shortlist ready" is as short as possible.
Visually appealing and actually useful — a rarer combination than it should be
There's a particular type of enterprise software that's aesthetically pleasant and operationally useless. Beautiful dashboards. Meaningless data. You've probably seen it.
/avlo: tries to do both — look good and be genuinely useful at the same time. The design is clean and considered. Dark headers, clear typography, colour used purposefully rather than decoratively. It looks like something built in 2026, not retrofitted from a product that launched in 2011.
But the visual choices exist in service of the function. The colour coding on suitability indicators isn't there because teal looks nice (though it does). It's there because it lets you scan a pipeline of twenty candidates in five seconds and know exactly where your attention needs to go.
No training required
This is one of those things that sounds trivial and turns out to matter enormously at implementation.
Most enterprise recruitment tools come with an onboarding process. You get a customer success manager, a series of calls, a help centre with forty-seven articles, and a training session that half your team misses and the other half forgets within a week.
/avlo: has a help centre. But the honest answer is that most users figure it out by clicking around for ten minutes. The interface is logical. The language is plain. The actions are where you'd expect them to be.
That's not an accident — it's the result of being built by people who've used enough bad recruitment software to know exactly what makes it bad.
Built from scratch. Not retrofitted.
The tools that look and feel the worst in recruitment tend to share a common history: they were built a long time ago, for a different era of hiring, and have been updated incrementally ever since. Every new feature gets bolted on. Every UI refresh is partial. The underlying architecture creaks.
/avlo: was built from scratch in 2025 with a clear idea of what it needed to do and how it needed to feel. There's no legacy to drag along. No technical debt from a previous generation of the product. No compromises made because changing something would break five other things.
What you see is what was designed. Not what survived.
Part of the /avlo: USP Series — a look at what makes us different, one feature at a time.
Early access is open at avlo.uk
