Lucas Meijer: “Stop searching — start asking your ATS”
Spadework automates CV processing for staffing and agency recruiters. The platform converts candidate profiles into standardized, vacancy-aligned documents.
“For staffing firms this is especially valuable — it’s something they do every single day. Doing it poorly isn’t just inefficient, it’s waste,” says founder Lucas Meijer in this podcast.
From academic AI to the root cause
Before founding Spadework, Meijer and his three co-founders all came from a Master’s in AI.
“We were all very academic — published papers, strong in theory,” he says. “But we also wanted to build something real for once.”
A consultancy assignment led them to a problem that later became the foundation for Spadework: a recruitment firm struggling structurally with CV processing.
“They said: ‘We keep running into this CV bottleneck — can you build something for it?’”
“No superficial fix”
The team expected to solve it in a month. That month turned into a year. The problem was deeper than assumed. Recruiters relied on a CV parser that failed to extract clean, structured data — forcing them to fix everything manually in Word.
“Word costs time. It fights you. It’s not built for this. We realized this needed a fundamental solution, not a cosmetic patch.”
Building their own stack
Spadework developed its own CV parser for more accurate data extraction, and built a browser-based editor so recruiters can edit documents directly — without detours through legacy tools.
“We generate documents ourselves with our own parser,” Meijer says. “And we edit them in our own editor — inside the document.”
The tool is designed specifically for staffing agencies presenting candidates to clients.
“For staffing, this is daily work. If you do daily work in a mediocre way, that’s pure waste.”
Tailored logic instead of one-size-fits-all
What differentiates Spadework, says Meijer, is the level of organizational tailoring. Some firms want internships split out, others list them under experience — Spadework reflects those logic choices.
“Every company evaluates CVs differently. We can split, rank, or surface data exactly the way you want it.”
Vacancy-specific rewriting is also possible:
“In work experience we can automatically surface the skills relevant to that vacancy, and re-rank them by relevance.”
From searching to asking the ATS
Beyond CV transformation, Spadework is building toward database intelligence. The ambition: no more manual searching — instead, ask the ATS a question.
“We’re keeping candidate data up to date, auto-loading vacancies, rewriting everything — so you don’t search, you ask.”
The system scans thousands of profiles at once, verifies recency, enriches missing attributes using external sources like LinkedIn, and writes updates back into the ATS automatically.
Scaling locally before scaling globally
With fifty clients, Spadework is entering a next phase.
“At the moment we deliver a lot of bespoke work — which is why clients are very happy — but it’s intensive and therefore expensive. We are scaling the delivery without lowering the outcome.”
The platform now processes more than 50,000 candidate profiles across clients in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Austria. Expansion will remain phased.
“The Great American Dream is still the Great American Dream — but that’s a step too far for now.”
Bootstrapped by intent
Spadework has taken no external funding.
“Financial independence gives us the freedom to grow on our own tempo and on our own priorities.”
More capabilities sit on the roadmap — but won’t be released until the current solution scales cleanly.
Listen to the podcast
Want to hear more from Lucas Meijer in conversation with Recruitment Tech?
Listen to the live recording from Recruitment Tech Demo_Day 2025 in Utrecht.
