What Is Recruiting Automation?

Recruiting automation is the use of technology to establish automatic workflows for what would normally be manual recruiting or HR activities. Recruiting automation can streamline candidate sourcing, outreach, interview scheduling, and skill assessments, which consume a significant portion of recruiters’ time.

As the global market becomes more competitive, it’s getting harder and harder for talent teams to attract and engage top candidates. It’s not enough to post jobs and pray for qualified applications to roll in; though inbound management is a top-of-mind challenge for leaders today.

With cutting-edge tools becoming more commonplace in the talent tech stack, AI and automation offer an enticing solution to the dilemma talent teams face today. That is, how can they spend less time on the repetitive, tedious tasks of recruiting and instead focus on those that provide value — engaging with candidates, collaborating with hiring managers, and becoming strategic partners for the rest of the business?

In this article, we’ll delve into recruiting automation, discuss its benefits, look to the future of AI recruiting, and help you identify clues that your organization needs automation to level up.

The basics of recruiting automation

Recruiting automation is a subset of hyperautomation. Hyperautomation is a framework that uses advanced technologies such as AI, ML, and robotic process automation (RPA) for scaling automation. In the context of recruitment, the goal of hyperautomation is to automate and optimize as much of the workflow as possible to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and the experience of finding, hiring, and onboarding employees.

By automating repetitive tasks, recruiters can focus on attracting, engaging, and nurturing candidates who are a great fit for the company and role. Typically, recruiting automation falls under the software-as-a-service (SaaS) category, supporting HR operations by saving time and boosting productivity.

Increasingly, recruiting automation includes AI-powered tools that automate manual tasks like writing job descriptions, sourcing candidates, pre-screening candidates, scheduling interviews, and more. 

Results from our recent report, Generative AI, Data, and the Future of Talent, found that two-thirds of respondents said the AI-enabled tools they are using have helped with efficiency by improving sourcing (65%), expanding their team’s reach without adding to it (65%), and speeding up the hiring process (62%). 

While AI had long been powering sophisticated technology around us, ChatGPT’s debut and the widespread adoption of generative AI (GenAI) in the past few years have catapulted the world into a new era of AI’s functional use. Heralding emerging technologies as the next great workplace disrupter is nothing new, but experts and execs alike agree — AI, especially GenAI, is poised to revolutionize the world and workplace. A recent report by Korn Ferry found that 82% of CEOs and senior leaders said they expect AI to have a significant or even extreme impact on their business. 

AI recruiting and automation are particularly helpful for companies that need to quickly scale their team or have limited resources. They also offer a powerful competitive edge — recruiters can start moving pre-vetted candidates through the hiring cycle before less nimble companies can act. 

Even better, with AI recruiting, talent teams take on a more strategic role, leading to enhanced employee engagement and better recruiter retention. And when used correctly, AI can even help combat bias in the recruiting process by sourcing non-traditional candidates and reducing human biases. 

Why recruiting automation, and why now?

First-rate talent is hard to find, and it’s only getting harder. Economic shifts, a widening skills gap, and the need for similar roles across enterprises and small businesses alike have made recruiting extremely competitive. This challenge leaves recruiters stressed-out and unsatisfied, leading to a high turnover in the HR industry itself, while hiring needs have surged. When you don’t have the recruiting talent to hire other employees for your company, the odds of you finding excellent talent diminish even further.

Our latest report, The Future of Talent Acquisition and Recruitment 2025, breaks down the top priorities for using tech in the talent acquisition process — including AI and recruiting automation.

Sifting through hundreds of resumes and online profiles, ensuring the right fit through phone screenings or assessments, and making informed hiring decisions take time and attention that recruiters simply don’t have. By leveraging AI recruiting and recruiting automation, talent teams can identify and contact the highest quality talent faster.

Benefits of recruiting automation

Recruiting automation can clearly make recruiters’ lives easier. But what are some other tangible benefits? Here are just a few advantages of incorporating recruiting automation into your talent acquisition strategy:

Faster candidate sourcing

‍Rather than wading through LinkedIn for acceptable candidates, recruiting automation does the scouring and hands you lists of pre-qualified, shortlisted candidates based on the skills and experiences you’re looking for. Using AI-driven, attribute-based talent sourcing, you can narrow your search with distinctions like “builds diverse teams,” “seen a successful exit,” “fast career growth,” “startup experience,” or “past founder” — a capability unique to Findem, thanks to our 3D data and enriched profiles. 

More data-driven decision making

‍Recruiting automation indexes a lot of data on your potential workforce: their skills, expertise, previous work history, aptitude tests, and more for a more holistic understanding of candidates’ strengths, weaknesses, career journey, and impact. This information helps build your people intelligence, enabling you to spot talent gaps and identify opportunities for growth as you build a talent roadmap.

Increased visibility with analytics

Recruiting automation consolidates the tools in your tech stack and pulls together data to give a complete, at-a-glance view of the entire talent funnel. This helps you to uncover inefficiencies in your recruiting process and see what’s working and what’s not across different recruiting channels (or even by recruiter or recruitment team).

Decreased time to hire

Automating mundane recruiting work can save recruiters hours of time every week. Bringing the best candidates to light, auto-scheduling interviews, and conducting skills tests speed up the front-end of the hiring process, so your organization can get job offers into the right hands the first time and fill job openings faster.

Rapid scaling made possible

Manually emailing and messaging hundreds of potential candidates per day is impossible. That’s where recruiting automation shines, allowing recruiters to send personalized messages to as many people as needed to meet hiring goals — be it 50 or 5,000 candidates per day.

Reduced costs and greater efficiency

Outsourcing to recruiting agencies may seem like a good idea at first, but it can backfire. Third-party firms are neither familiar with your company culture nor necessarily skilled at converting candidates to hires. Plus, outside agencies aren’t cheap. But recruiting automation can free up at least a day of each recruiter’s week and reduce time-to-fill by 80%.

Reallocation of resources

Recruiters have a lot on their plates. They’re constantly reading applications, scheduling meetings, building engagement across job-related platforms, updating talent software, researching and nurturing the candidate pipeline, writing job descriptions, and more. Automating these duties empowers recruiters to spend more time on high-value work, like interacting with qualified candidates, focusing on the hiring experience, and building the company brand.

Combat hiring bias

Diversity hiring is a concern for many companies, but, unfortunately, bias is inherent to manual recruiting processes. It’s tough to reduce bias when there is human interaction at every step of the recruiting cycle. However, recruiting automation can anonymize profiles, build a more diverse applicant pool, and alert recruiters to unconscious beliefs to limit bias as much as possible.

Recruiting automation, AI, and data at work

AI falls under the greater umbrella of recruiting automation but remains distinct. Whereas recruiting automation can include anything that automates manual tasks into new, streamlined workflows, AI recruiting brings a machine learning element to the conversation. 

AI won’t (and shouldn’t) alter how decisions are made, but rather improve the information being used to make decisions. For example, AI won’t be used to interview candidates, but it can be used to ensure the best candidate is being interviewed. 

AI can perceive information, learn, and solve problems by extracting insights from massive quantities of data, while traditional recruiting automation cannot. But AI is only as good as the data it’s built on, and without clean, unbiased, and context-specific data, AI is liable to replicate biases, provide failable info, or else get recruiting wrong.

Findem’s responsible approach to AI generates a holistic snapshot of a candidate thanks to 3D data. Rather than simply pulling data from job search platforms or resumes, Findem powers its AI with 3D data from across the web to provide an accessible and accurate snapshot of a candidate’s entire career. 

In the last few years, GenAI has become a focal point of the recruiting scene. GenAI, which can create text, images, code, and other types of content, is already being used by top platforms for talent teams, like Findem and LinkedIn Recruiter. When people speak about AI in recruitment today, they usually mean using generative AI activities such as talent sourcing, candidate matching, creating job descriptions, candidate outreach and engagement, more inclusive communications, and employer marketing content.

AI recruiting automation benefits are great in theory, but what about in practice?

Surge the volume of quality candidates in half the time

Recruiting more high-quality candidates is challenging. Recruiters can use up most of their day hunting for talent on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed, and other external sourcing platforms, searching for personal email addresses, and tailoring messages to each person. Not only does all of this manual work leave recruiters with little time for anything else, but most of the candidates that recruiters source don’t end up being worth even a phone screen. 

Recruiting automation enables recruiters to develop ideal candidate profiles to pinpoint people who have the right industry expertise and skills to be worth everyone’s time.

With Findem’s Copilot for Sourcing, recruiters can turn posted jobs into search criteria automatically and curate a talent pool of high-quality, diverse candidates in a single click — no prompts required.

Shorten time-to-fill

Automation can speed up recruitment time. Laura Lazewski at Marathon Health streamlined email templates, resulting in significant time savings for her team. Today, she only needs 10 minutes to go from a search to a sourced candidate, and can turn a candidate into a hire in just one week with automated outreach campaigns. 

Still, many recruiters continue to manually copy and paste Boolean search strings into individual search engines without much top-tier talent in return. Whatever talent does surface is usually added to yet another spreadsheet and finally loaded into an ATS. 

Sometimes recruiters have to do further sleuthing at this point to find email addresses. Despite being entirely inefficient, this process is all too common. Recruiting automation solutions draw from the broadest range of public information and deliver a multi-dimensional collection of candidates near-instantly.

Cut recruiting costs

Ultimately, a shorter recruitment time equals a lower cost to recruit, even for hard-to-fill roles in tech or other STEM fields. Rather than hiring costly technical recruitment firms, automation tools can quickly sift through online profiles, patents, publications, company information, and more to find experienced candidates. 

The team at Eikon Therapeutics reduced its total tech spend by 25% when they made the switch to Findem, and are realizing the benefits of recruiting automation. “Findem is accelerating the process to produce a job profile, match candidates to the profile, email them, and put hiring managers in conversation with qualified candidates within a week,” said Grant Weinberg, VP of Talent Acquisition & HR Operations.

Attribute-based filtering can refine these searches even further, leaving you with only the most qualified people to contact. Then, recruiters can simply shortlist their favorites, add them to a personalized drip campaign, and resume other tasks while recruiting automation continues to work. Recruiting automation platforms consolidate tools and workflows, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing costs.

Is recruiting automation right for your tech stack?

Virtually every organization can benefit from recruiting automation, but there are some obvious signs your team is in dire need of support. 

• Overwhelmed recruiters: Recruiters gain energy from talking to other people, not from updating spreadsheets or sending dozens of emails. Without the help of automation, you risk your recruiters burning out — potentially losing some of your most essential employees.

• Long recruiting cycles or unfilled roles: Lengthy recruiting cycles or roles sitting unfilled for long stretches of time suggest a need for recruiting automation. As recruiters struggle to keep up with each candidate in the pipeline, they miss out on reaching other excellent candidates who get snatched up by other companies. 

• Limited recruiting time or budget: Although hiring outside agencies may help speed up the recruiting process, it also significantly increases your cost to hire. Recruiting automation can cut down on your cycle time.

• Scattered metrics: When recruiting metrics are dispersed across multiple tools, it affects recruiting efficiency and even the ability to find quality candidates. Recruiting automation tools optimize your recruiting metrics by centralizing them in a single hub, giving you better insights into process improvements and into your potential candidates.

• Tech stack inefficiencies: Having too many manual solutions involved in generating leads, finding candidates’ email addresses, scheduling interviews, conducting assessments, and so on segments the data. This leads to a plethora of inefficiencies in your recruitment processes, costing you time and potentially ideal candidates. 

Implement recruiting automation today

Recruiting automation software relies on AI to sift through various talent pools, schedule interviews, and much more along the way. Overall, recruiting automation is a helpful way to detect top-notch candidates, lower costs, and expedite recruitment time. Perhaps most importantly, it gives companies a competitive edge to identify and approach ideal candidates who are still early in their job search. It’s important to find a high-quality recruiting automation solution to meet your needs.

Findem’s platform provides a comprehensive view of global talent by sifting through all publicly available data (plus any internal data or systems you choose to connect, such as ATS). By enriching your typical searches with 3D data, Findem enhances your talent pool, saving time and money.

Findem puts a heavy emphasis on data-driven decisions, empowering your talent team to integrate data from other HR tools to create a 360-degree view of people inside and outside your organization. It helps you understand what makes your top talent successful, reveal areas for process improvement, and benchmark against business goals.

To learn more, download our latest report on the future of talent acquisition and recruitment in 2025 (and beyond).