How to Set Up Cortex Automation Rules (Beginner Guide)

Cortex is the part of HiredAI that does the work you’d otherwise do manually — reviewing every new applicant, deciding who to advance, sending the right follow-up, and sourcing more candidates when the pipeline thins out. Instead of doing those things one application at a time, you write rules once and Cortex applies them to every candidate who comes through.

This guide walks you through setting up your first rule from scratch. Expect to spend about 15 minutes on it. By the end, you’ll have one live rule doing real work, and you’ll understand the pattern well enough to build the rest yourself.

Before you start

You’ll need two things in place before Cortex has anything to act on:

An active job posting. Cortex rules run on applicants, so you need a live job with traffic. If you haven’t posted one yet, post a job first and come back once you’ve had a handful of applications come in. Rules built against an empty pipeline are hard to test.

A clear idea of one decision you make repeatedly. The best first rule automates something you’re already doing by hand. Open your last week of applicant reviews and look for the pattern. Maybe you auto-reject anyone without work authorization. Maybe you fast-track candidates with a specific certification. Maybe you tag everyone from a competitor as “high priority.” Whatever you do five times a day without thinking — that’s your first rule.

Don’t try to automate your entire workflow on day one. One rule, one decision, then expand.

How Cortex rules actually work

Every rule has three parts: a trigger, one or more conditions, and one or more actions.

The trigger is the event that wakes the rule up. The most common one is “a new application is submitted,” but Cortex can also trigger on things like a candidate replying to outreach, a hiring manager leaving a review, or a candidate sitting in a stage for too long.

The conditions are the if-statements. They check facts about the candidate — years of experience, skills extracted from the resume, answers to screening questions, location, source, anything else captured during application. You can chain conditions with AND/OR logic.

The actions are what happens when the conditions match. Cortex can move the candidate to a stage, send them an email, tag them, assign them to a recruiter, schedule a follow-up, or kick off automated outreach to similar candidates.

Once you internalize trigger → conditions → actions, every rule you’ll ever build is just a variation on that pattern.

Step 1: Open the Cortex rule builder

Head to Cortex from your dashboard. The landing view shows any existing rules — if this is your first time, it’ll be empty.

Click New Rule in the top right. You’ll land in the rule builder.

Note: If you don’t see Cortex in your sidebar, your account may be on a plan that doesn’t include it yet. Check your plan and access — or reach out to support and they’ll get you set up.

Step 2: Pick a trigger

The trigger dropdown is the first field. For your first rule, choose “New application submitted.” This fires every time someone completes an application on any of your jobs.

You can scope the trigger to specific jobs using the filter underneath. If you only want this rule to run on, say, your Senior Engineer req, select that job from the list. Leave it blank to apply across all jobs.

A few common trigger choices and when to use them:

• New application submitted — applicant triage, the most common starting rule
• Candidate replies to outreach — automated follow-up when sourcing
• Candidate inactive in stage for X days — nudges, reminders, or auto-rejections
• Hiring manager rating submitted — moving candidates to next stage based on scores

For this walkthrough, stick with New application submitted.

Step 3: Build your conditions

This is where most people overthink things. Start with one condition. You can always add more later.

Click Add Condition. You’ll see a field selector listing every attribute Cortex knows about a candidate — resume-extracted fields like years of experience and skills, screening question answers, application source, location, and more.

A solid first condition: Years of Experience > 5. It’s specific, it’s testable, and it maps to a decision most recruiters make manually a hundred times a week.

If you want to combine conditions, click Add Condition again and choose AND or OR:

• AND means all conditions must be true. Use this when you’re narrowing down (experienced AND in-region AND has the right certification).
• OR means any one condition is enough. Use this when you’re casting wider (graduated from one of these five schools OR worked at one of these three companies).

A useful rule of thumb: if you find yourself stacking more than four conditions, you probably want two separate rules instead of one tangled one. Cortex rules are easier to debug when they do one thing each.

Step 4: Choose your actions

Now the payoff. Click Add Action and pick what should happen when the conditions are met.

For a first rule, I’d recommend one of these three action patterns:

The triage tag. Action: Add tag “Priority”. This is the lowest-risk first rule — you’re not auto-rejecting anyone, you’re just flagging the strong applications so you can review them first. Great for getting comfortable with the system before automating anything destructive.

The fast-track. Actions: Move to stage “Phone Screen” + Send email “Phone screen invite” + Assign to recruiter [your name]. This automates the entire path for clearly qualified candidates. Use it once you trust your conditions.

The auto-source extension. Action: Trigger sourcing campaign with a candidate profile that matches the applicant. This is the powerful one — when a great candidate applies, Cortex uses their profile as a template to go find more like them via HiredGPT’s 850M-candidate index. You stop relying on inbound alone for your best roles.

You can stack multiple actions on one rule. A common combo: tag + move stage + send email + notify recruiter. Cortex executes them in order, top to bottom.

Step 5: Test before you turn it on

This is the step everyone wants to skip. Don’t.

Above the Save button there’s a Test Rule option. Click it. Cortex will run your rule against the last 30 days of applicants on the selected job(s) in dry-run mode — no actions actually fire, but you see exactly which candidates would have been affected and what would have happened to each.

Read the test results carefully. The most common surprise: a condition you thought was strict is actually catching candidates you didn’t mean to catch (or vice versa). For example, “Years of Experience > 5” will catch candidates whose resumes Cortex parsed inaccurately — someone with 4.5 years rounded up, or someone whose resume put years in an unusual format. The test view shows you these edge cases before they become real decisions.

If the test shows the rule doing what you want, save it and toggle it to Active. If not, go back and tighten the conditions.

Step 6: Watch it run for a week

After you activate the rule, leave it alone for about a week and let real applicants flow through. Then come back to the Cortex rule view and check the Activity tab on your rule. It shows every candidate the rule touched, what conditions matched, and what actions fired.

The first week is diagnostic. You’re looking for two things:

1. False positives — candidates the rule acted on that you wouldn’t have acted on manually. These mean your conditions are too loose.
2. False negatives — candidates you reviewed manually that the rule should have caught but didn’t. These mean your conditions are too tight, or you’re missing a condition entirely.

Adjust, re-test, reactivate. Two or three iterations and the rule will be tuned.

What to build next

Once your first rule is running cleanly, build out from there. A reasonable progression for a new Cortex user:

Week 1: One triage tagging rule. Week 2: Add a rejection rule for clear non-matches (wrong location, no work authorization, missing must-have certification). Pair it with a polite auto-reject email so candidates aren’t left hanging. Week 3: Add a fast-track rule for your strongest matches — move to phone screen, send an invite, notify the recruiter. Week 4: Add an inactivity rule that nudges or auto-rejects candidates who’ve been sitting in a stage too long. Month 2: Start using sourcing-trigger actions to extend your pipeline automatically when good candidates apply.

By month two, Cortex should be handling the first-pass review on every applicant, and you should be spending your time on the candidates worth real attention.

Common mistakes to avoid

A few things that trip up new users:

Building rules before you have data. Cortex rules need real applicants to act on, and you need real history to tune against. Don’t build five rules on day one — you’ll be guessing. Build one, watch it, then build the next.

Auto-rejecting too aggressively at first. Auto-reject rules are the most powerful and the most dangerous. A rule that rejects everyone without “5+ years experience” will reject the 4.5-year candidate with the perfect resume. Start with tagging, not rejecting. Move to auto-reject only after you’ve watched the rule run in tag-only mode for a week.

Forgetting that resume parsing isn’t perfect. Cortex extracts what it can from resumes, but every parser has edge cases — unusual formats, scanned PDFs, non-standard date conventions. Your conditions need to tolerate that. When in doubt, use the test mode to spot-check.

Not coordinating with hiring managers. If Cortex auto-advances candidates to phone screen, your recruiters need to know it’s happening, and your hiring managers need to know why some candidates are showing up in their queue with notes already attached. Loop them in before activating high-impact rules.

Where to go from here

If you’ve got your first rule live and running, you’re 80% of the way to a Cortex setup that pays for itself. The remaining work is mostly iteration — watching the activity logs, tightening conditions, adding new rules as new patterns emerge.

If you want to see Cortex working alongside the rest of the platform, open your dashboard and check how many of yesterday’s applicants got touched by automation versus how many are still sitting untriaged. That number is the one to watch.

Need a hand setting up your first rule? Our getting-started guide for recruiters walks through the full onboarding flow, and support can pair with you on a live rule if you’re stuck.