Fern reads every application for you, checks the qualifications you actually need, and hands back a shortlist of qualified candidates — ranked, explained, ready to interview.
Under five minutes from start to listing your job, then the best-scoring applicants will appear automatically in your dashboard
"The owner of a small business is the best person to build a team — and the worst person to spend three hours reading CVs."
That's why Fern exists.
Fern reads every application for you, checks the qualifications you actually need, and hands back a shortlist of qualified candidates — ranked, explained, ready to interview.
Under five minutes from start to listing your job, then the best-scoring applicants will appear automatically in your dashboard
We didn't build Fern from a hunch. We built it because the numbers — for New Zealand owner-operators in high-turnover sectors — keep getting worse.
New Zealand businesses advertising positions themselves regularly receive 80–100 applications per role. For a café owner or childcare director, reading all of them isn't realistic.
New Zealand's accommodation and food services sector replaces nearly its entire workforce every year. Reading CVs becomes a job in itself.
The average New Zealand hire takes 50 days — longer than Australia's 40-day average. Every day a role sits open costs in productivity, overtime, and stress.
SEEK and Indeed get you applications. Fern does what happens next — actually reading them. When you post a job through SEEK or similar, applicants are directed to a form that Fern can see and get to work on.
No. Fern reads applications. You make the hire. We score the candidates who match your requirements, explain why each one was scored the way they were, and flag anything missing. You can still see every single applicant, even if they scored low. You still interview, you still choose.
We score on what your role actually needs — not formatting or polish. A barista with three years of weekends and a current Food Safety Certificate beats a perfectly-formatted CV with neither. You can filter applicants by any requirement or need, not just by overall score.
Yes. Applications are processed for your role only, never sold, never used to train external models. Candidates can request deletion at any time.
You're never under any obligation. If you don't think any of the applicants are a good fit, you can simply not take it further — there's nothing to lose.
No. You write the role in plain English — the way you'd describe it to a friend. Fern reads it the same way. There are no prompts, no models to pick, no settings to configure.
