§ The result
Stepstone leads impress.ai on 5 of the 7 criteria.
Rubric v1.0 scores the Screening entries Stepstone and impress.ai at 49 and 38, a gap of 11 points. Stepstone leads 5 of the 7 criteria and the remaining 2 are level, so impress.ai is ahead on none of them; the closest of the 5 Stepstone leads is FRIA Support, impress.ai 25 to Stepstone 30. One criterion, Bias Audit Transparency, is both the widest raw gap (impress.ai 22, Stepstone 50) and the heaviest weighted swing, and at 18% weight it makes up 45% of the weighted advantage Stepstone holds across the 5 criteria it leads.
Vendor profile
impress.ai
impress.ai is a Singapore-headquartered recruitment automation platform that uses conversational AI assistants, resume parsing and scoring, and structured competency-based screening to filter, rank and shortlist job candidates, integrating with enterprise ATS systems.
Vendor profile
Stepstone
Stepstone is a German job marketplace whose Stepstone Recruit employer platform includes an AI Screening Agent, which rates each application against requirements taken from the job ad, and a Talent Finder, which recommends candidates from a CV database of more than 4 million profiles.
§ The record
impress.ai and Stepstone are both filed under Screening AI. They record no secondary category in common.
Both are in scope of EU AI Act, NYC LL 144, Illinois HB 3773 and Colorado AI Act. Only impress.ai is in scope of Mobley v. Workday.
| Record | impress.ai | Stepstone |
|---|---|---|
| Price tier | High | Mid |
| Headquarters | SG | DE |
| Founded | 2017 | 1996 |
§ What decides it
The criteria that move the gap, heaviest swing first.
18% weight · 45% of the movement so far
Bias Audit Transparency
impress.ai 22 · Stepstone 50
5.0 weighted points to Stepstone
20% weight · 80% of the movement so far
Article 11 Technical Documentation
impress.ai 35 · Stepstone 55
4.0 weighted points to Stepstone
15% weight · 87% of the movement so far
FRIA Support
impress.ai 25 · Stepstone 30
0.8 weighted points to Stepstone
12% weight · 94% of the movement so far
Human Oversight Design
impress.ai 52 · Stepstone 58
0.7 weighted points to Stepstone
12% weight · 100% of the movement so far
Post-Market Monitoring
impress.ai 32 · Stepstone 38
0.7 weighted points to Stepstone
Weighted delta is the raw difference times the criterion weight, so the 5 figures above sum to -11.2 — the difference between the two totals before either is rounded. Shares are of 11.2 points of movement counted without direction. The table below rounds each side to a whole number first, so its Δ raw total reads -11 beside that -11.2.
§ Category-by-category
Raw score per criterion, with weighted delta.
Δ is impress.ai minus Stepstone.
| Category | Weight | impress.ai | Stepstone | Δ raw | Δ weighted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Article 11 Technical Documentation | 20% | 35 | 55 | -20 | -4.0 |
| Bias Audit Transparency | 18% | 22 | 50 | -28 | -5.0 |
| FRIA Support | 15% | 25 | 30 | -5 | -0.8 |
| Data Governance Disclosure | 15% | 55 | 55 | - | - |
| Human Oversight Design | 12% | 52 | 58 | -6 | -0.7 |
| Post-Market Monitoring | 12% | 32 | 38 | -6 | -0.7 |
| Customer Documentation | 8% | 58 | 58 | - | - |
| Total | 100% | 38 (F) | 49 (F) | -11 | -11.2 |
§ Evidence
Cited sources and documented absences, criterion by criterion.
An absence is a finding, not a blank: the reviewer looked for a named artefact and recorded that it is not located. Where a source sits is a fact about hosting only.
| Criterion | Weight | impress.ai | Stepstone | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cited | Absences | Audit / hosting | Cited | Absences | Audit / hosting | ||
| Article 11 Technical Documentation | 20% | 2 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 5 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domainSources on a separate domain |
| Bias Audit Transparency | 18% | 2 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 3 | 1 | Audit reportSources on a separate domain |
| FRIA Support | 15% | 2 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 2 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain |
| Data Governance Disclosure | 15% | 2 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 6 | 0 | Sources on the vendor's own domainSources on a separate domain |
| Human Oversight Design | 12% | 3 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 5 | 0 | Sources on the vendor's own domain |
| Post-Market Monitoring | 12% | 3 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 3 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domainSources on a separate domain |
| Customer Documentation | 8% | 4 | 1 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 5 | 0 | Sources on the vendor's own domain |
| All criteria | 100% | 18 | 7 | Sources on the vendor's own domain | 29 | 4 | Audit reportSources on the vendor's own domainSources on a separate domain |
impress.ai has 25 evidence rows across 7 of 7 criteria — 18 with a source URL, 7 documented absences; Stepstone has 33 evidence rows across 7 of 7 criteria — 29 with a source URL, 4 documented absences; some documentation or audit rows for Stepstone sit on a domain separate from the vendor's own site.
Provenance
The scores above are documented by 58 evidence rows on file for these two vendors: 25 for impress.ai, across 1 distinct source domain, and 33 for Stepstone, across 6 distinct source domains.
- Rubric
- v1.0
- impress.ai last reviewed
- August 2, 2026 · HireAIScore editorial team
- Stepstone last reviewed
- September 25, 2026 · HireAIScore editorial team
HireAIScore scores are editorial research, not legal advice, and no vendor pays for placement, scoring or removal — see the methodology, conflicts policy and terms.
§ Where next