How to import a CV into Invenias
There are three routes, and they are not equivalent. One works from anywhere, one works only for your own advertising, and one needs somebody sitting at a PC. This page sets out what each one does, and what actually ends up on the record afterwards.
Written by the team behind CV Mailroom, which is the third route. The first two are described as they are — both are perfectly good, and most firms use all three.
Route one: entering it by hand
Open Invenias, search for the candidate, create them if they are not there, type the details from the CV, then attach the document to the record. If the CV came in reply to an advertisement, add them to the assignment and set the source as well.
This is the route every firm starts with and nobody ever fully leaves. It is completely reliable, because a person is doing it. Its two costs are the obvious ones: it takes a few minutes per CV, and it only happens when somebody is at their desk with Invenias open.
That second cost is the one that quietly does the damage. A CV that arrives on a Friday afternoon, or on a phone between meetings, does not get filed later — it gets filed never.
Route two: Invenias Apply
When a candidate applies through an advert you have posted from Invenias, the application carries an identifier that ties it back to the assignment it came from. That is the mechanism working exactly as intended, and it is the cleanest of the three when it applies.
The limit is in the name: it covers applications to your own advertising. It does nothing for a CV a colleague forwards you, a speculative approach, a referral from a client, a candidate you met at a conference, or a CV sent to your personal address because that is who the candidate happened to have an email for.
For most recruitment firms that is the larger pile.
Route three: forwarding the email
You get your own address. Forward the email with the CV attached, and the CV is parsed and filed into your Invenias — the person created or matched, the document attached under its original filename, and a journal note left saying how it got there.
Nothing is installed, and nothing about your Invenias configuration changes. It files through a dedicated API user against your own licence, the same way a consultant would, which is why what appears looks like a normal record rather than an import.
Including from a phone. Forwarding an email is something every phone already does. That is the practical difference between this route and the first one: a CV can be filed from a train, and it is filed in the thirty seconds you actually have rather than the ten minutes you intend to find later.
Accepted formats are PDF, DOC, DOCX and HTML.
Upload a CV and see the Invenias screens it would produce. No sign-up, nothing written to any system, the file deleted the moment it has been read.
What lands on the record
This is the part most descriptions skip. Here is exactly what a forwarded CV produces, for a candidate who is new to your database:
A person record parsed from the CV — name, job title, employer, and the contact details the CV carries.
Their employment history, with each previous role's company and dates, up to 25 roles.
Their education — qualification, subject and place of study, up to 15 entries.
The CV itself, under its original filename, with any cover letter or other attachments alongside it.
A journal note on every record it touches, saying the CV came in through CV Mailroom. Nothing appears in your database without an explanation of how it got there.
A programme to land in, for CVs that arrive with no reference, so speculative approaches are somewhere findable rather than loose in the database.
When the CV came in reply to an advertisement, two more things happen:
The candidate is added to that assignment, matched from the reference in the subject line or the identifier in the application.
The source is recorded on the person record, so you can see where they came from.
Invenias has AI search now, and it can only find what somebody has already put in. Every CV that never got filed is a candidate your own database will tell you that you do not have.
What it does not do
Worth knowing before you decide, rather than after.
- It does not re-write records that already exist. When a CV arrives for somebody already on file, the document is attached to their record and nothing else is touched — no field is overwritten, no history is refreshed. That is a deliberate decision: a consultant who has curated a record by hand should not have it quietly replaced by whatever a candidate last wrote about themselves.
- It does not write skills. Employment history and education are written for new candidates; skills are not written for anybody.
- It matches on email address. A candidate is recognised by the address on their CV. There is no fuzzy name matching, which means it will occasionally create a second record for somebody who has changed address — and it means it will never file a CV against the wrong person. Of the two failures, that is the one to choose.
- It does not stop mail that fails a sender check. The checks run and the results are recorded and visible to you, but a failed one does not hold up an import. Sender checks here are reporting, not enforcement.
Questions
No configuration changes, and nothing is installed. CVs are filed through the Invenias API under a dedicated user on your own licence, so what appears is an ordinary record created by an ordinary user.
Median 28 seconds from the email arriving to the record being in Invenias, measured across 40 live imports. Most of that is the parse.
PDF, DOC, DOCX and HTML. Other attachments on the same email are still uploaded to the record, they are just not parsed as a CV.
It comes back to you with the reason, and the CV is still attached so nothing is lost. The candidate is never contacted about a parse failure.
No, and most firms do not. This is for the CVs that would otherwise sit in an inbox — speculative approaches, referrals, and anything that arrives when nobody is at a PC.
See it on one of your own CVs
The quickest way to judge this is to put a real CV through it and look at the record it produces. That takes about ten seconds and needs no sign-up.
Also worth reading: what a parsed CV fills in, field by field · filing a candidate from your phone · pricing