How to Use an AI Recruiting Assistant as a Freelance Recruiter

Economic uncertainty over the last few years has meant that job workload can be erratic. One minute, clients are imposing hiring freezes and the next, they’re rapidly hiring and you’re up against the clock to place the right candidates before another recruiter does.

And despite there being a high number of candidates on the market right now, there are still skills shortages in a lot of sectors, so you have to work twice as hard to find the right people with the right skills.

Operating freelance as a solo recruiter means you have to do the job of a whole recruitment team yourself. But the great news is, artificial intelligence is making it possible for freelance recruiters around the world to compete with hiring teams ten times their size.

In this article, I’m going to show you how incorporating an AI assistant into your workflows will help you double your output by turning you into an AI-enabled recruiter.

Main challenges freelance recruiters face in 2024

2024 has been a ‘cautiously optimistic’ year for the staffing industry so far. But factors like remote working, labour shortages and rapid technological advancements have lead experts to say that recruitment is harder than ever before.

This new recruitment landscape has created a few different challenges for recruiters who are operating on their own:

• Client acquisition and retention: Finding a steady stream of clients is crucial to being a freelancer in any industry, and recruitment is no different. Unlike recruiters who are hired to work as part of an agency hiring team, freelancers have their work cut out for them to get noticed and build their reputation. For example, you need to become a master of self-promotion through online marketing and networking if you’re going to get noticed in this busy market.
• Inconsistent income: The nature of freelance work is that your income can fluctuate a lot. In the freelance world, this is often referred to as ‘feast and famine’. Managing an inconsistent income like this takes a lot of forward planning: you need to manage your finances well and build a buffer for slower periods, or times when you miss out on placements you were counting on for revenue.
• Administrative tasks: Working as an agency recruiter already involves a high workload, but when you’re a one-man band, you have extra admin tasks to think about too. For example, invoicing, drafting contracts, and record-keeping all fall on you. While these tasks aren’t necessarily difficult, they take up valuable time that you should be spending on core activities like generating new business and sourcing candidates.
• Candidate sourcing and screening: Of course, every recruiter has sourcing and screening to think about in the day-to-day of their role. As a solo recruiter, your candidate network and talent pools are naturally going to be smaller than a larger agency, and you might not have access to more expensive sourcing tools that larger agencies invest in for their hiring teams. This can make it harder to compete to reach top talent first.
• Isolation and work-life balance: This isn’t a challenge for every freelance recruiter, but those who struggle with balancing work and life can feel it hard when operating as a solo recruiter. Recruitment is a people business so it’s likely you got into recruitment because you’re a social person. Working independently can get isolating, and balancing a high workload can make it hard to manage your time leisure time.

What can AI assistants do for freelance recruiters?

If you can relate to any or all of the above challenges right now, here’s some good news: AI-powered recruiting tools can support you in a way that you can overcome almost every one of them.

Here are four core ways AI technology can help you keep all the benefits of being an independent recruiter without dealing with the disadvantages of working alone.

Take over admin so you can double your output

We’ve already talked about the woes of admin workloads when you’re operating as an independent recruiter. Recruitment is an admin-heavy role, but working as an independent recruiter leaves every single admin task to you.

AI assistants can take over a whole load of these admin tasks so that you can double your work output.

For example, almost every task related to interviews and intake calls can be handled by Carv’s AI assistant. The AI workmate attends your calls with you, recording and taking notes of everything that’s said and creates summaries and highlights of the discussions you have.

Based on what’s said during intake calls you have with hiring managers, tools like Carv can create meeting summaries, job descriptions and generate interview questions in seconds.

After candidate interviews, AI technology can generate candidate profiles and candidate write-ups that you can present to hiring managers about their suitability for the role. It can even draft follow-up acceptance or rejection messages for job seekers so you don’t have to spend any time thinking about them.

There are also AI tools on the market that can schedule interviews for you automatically by syncing invitee diaries. Some recruitment software and assessment tools even have this functionality as an added feature.

Streamline candidate sourcing

Sourcing candidates can be one of the most time-consuming tasks for a solo recruiter. But nowadays, there are a whole load of AI tools that can automate candidate searches and even identify qualified candidates for you.

AI sourcing tools integrate with databases, job boards and social media platforms like LinkedIn so they scan historical data in your candidate networks and pull out the candidates you need to have on your radar.

Unlike traditional sourcing technology, AI-based platforms like Carv can work with unstructured data, so your search isn’t limited to keywords mentioned in candidate CVs or profiles.

With Carv, for example, you can build your Talent Space where you have all the information about candidates, including pre-screening calls, interviews, assessment results, and so on.

With all this information in one place, and an AI workmate that can work with unstructured data at your fingertips, it’s much easier to find good matches even for hard-to-fill positions.

Improve candidate screening

Candidate screening is a stage of the hiring process that AI tools can now take over completely for a solo recruiter. Which is handy, since it’s one of the most time-consuming parts of the process and can be difficult to handle efficiently alone.  

There are a lot of different screening methods that AI can automate for you. For example, you can use AI for resume parsing, for running skills-based assessments or coming up with screening questions based on the job brief too.

There are also AI assistants that can screen candidates automatically via a conversational AI chatbot on messaging services like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. You can even build a customized AI avatar that can take potential candidates through the whole screening process virtually so they feel like they’re in constant contact with a recruiter before you’ve even made direct contact with them yet.

Enhance communication with candidates and clients

When you’re operating as a one-man talent acquisition brand, keeping up with all your comms manually can verge on the impossible. Not only do you have both clients and candidates to keep in constant contact with, but both sides expect a high standard of communication nowadays if you’re going to keep them engaged.

An AI recruiting assistant can help you manage communication with candidates and clients by letting you automate recruitment emails like acceptance and rejection messages, job alerts and interview reminders. Automatic scheduling tools can also sync up with your calendars and send comms before and after meetings too.

So now you know what AI recruiting technology can do, how do integrate an AI assistant into your workflows and make it part of your day-to-day?

How to integrate Carv’s AI into your workflows

Integrating an AI tool like Carv into your daily workflow is really straightforward. It only takes three simple steps, and you only have to go through the process once.

Step 1: Create a free Carv account

Step 2: Connect Carv to your calendar

Step 3: Set up your meeting types - choose from interviews, intakes, or general.

You can start using Carv immediately to manage all the repetitive tasks mentioned earlier in this article. Carv can automatically join your virtual meetings, but you can also choose to add it to face-to-face meetings, or to call candidates through the tool.

The output documents you generally need to create before and after intake calls and interviews, such as intake reports, candidate profiles, or job descriptions, can be customized to your own tone of voice through custom AI pipelines.

The AI workmate will use your tone of voice it’s picked up from meetings when creating notes and summaries, but if you also want documentation like candidate profiles to be formatted in a specific way, and in your TOV, we can set the tool up to do that too.

If you want your ATS to be automatically updated based on data from your calls, Carv can also do this. For example, it can populate the intake or interview debrief fields, the candidate profile or write-ups, or candidate information that forms your screening criteria.

Benefits of using an AI assistant like Carv

If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you don’t need much convincing about the benefits of using an AI assistant like Carv to manage your workload as a freelance recruiter.

But in a nutshell, you’ll see a huge positive impact on your recruitment metrics:

• Increased recruitment efficiency and effectiveness  
• Reduced process costs
• Better fill rates for your open positions
• Faster time to hire
• Better candidate experience and engagement
• More accurate matching and better quality of hire
• Scalable operations driving predictive growth.

If you’re already using a generic generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude in your recruitment process and you’re thinking it’s already doing the job, it’s worth thinking about context, personalization, and scalability to understand how much more you could be getting out of a recruitment AI tool.

Specialised tools like Carv are only getting smarter and faster, and they’re making recruiters better at their jobs as they become more sophisticated over time.

Therefore, if you choose to stick with generic tools, you’ll be missing out on all the benefits that solo recruiters are capitalising on using specialised tools that help them work smarter.

To see how Carv can help you cut admin time and double your output as a freelance recruiter, get started for free today.