Hiring only works when it works for both sides.
Bright Apply is a conversational screening tool for high volume hiring. It helps in-house recruiters discover the best candidates when screening at scale while giving candidates a better, fairer experience.
Why we built it
We’ve spent more than a decade working at the heart of early careers hiring. We’ve seen first-hand how volume hiring has changed and felt the impact on both sides.
- Applications have surged
- Shortlisting is harder and more time consuming
- And the candidate experience is harder to protect
Early screening is where the process breaks most often. It is also where teams can make the biggest gains, if screening is consistent, transparent, and built for scale.
Bright Apply is our answer. It brings structure and consistency to early screening, without losing the human feel candidates expect.
Return to high quality, candidate-generated interactions and responses
Give candidates a personalised experience they enjoy
Significantly reduce the manual screening effort
Our DNA
The Bright Apply team has spent more than ten years delivering high volume, end-to-end recruitment campaigns. We’ve partnered with hundreds of employers across multiple sectors and supported millions of candidates through the process.
Incorporated in 2008
Recognised for Recruitment Tech excellence
Working with 350+ blue chip corporates
Supported 1M+ candidates
Diversity champion within recruitment
“That experience shaped a simple belief: hiring only works when it works for both sides. That principle underpins how we designed Bright Apply – and how we work with our clients day-to-day.”
Our approach
Consistent and fair by design
We design and test our AI to help reduce bias with ongoing monitoring and human oversight.
Privacy built in
We collect only what is needed for screening and handle personal data securely. We do not use candidate data to train public AI models.
Transparency about AI
We are clear about when and how AI is used.
Authenticity over artificiality
We keep the experience authentic and transparent. We do not use a fake human persona or pretend a human is behind the chat.
Human decision making
We support human decision making, not replace it. People remain accountable for hiring decisions.
Substance over hype
We do not build AI for its own sake. Bright Apply is research-backed, tested, and co-designed with real users to focus on what works.
Facts, not predictions
We do not predict culture fit or infer personality traits. Bright Apply uses only what the candidate shares in the interview and the criteria set.
The team behind Bright Apply
The core team includes recruiters, technologists, designers, and behavioural scientists, all of whom have worked directly inside the volume hiring problem we’re trying to solve.
Kirsten Barnes
Chief Executive Officer
Kirsten leads Bright Apply with over 15 years of experience at the intersection of careers and technology.
She has a deep understanding of where hiring fails – for the recruiters managing it and the candidates going through it and a clear conviction that technology, done right, can make it better for both.
Thomas Brightwell
Chief Product & Technology Officer
Thomas leads product and technology at Bright Apply – overseeing everything from the AI and infrastructure to the team that builds it. He believes technology has the potential to genuinely transform how hiring works – and is committed to building something that lives up to that. Before Bright Apply, he co-founded Bright Network and built it into the UK’s number one early careers platform.
Josh Triggs
Founding Account Executive
Josh works directly with hiring teams to understand what they’re dealing with and work out how Bright Apply can help. He joined the team having spent nearly a decade with some of the UK’s largest employers on how they attract and assess candidates at scale.
Olivia Sanchez
Product Director
Olivia leads Product at Bright Apply, working out what’s worth building, how it’ll create value for our customers, and making sure it gets built properly. She has ten years across financial services, technology, and AI products, and is experienced in bringing products to life – using research, user insight, and a fair amount of pressure-testing to build a concrete product from an idea to reality.
Sara Rasul
Director of Strategy & Operations
Sara leads strategy and operations at Bright Apply, making the business run in ways that directly deliver an exceptional experience for customers.
Before joining, she spent five years at McKinsey working across strategy and transformation in both public and private sector organisations.
Adam Nash
Senior Software Engineer
Adam is a Senior Software Engineer at Bright Apply, working on the engineering that sits directly behind what recruiters and candidates experience. He’s spent nearly five years building and scaling technology in the volume hiring space, developing a deep understanding of what it takes to make these platforms work for recruiters and candidates.
Paul Porter
Platform Partnerships Director
Paul leads platform partnerships at Bright Apply, working with RPO partners to implement Bright Apply across their client base – helping them improve how they screen and assess candidates, reduce bias, and deliver a better experience on both sides. He brings over seven years in recruitment, managing end-to-end hiring campaigns from attraction through to pre-boarding.
Guillaume Soulié
Vice President of Engineering
Guillaume has spent over six years at Bright Network, leading complex engineering challenges – from architecting a real-time deep learning recommendation system to building Talent Tracker, a data-driven platform that has shifted how the graduate hiring industry thinks about data. As VP Engineering at Bright Apply, he applies that same depth of experience to building a product customers can depend on as it grows.
Frederick Naylor
Lead Software Engineer
Frederick is Lead Software Engineer at Bright Apply, bringing over six years of experience building technology in the recruitment and staffing sector. He knows the domain extremely well, which shapes how he thinks about what gets built and how.
Cristina Bardas
Senior Software Engineer
Cristina is a Senior Software Engineer at Bright Apply, focused on the frontend side of the product that recruiters and candidates directly interact with. She has a strong track record of building software in the recruitment and staffing sector and works at the intersection of design and engineering.
Maggie Lin
Junior Software Engineer
Maggie is a Full-stack Engineer at Bright Apply, working across frontend and backend to develop features that make a real difference for users. Before joining, she honed her skills at an ethical AI company, bringing experience and expertise that informs her role at Bright Apply.
Screen better. Screen faster. Screen fairly.
If your team is receiving more applications than it has time to review properly, that’s the problem Bright Apply was built to solve.
Bright Apply is a conversational AI screening tool for talent acquisition teams running volume hiring. Built on over 15 years of hiring insight by Bright Network.
ISO27001 certified | EU AI Act compliant
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