Cost of Screening Resumes with an LLM at Scale
Each resume is a few thousand tokens in and a short score and rationale out, so cost scales linearly with applicant volume.
Typical monthly workload
- Input tokens
- 15,000,000
- Output tokens
- 1,500,000
- Requests / day
- 2,500
Illustrative estimate. Adjust the sliders below to match your own volume.
Recommended setup
Extract structured fields with a small model, then compare against the job rubric. Keep a human in the loop for final decisions.
Monthly cost by model for this workload
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 1.5 Flash | $0.075 | $0.30 | $1.57 |
| Gemini 2.0 Flash | $0.100 | $0.40 | $2.10 |
| DeepSeek V3 | $0.140 | $0.28 | $2.52 |
| GPT-4o Mini | $0.150 | $0.60 | $3.15 |
| Qwen 2.5 72B | $0.350 | $0.40 | $5.85 |
| Llama 3.3 70B (Groq/Together) | $0.590 | $0.79 | $10.04 |
| DeepSeek R1 (Reasoning) | $0.550 | $2.19 | $11.54 |
| Claude 3.5 Haiku | $0.800 | $4.00 | $18.00 |
| o3-mini (Reasoning) | $1.100 | $4.40 | $23.10 |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $1.250 | $5.00 | $26.25 |
| Mistral Large 2 | $2.000 | $6.00 | $39.00 |
| Grok 2 | $2.000 | $10.00 | $45.00 |
| GPT-4o (Omni) | $2.500 | $10.00 | $52.50 |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | $3.000 | $15.00 | $67.50 |
| o1 (Reasoning) | $15.000 | $60.00 | $315.00 |
Computed from list prices and the workload above (15,000,000 input and 1,500,000 output tokens per month), with no caching or batch discounts. Real bills vary.
How to cut this cost
- Parse once, score many
Convert each resume to compact JSON once, then reuse it across multiple openings instead of reprocessing the raw file.
- Audit for bias
Screen on skills and evidence, not names or demographics, and review model decisions regularly.
Simulate your own spend
Quick Workload Presets
Pick a scenario or fine-tune token parameters and cloud host below.
Token & Usage ParametersLLM API
Switching from GPT-4o ($195.00/mo) to Gemini 1.5 Flash ($5.85/mo) saves 97%.
Lowest cost per token, high-frequency tasks, real-time audio/video
State-of-the-art open economics, high-performance general intelligence
Real-time conversational streaming, vision, multimodal processing at speed
High-volume text processing, fast chatbots, structured JSON extraction
Top open-weights coding, math, and multilingual benchmark performance
Open-weights privacy, self-hosting or ultra-cheap hosted inferencing
Complex math, algorithmic reasoning, open deep-thinking workflows
Rapid code completion, customer service, fast structured parsing
Cost-effective scientific & coding reasoning, high-accuracy logic
Massive context (2M tokens), full video/audio analysis, large codebases
Multilingual tasks, European compliance, enterprise code generation
Real-time information synthesis, creative generation, vision analysis
Complex multimodal reasoning, coding, and production enterprise apps
Software engineering, nuanced writing, complex agentic tool use
Advanced mathematics, algorithmic coding, PhD-level scientific logic
Frequently asked questions
Is automated resume screening risky?
It can be. Hiring tools may be regulated in some jurisdictions and can encode bias, so keep human review and check local rules before relying on scores.