6 ways to automate the inefficiency out of recruiting

Recruiter effectiveness has never been a question of skill or capability. For years, they’ve deftly navigated the ever-evolving talent landscape to find and engage top candidates. But legacy tech that made their jobs easier in the past is now presenting roadblocks to success — and that feedback is coming straight from recruiters.

According to UNLEASH’s exclusive report, which highlights data from Findem’s joint research with Recruiter.com, ineffective use of tech is the biggest challenge for recruiters in 2025. They’re particularly frustrated with the tools that have bloated the talent tech stack, leading to higher costs, lower ROI, and burnout that’s reached record levels.

While a recruiter’s core job responsibilities haven’t changed tremendously over the years — they’re still reviewing resumes, reaching out to candidates, and aligning with hiring managers — the ways in which they work have. Trying to consolidate data, build dashboards, and pull insights from a dozen different point solutions is a recipe for complexity. 

Recruiters need a tech stack that works for them, consolidating sourcing, outreach, and insights into one system that’s integrated with the tools they love while automating the manual, repeatable tasks that slow their progress. Keep reading for six areas where recruiting automation can ease some of the frustration and bring out the best that recruiters have to offer.

Consolidate your sourcing channels in one place

When a new requisition opens, recruiters normally open four or five tabs to search for qualified candidates. Between external sourcing channels, the ATS, and a flood of inbound applications, they spend precious time sifting through disparate systems to try, often unsuccessfully, and pluck out the best matches.

With AI-driven tools like Findem’s Copilot for Sourcing, recruiters can open one tab and simultaneously search all their sourcing channels at once, with the best-matched candidates automatically surfaced in a singular view. Copilot integrates with applicant tracking systems to generate specific search criteria from job descriptions, sourcing only those candidates, no matter the channel, who fit the requirements. 

Automatically engage with all of your talent pools

Unlike resumes, which are static and often out-of-date, candidates themselves are always changing. Their skills and experiences are fluid, making it difficult for traditional outreach to keep up with their evolving narratives. If recruiters send messages to candidates that aren’t timely or include the wrong information, it could harm the relationship and lead to the end of a potential hire’s journey with a company.

Automation, like that in Findem’s Talent CRM, makes it possible to streamline outreach by sending personalized messages, scheduling follow-ups, and managing campaigns for hundreds of candidates. KIPP Northern California replaced its cold outreach platform with Findem and improved both brand recognition and response rates, all while reducing sourcing time from weeks to just 10 minutes.

Quickly sort through your inbound applications

Three out of four talent professionals experienced an increase in applications per open job last year, and that surge of interest is only getting tougher to manage. Recruiters are expected to keep up with the demand, often wasting time sorting through the influx to qualify applications from unqualified candidates.

Findem’s Inbound Management solution makes it possible to instantly identify high quality, inbound candidates and process qualified talent for future opportunities, speeding time to hire and reducing the manual workload on recruiters. It automatically filters through thousands of inbound applications at once, highlighting only those that meet the required qualifications.

Keep candidate data up-to-date, without the data entry

Resumes and candidate information are out of date as soon as they hit the ATS or CRM. Manually updating information about an applicant or potential hire is time-consuming on its own, but especially when a recruiter must do so across tools and systems. This challenge introduces the potential that data is entered incorrectly or repeated across databases.

Findem’s Talent Data Cloud is built on a foundation of trusted 3D data that saves recruiters hours of verification time. It’s constantly updated and verified from more than 100,000 data sources, ensuring candidate profiles in the ATS and your CRM are kept up-to-date without manual intervention.

Search your ATS for qualified candidates

Beyond just being kept fresh, recruiters need their ATS to be searchable. Most ATS platforms aren’t designed to be searched, but rather, to be storage repositories for past applicant information. Without the ability to search, how can recruiters ever get the most out of an oft-ignored talent pool?

With Findem’s 3D data and comprehensive ATS integrations, recruiters can search for past applicants with the confidence that the data is up-to-date. That way, they can automatically surface qualified candidates who may have been previously overlooked or mismatched for open positions.

Surface insights to elevate recruiting’s impact

Tracking and analyzing recruitment metrics manually is a time suck — and it slows down the kind of insights that actually help teams improve. With automated analytics, talent teams get instant access to real-time data on what’s working (and what’s not), from time-to-fill to which channels are delivering the best candidates.

With this data, teams can spot bottlenecks faster, fine-tune their strategies, and make smarter decisions — all without drowning in spreadsheets. Findem’s Sourcing Analytics Essentials makes this easy with pre-built dashboards that put key metrics front and center. One high-growth software company used these dashboards to drive faster adoption and boost recruiter engagement by 30 percentage points in under a year.

Start automating the inefficiency out of recruiting today

Recruiters have the skills, instincts, and resilience to thrive in any hiring market — but outdated processes and fragmented tech are holding them back. The very tools that were supposed to make recruiting easier have created unnecessary complexity, adding manual work instead of reducing it.

Automation flips that script. By streamlining sourcing, outreach, data management, and more, recruiting automation helps talent teams focus on what they do best: building relationships, telling compelling employer stories, and making the hires that move the businesses forward.

With automation integrated into every step of the talent acquisition process— from sourcing to engagement to uncovering insights — Findem’s platform is built to cut out inefficiency and give recruiters their time (and sanity) back.

See what’s possible with a platform that works the way recruiters do. Request a demo and discover how Findem can simplify your tech stack, streamline your processes, and help your team find and hire top talent faster.