HPC-Driven Human Resources Innovation for the Western Balkans
Organisations Involved
Recrewty d.o.o. is a Montenegrin SME, which developed an AI-powered HR platform for recruitment and candidate assessment, serving SMEs and enterprise clients across South-East Europe.
DigitalSmart d.o.o. is a specialist in high-performance computing, AI infrastructure and advanced communication systems.
The Challenge
Recruitment teams across South-East Europe face a structural bottleneck: HR receives hundreds or thousands of applications per opening but must shortlist them to a handful of interviews through manual screening. Reviewing CVs and comparing candidates is slow, inconsistent, and impossible to scale during hiring peaks. For SMEs without dedicated talent-acquisition teams, this means delayed hiring and real opportunity cost.
The core task is retrieval and comparison — parsing CVs, searching candidate databases, and ranking profiles against new openings. Generative AI is the wrong tool here, as it tends to invent details when working with structured records. The better-suited "encoder" models come with two limitations: existing ones are trained mainly on English, and they struggle with the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian (BCMS) languages — driving up computing costs while degrading accuracy. Compliance with the EU AI Act, which classifies certain workplace AI uses as high-risk, further rules out generic foreign solutions.
Recrewty saw the opportunity: a solution built specifically for regional SMEs — an encoder trained on real recruitment data in BCMS languages. Delivering it, however, requires high-performance computing (HPC) for both training and operation. This is what makes the performance and pricing viable for Western Balkan SMEs, cutting the cost of a candidate search from roughly €90 to €0.05 per query.
The Solution
The consortium built an integrated AI and HPC platform covering CV analysis, chat-based candidate interviews, psychometric assessment, and audio interview processing in one recruitment workflow. The psychometric step pairs the standard "Big Five" personality test with Recrewty's proprietary cultural-fit assessment "4C".
At the core is a custom language-understanding AI model purpose-built for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, trained on Italy's Leonardo supercomputer and scaling from 32 to 64 high-end A100 GPUs. It is the longest-reading text model available for the region, able to process a full CV or interview transcript in one pass.
The pipeline runs on-premises and covers PDF and scanned CV ingestion, document analysis and refinement, interview transcription, and structured outputs into the Recrewty platform. The system was validated in live client HR operations.
Business Impacts
For Recrewty, the experiment delivers more than a better recruitment product. It places in the SME's hands a strategic asset that did not previously exist in the Western Balkans: the first modern architecture encoder model purpose-built for the region's languages. The asset is not limited to recruiting. The same underlying model can power applications in media monitoring, banking and compliance, legal review, customer-service automation, and public-sector digitalisation, opening commercial pathways well beyond HR.
Recrewty has a high expectation for a significant number of new customers because of the high level of publicity already seen. Leading news outlets and regional technology portals have featured both the new solution “ModernBERTic” and the associated benchmark “BalkanBench” and have emphasized the projet outcomes as the region’s own AI infrastructure, independent of foreign AI tools. For client SMEs, the broader impact is structural: faster, more consistent hiring decisions through a locally trained tool aligned with EU AI Act requirements for human oversight in high-risk workplace AI.
Business Benefits
• 85% reduction in screening workload in a live case, narrowing 1,318 applicants to 3 final interviews and saving 55.7 hours.
• Cost per candidate-database search reduced from roughly €90 on commercial LLM services to €0.05 on the project's own model, a 1,800x reduction enabling SME-scale deployment.
• Faster, more consistent hiring for SME clients, with full human authority over final selection preserved.
• The first modern AI language model purpose-built for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian becomes a reusable asset for media monitoring, banking, compliance, legal review, and public-sector digitalization.
• New commercial pathways for Recrewty through licensing and vertical adaptations of a regionally unique AI asset.