A French business specializing in Work-Study Programs, known in France as Alternance, contacted developers to digitalize their recruitment workflow. Alternance helps students gain a degree, work experience, and receive a salary, aiding young people in entering the workforce. Initially, the company managed everything manually, leading to inefficiencies. To address this, a custom recruitment pipeline was built using Odoo Community.

However, the bottleneck of manual data entry for CVs remained a significant issue. The solution involved automating the process with AI, which evolved through iterations. The first iteration used Tesseract for OCR and ChatGPT for AI parsing, but faced technical and cost challenges.

Transitioning to LlamaParse improved accuracy, but ChatGPT costs were still high. The final iteration migrated to DeepSeek for cost efficiency, but non-compliance with GDPR led to another change. The winning setup was Google Gemini, which offered compliance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

This journey demonstrates the iterative nature of software development and the importance of balancing performance, cost, and legal compliance in AI-driven solutions. This news matters to recruitment agencies and businesses relying on Odoo for their operations, highlighting the importance of GDPR compliance and the evolution of AI tools in automating processes.