I read a lot of AI-for-recruitment listicles. Most are written by people who've never billed a fee. They tell you to "leverage AI for sourcing." Great. How?
This isn't that. These are the five workflows I actually built in my own firm — in order of highest ROI. Start from the top down.
Apply the 80/20 principle. The top 20% of workflows generate 80% of the hours back. Know which workflows those are. Don't automate the wrong ones.
The list.
BD intelligence: knowing who to call before they post the job.
Most founders spend 6–8 hours a week scanning LinkedIn, press, funding news, and competitor moves for BD signal. That's a research job, not a recruiter job. I rebuilt it as a six-skill stack — market scans, named-account watchlists, exec-move tracking, funding triggers, conference attendee enrichment, and a weekly digest of who's actually worth a call.
Interview feedback collection and shortlist reporting.
Most senior recruiters spend 3–5 hours a week chasing hiring managers for interview feedback and then turning that feedback into a client update. It's admin. It's draining. And it gets delayed.
Candidate enrichment and initial long list scoring.
Take a list of 200 names. Enrich with current role, seniority, tenure, adjacent moves, known publications. Then score against a candidate scorecard you've defined. Three hours of manual research becomes twenty minutes of review.
Personalised outreach at scale (without the spam energy).
The dream isn't sending 500 identical InMails. It's sending 50 genuinely personalised ones — referencing a specific post, a specific move, a specific thing the candidate cares about — at the same pace you used to send the generic ones.
Job specification drafting from a thirty-minute briefing call.
You take the call. Otter captures the transcript. n8n pushes it to Claude with your house style and proven job-spec structure — not a paragraph summary, but a structured spec with competency pillars, an ideal-profile framing, and a scoring rubric ready for your interview team. Branded .docx back in your inbox before you've made a cup of tea. You edit, not write.
A warning.
Do not start with number four. I know you want to. Sophisticated outreach feels like the shiny prize. But if you don't know who to target (bad BD) and your enrichment data is broken, you're sending personalised spam to the wrong people with confidence. Get numbers one and three sorted first. Then number four makes your outreach ten times better, not ten times more embarrassing.
Your forward action plan.
Pick one from the list. Give yourself two weeks. Build it, break it, use it on a real search. Measure the hours back. If the numbers hold up — and they will — go to the next one.
Or book a Strategy Call, and I'll tell you which one you should start with based on what your firm actually does. Either works.
Pick one. Start this week.
Take the AI Readiness Score
All 21 questions scored. Your firm gets a Ready / Almost Ready / Behind rating.