What AI Tools Do Agency Recruiters Use?

Well, since AI recruiting tools began emerging on the market, now we can ask a more realistic question: “Which AI tool can do this for me?”

There are so many different types of AI tools out there that recruiters can use — and the list is growing every day. Some have been specifically designed with the recruitment process in mind, whilst others you can easily ‘recruitify’ to suit your needs.

Most recruiters who use AI to streamline their recruitment workflow will use a mixture of the tools in this list. If you’re just starting out, it’s good to start small: Take a particular problem you’re having and look through this list to see which tool you can add to your workflow to solve it, and iterate from there.

Here are a few of the best AI recruiting tools recruitment agencies are using right now and the challenges they can solve for you.

Generative AI tools

Used for: Writing client and candidate emails, job descriptions, social media posts and extracting information from contracts and policy documentation.

There are a few powerful generic AI tools out there that aren’t built for recruitment per se, but they’re so flexible that they can be easily used for recruitment tasks.

Even if you’ve never used them before, you’ve probably heard of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.  

These tools are used by recuiters largely in the same way: to create documents, write job descriptions, or draft candidate profiles for hiring managers. As well as generating documents, this AI technology can also be used to review and extract information from documentation.

You might need a paid subscription to access this feature, but most of these generative AI tools allow you to upload documents that the technology will scan through in seconds to provide highlights or answer any questions you might have about the text.

You can then use it for things like policy checking, looking up country-specific hiring regulations or asking the bot questions about a client’s staffing policy, for example.

Note-taking tools

Used for: Transcribing interviews and calls, creating call summaries and meeting actions.

Taking notes during interviews and calls is something that not only slows you down, but it gets in the way of you fully engaging with candidates and hiring managers when speaking to them too.

How can you practice active listening and genuinely assess a candidate if you’re busy scribbling notes while they’re talking? And how many times have you come back to your meeting notes and felt completely unsure about who the candidate was and what you thought about their suitability for the role?

This is where note taking tools come into play.

Carv, for example, is a recruitment platform that enables zero-admin workflows. Among others, it joins recruiters during meetings, takes notes, and turns those notes into specific output documents. Also, Carv syncs with the ATS, keeping all the data up-to-date, and eliminating the need for manual input from recruiters.

Metaview is another note-taking tool that’s specifically designed as a recruitment solution. It works in the same way as Carv, sending meeting notes to the ATS to eliminate manual work. Also, it is used by recruiters to get feedback on their interviewing skills.

Next to these, there are also a lot of generic AI-powered note-taking tools, like Fireflies, Otter and Notta. Although these tools aren’t recruitment-specific, they tend to have integrations with project management tools like Notion, and with communication tools like Slack.

AI assistants

Used for: Delegating repetitive admin tasks, updating the ATS, drafting documents, note-taking and summarizing interviews and calls.

AI assistants are making big waves in the recruitment world right now, as they’re able to do much more than taking notes or creating documents.

These powerful tools use a whole combination of automation, machine learning, conversational AI and natural language processing to take over so many parts of the recruitment process that it really can feel like you’ve finally got that admin assistant you’ve always wanted!

For example, you can delegate a whole load of different repetitive tasks to an AI assistant, from turning intake calls into job requirements ready for posting across job boards, to preparing interview questions or onboarding documents.

You can also ask it questions about potential candidates to check for consistency across interviews, draft follow-up emails, use it for sourcing qualified candidates for an open role from your talent pool, or for matching applicants to job openings.

AI assistants like Carv can join not only video interviews but also face-to-face meetings and phone calls, capturing information and keeping all the systems in sync. They can work with templates and be customized to fit your employer brand and tone of voice, ensuring that the output sounds like you.

Using a more comprehensive AI recruitment tool like this can be helpful for some teams as it simplifying their tech stack, which can result in more value in terms of pricing.

Note: While AI assistants can help with pretty much any recruitment task, they should never be used for making hiring decisions, as this is against the EU AI legislation.

AI-based ATS or CRM

Used for: Sourcing from talent pools, updating the applicant tracking system (ATS).

There are two ways recruitment agencies can use artificial intelligence to manage their ATS and/or CRM (depending what they use).

The first option is to use an AI agent or AI assistant, as described above, to update the ATS with candidate information after every meeting. This can be done in different ways, but the most popular option is to use an API integration, or to embed an AI assistant in your ATS.

The second option is to use a native AI agent, meaning an AI assistant that comes with your ATS. Some newer ATSs have assistants that enable recruiters to easier search and source suitable candidates directly from the ATS, or from a connected database.

Greenhouse, JobAdder, Lever, and Manatal are all recruitment software that come with an AI-driven ATS. Avature and Beamery are CRMs that have AI-powered functionality too.

A native AI-powered ATS does come with some limitations in that they can only work with information that’s already in the ATS. This means the tool’s candidate matching capabilities are limited to what’s already in your talent pools.

Working with an external third-party integration, on the other hand, means the AI can also work with information that’s external to the ATS.

So for example, with a tool like Carv, you can automatically fill your ATS with candidate data, and then use the native AI assistant to search through that data. This supercharges your ATS and recruitment process, driving efficiency and reducing the overall time to response and time to hire.

AI messaging tools & chatbots

Used for: Initial candidate screening, candidate sourcing, candidate engagement.

Of course, engaging one-to-one with your candidates is still a hugely important part of being a recruiter - and it always will be. But sometimes, we can lose precious time having early-stage and often repetitive conversations with job seekers who aren’t going to be right for our roles.

This is where AI-powered messaging technology is already saving recruiters hours of time.

When candidates apply to your job openings, you can use such tools to handle initial screening questions and even help generate a shortlist - which is particularly useful when your process involves high-volume hiring.

Here’s an example of how fast food restaurant Five Guys uses Olivia by Paradox to handle the first stage of its talent acquisition process.

By integrating a chatbot to your agency’s website, you can save time by letting the AI answer any applicant FAQs or direct them to the appropriate pages of your website.

One study by BPO company Alorica found that they saved 1,200 hours of recruiter time over a 3-month period by allowing a chatbot to handle initial screening.

Paradox, XOR and Humanly.io offer chatbots as part of a larger AI recruiting software package. These tools improve the candidate experience and streamline the recruitment process by handling the first interaction stages.

AI sourcing tools

Used for: Sourcing candidates, job matching, candidate and client outreach.

Most recruiters still resort to sourcing candidates through Linkedin Recruiter and talent databases like HireEZ, SeekOut, Entelo, or Loxo.

But there are candidate discovery tools out there that use artificial intelligence to help recruitment teams find top talent that other recruiters aren’t finding.

These tools work by scanning through LinkedIn profiles, resumes and candidate social media profiles to create shortlists of potential candidates for your consideration, or by engaging passive candidates in talent pools to gauge their interest in a new role.

For example, Manatal is a recruiting platform that has an AI-powered recommendations and job matching feature. PeopleGPT by Juicebox is a powerful candidate discovery tool that you can use to map the market, especially when recruiting within niche industries.

Essentially, the magic of these tools lies in their ability to flag the most relevant and best candidates without you having to do any proactive digging. You just simply tell the AI who you’re looking for and it will scour the internet and present you with the right candidates.

AI-powered scheduling tools

Used for: Scheduling client meetings and candidate interviews.

Arranging interview and meeting slots with candidates and hiring managers is a task that always takes much longer than it should. Between email threads to establish the right time and calls to reschedule, something that should take a matter of seconds can suck up unnecessary brain power from multiple people.

This is why a lot of recruitment agencies use AI-powered interview scheduling tools.

These tools use an algorithm to scan the calendars of all those invited to join the interview or meeting to find the perfect slots. Scheduling and rescheduling meetings through these tools is just a matter of a few clicks.

There are some generic scheduling tools like Calendly that work with almost any video interview platform, whilst Google Appointment Scheduler is the option to go for if you use Google Meet for meetings.  

GoodTime is a tool that’s designed specifically for scheduling recruitment meetings and some recruiting platforms, like Lever and Greenhouse, have an AI-powered scheduling feature built into the software.

AI interviewing tools

Only a few years ago, the concept of AI interviewing tools would’ve seemed totally far fetched. But nowadays, they’re already the norm amongst hiring teams.  

There are a few difference stages of the interview process that AI can support with or take over. For example, you might use an AI interviewing tool like Tengai that comes with a recruiter avatar that takes over the interview entirely.

If you prefer to be present in the interviews, you could use a hybrid human-AI set up, where the AI ‘sits in’, records the interview and suggests interview questions in real time based on the conversation you’re having with the candidate.

Or say you have a situation where you’re recruiting as part of a high-volume hiring process. Your agency might not have the manpower to interview all the successful applicants for the first interview round.

Using a candidate screening tool like Willo you could hold the first round as asynchronous interviews, and the AI will score the candidates based on their answers, without you having to review any of the video content.

Not only do these tools help recruiters have better, faster and more efficient interviews, but they also help you eliminate unconscious biases and support your decision-making with data too.

Getting started

Of course, there are a lot of options in this list, and not every tool will be suited to your recruitment workflow as every agency works differently.

If you’d like to start experimenting with AI as a recruitment agency, a good starting point is to go with an AI assistant that integrates with your ATS and takes over the most time-consuming tasks - taking notes during meetings and adding the data to the ATS.

These are the tasks that almost every recruiter will benefit from support in, and AI assistants are more than capable of providing that support.

Try Carv for free today to see how the AI assistant can take over the admin so you can focus on candidates and clients.