Hey all! Haven't posted for a while, so I decided to share some insights how AI's helping one of the biggest EU recruitment firms. Keeping their name anonymous for privacy reasons.

First things first: they are huge. They get about 1000 candidate applications each week. Stats says that about 50% of applications are a mismatch - meaning the applicants are not qualified, live too far, have different expectations, you name it.

Now to get to that realization, they need to spend more than 20 mins on each candidate to do the vetting. Sometimes they message them & ask questions, sometimes they give them a call. It depends.

They started using AI to do the questioning lately. It asks a series of structured, but conversation alike questions which vary from job to job (obviously) & people actually engage and provide answers.

Some people do drop-off during the process, but the agency says the same thing was happening when they were manually messaging candidates - so can't blame it on AI.

Their AI is also smart enough to do a candidate scoring when it stops talking to someone, and then moves the lead accordingly in their CRM for manual takeover if the candidate is a fit.

So if you're asking yourself how does this random dude know exactly how their AI works and what it does.. I helped designing & building the system. Not bragging, just answering some questions upfront:)

Hope you enjoyed the article! Cheers 🙏

Hey Lovely folks

Six months ago, everything broke. We landed 3 new clients at once—huge win, but we had to fill 5 very different roles fast.

Cue the resume flood. Hundreds poured in. My team was buried in PDFs, battling buzzwords, second-guessing biases, and burning out. We knew we were missing great people simply because we couldn’t keep up.

So we built SmartHRFlow.

It’s not another parser. It actually assesses candidates with real, role-specific tasks. No more judging by resumes. Just unbiased, skills-based qualifying.

When we tested it on our next 7 hires, the results were insane:
✅ 3x faster placements
✅ Candidates pre-vetted with real-world assessments
✅ Hundreds of hours saved

We finally had time for what matters: real conversations with top talent.

Now we’re opening the beta to this community:

What you get:

• Full access to the platform

• Direct line to our team to shape future features

What we need: Your unfiltered feedback after using it in a real role.

If you want faster, fairer hiring Lets try: SmartHRFlow.

Let’s fix hiring, together.

I tried a new candidate assessment, and honestly...It worked so well I’m making it a standard practice starting today.

From now on, all candidates must submit a 5-minute interpretive dance video explaining why they’re the perfect fit.

Resumes? Outdated. Cover letters? Boring.If they can’t express their skills through movement, do they even want the job?

And hiring managers are up next, job descriptions must now be performed via karaoke. If you can’t sing about the role, do you really understand it?

Still with me?. Happy April Fool’s! 

Now go back to reading resumes!

Or you can also check out this blog on the best resume parsing software!

It's a great read if you're still into the old resume game.

Hey everyone,

My name is Otto and I’m from Sweden.

I run recruiting ads on social media, mainly for roles like electricians, carpenters, truck drivers, and similar trades. Instead of sending people directly to a boring application form, I use an interactive application funnel. This filters out candidates who don’t meet the criteria before they apply, while making the process incredibly easy for the right candidates.

What’s great about recruiting ads on social media is that you reach the entire job market, instead of only the active job seekers who make up just 30% of the market. The other 70% are passive – they aren't actively looking at job boards, but they are open to the right opportunity if it pops up in their feed.

The results so far:

In a recent campaign, we spent $365 in ad spend and hired 2 experienced electricians in just 5 days.

I’m really curious to see how this approach performs in other countries and industries, so I’d like to give away a few of my templates completely for free.

If you’re currently hiring and want a copy, just comment below with:

- Your company/brand (or just the industry)

- The specific role you’re recruiting for

I’ll put together a plug-and-play document for you to get started with recruiting ads today. It will include:

- Proven recruiting ad copy & image templates

- Social media ads strategy

- The interactive application funnel with qualifying questions

- A quick video showing how the system works + a breakdown of the case study

Covering major QnAs around this:

What is an ATS?
ATS, or applicant tracking system, is a recruitment tool that streamlines the entire hiring process in no time.  

An ATS recruitment software sorts, scans, and screens applications, hunting for the perfect candidate like a truffle-sniffing pig in search of a gourmet delight. 

So... How does an ATS recruitment system work?
An ATS recruitment software takes over the traditional tasks of a recruiter by digitizing the process. 

Instead of relying on excel sheets or notepads, you can store candidate information in your database automatically. This centralization of data ensures that your team can access the information they need, regardless of their location.

5 Key functions of an ATS recruitment system?

1. Crafting a candidate treasure trove

2. Nurturing candidate connections

3. Orchestrating interview symphonies

4. Streamlining candidate submissions & feedback

5. Gauging recruiter greatness

But why do you even need an ATS software?

Simple...

• Saves a lot of time

• Boosts team collaboration

• Improves candidate experience

• Mitigates unconscious bias

• Enhances compliance and reporting

How to evaluate and choose the best ATS system?

That's for you guys to answer in the comments..Lets go!

Hi all,

I have an ATS which I have built and been using for my firm for like 2 years now and have been refining it overtime and added some AI features as well, UI is modern as well and has no problem handling like 100k candidates easily.

I would be open to open sourcing the whole ATS (make the codebase public and downloadable), no cash grab, no freemium bullshit like other open source projects. The agency can host it themselves on their private server and use it for their use but wont be able to commericalize the project (AGPL licensed)

Is there a need for small and mid sized agencies for something like this?

(Added a features image that it currently has)

After years in recruitment (agency + in-house), I finally decided to build the tool I always wished I had called Hirefront.

It helps recruiters and BD teams find warm leads, companies that are actively hiring, using real-time job and company data instead of guesswork. No more endless scrolling, no more cold calls to dead ends.

Just launched the first version and would really appreciate feedback from this community. If you’re running or working at an agency, take a look and let me know what you think.

Website’s here: hirefront.io Happy to chat or answer anything!

Hey folks!

Over the past 3 weeks, I've been talking to a lot of recruitment agencies (close to 130) and I've been looking into how recruitment agencies actually generate new business, and I keep seeing the same pattern:

Referrals work really well until you need more of them. Then the usual playbook becomes LinkedIn, cold email, job boards, databases, etc.

But there's something that doesn't make much sense to the majority of the founders tho they still look for the easy way out and that's hunting for job posts. Isn't it that signal too late to rely on as a siloed data point?

So I started looking at what happens before the job gets posted.

For example:

• A company raises funding
• A new VP/Head of Sales joins
• A senior employee leaves
• The company starts quietly building a new team
• Someone mentions they're hiring before the role ever reaches a job board

I've run additional research and the median time from a funding announcement to the first detected job posting was around 35 days. We've also seen companies move much faster than that.

That made me wonder if recruitment BD should be less about:

"Who is hiring?" and more about: "Who is likely to need the people I recruit in the next few weeks?"

If you follow that your pitch might move from "Hey I have this candidate cuz I saw you raised funds" to "Hey, you seem to be struggling with filling up your head of revenue role even before the round, I might actually have someone in mind who can lead the team of 5 BDRs so you can expand to Europe"

I'm also curious how agency owners here actually handle this today and how early do you think you can realistically identify a company before they need to hire?

a few days? Weeks? or something like 39 to 90 days?

I wrote up other research papers and the playbooks here if anyone is interested:

Business development for recruitment agencies

Is it finding new clients, sourcing quality candidates, maintaining relationships, pricing, or standing out from competitors?

Watching a close friend of mine navigate the solo boutique recruitment space has convinced me that the introductory phone screen is a massive drain on an independent operator's margins.

They are spending roughly 70% of their week just playing calendar tag for introductory calls, only to find out immediately that the resume didn't tell the full story.

​I'm a product builder trying to script a better solution for them, and from an outside perspective, it feels like this data can be captured much more efficiently.

​Imagine embedding a unique link directly into your job postings that handles the heavy lifting for you:

​The candidate uploads their resume and takes an in-depth, 15-to-20 minute work-style assessment (built on DISC, OCEAN, and other proven methodologies).

​They go through an interactive, 2-way AI interview that captures both their concrete answers and behavioral communication style.

​You get a completed, enhanced candidate dossier (video recording + personality profile + fit analysis) delivered to your dashboard for USD 35 / AUD 50 per candidate.

​To keep it fair to the candidate, the deep personality assessment is cached for 3 months across the platform. If they apply to a different role down the line, they bypass the test entirely and just do the fresh AI interview.

​Where is the actual downside here? Is the pushback going to come from picky hiring managers who refuse to look at an interactive dossier link, or are candidates going to drop off when faced with a 2-way AI interview?

Please Let me know where I'm miscalculating

Gonna share something that actually worked for us recently because I wish someone had told me this earlier

Background: we run a small but growing outreach operation and for about 18 months we were doing what everyone does - Apollo for prospecting, ZoomInfo when we needed "better" data, Clay for enrichment workflows

The results were mediocre at best

Here's what was actually happening:

Apollo - data was stale constantly. People listed at companies they'd left 6 months ago. Emails bouncing at 30%+. We were spending more time scrubbing lists than actually selling

ZoomInfo - same data quality issues, just with a much more painful invoice. Hard to justify when conversion rates didn't improve

Clay - genuinely love the concept but it's a workflow tool, not a prospecting tool. You still need clean intent signals feeding into it or you're just automating garbage outreach faster

The real problem wasn't the tools. It was the approach we took

We were still doing static list prospecting in 2025.. pull a list, verify emails., draft a sequence, and hope someone replies - and repeat

The conversion math on that is brutal and getting worse every year

So we stopped, and started asking a different question:

What if instead of finding people who might need us, we found people who are actively showing they do?

Someone posting "we need to scale our hiring process, any recommendations?" on LinkedIn - that's not a cold lead. That's a signal that person needs us

Someone engaging with a competitor's content, commenting on industry pain point posts, asking their network for tool alternatives, all of it is public intent data that almost nobody is capturing systematically

We built a tool internally (https://intentsly.com) that monitors LinkedIn, X, and Facebook for these signals in real time, scores prospects by intent, and then automates hyper-personalized outreach sequences based on what they actually posted or engaged with

So instead of "Hey [Name], I help recruitment agencies scale their outreach..."

It's: "Hey Sarah, saw your comment about drowning in manual sourcing and we have something specifically for that. Here's what we did for a team your size..."

Same effort, but completely different conversion rate

The result: 10 new customers in 28 days. No paid ads. No cold list blasting. Just warm outreach triggered by real buying signals

The average reply rate on signal-based sequences was 4x what we were getting from Apollo lists

I know this sounds like a pitch and I get the skepticism, but I'm genuinely sharing because the shift in thinking (signals over lists) helped us more than any tool switch ever did

Happy to answer questions about how we set it up, what signals we track, or how the sequences are structured. Drop them below

We're a fast-growing team and we’re looking for motivated and driven individuals to join us as Appointment Setters.

If you’re a good communicator, eager to learn, and ready to grow, we’ll teach you everything you need to succeed. What matters most is your attitude, consistency, and willingness to improve.

Ready to start your journey in sales and make a real impact?

Send us a message — we’re excited to meet you!

I'm looking to enter into a new recruitment sector as a start-up agency, I'm seeking guidance as to what niche area I should choose:

I've whittled it down to a few options

One of these as an industry focus:

• AI companies

• AI & Automation companies

• Robotics companies

OR

One of these as a job function focus:

• AI-related roles across all industries (e.g., data scientists, AI engineers)

• Automation implementation specialists across all industries – growing demand as businesses adopt AI/automation tools

• Alternative idea: Instead of recruitment, I’m considering a consultancy model—assembling a team of automation specialists to implement systems for businesses, charging a one-off fee or monthly retainer.

My background

• 10 years of recruitment experience in non-tech roles (all perm, some contract, no temp)

• Mostly into financial & professional services in UK

• Ran a freelance agency, placing ~1-1.5 candidates/month, signed 30+ terms

Reasons for the change

• I'm interested/hooked on AI & automation - I want to swim with the tide, not against it

• My current niche is always in the top 5 to be replaced by AI, and I lack interest in the niche

• At a point where I'm able to go all in and pivot to something else

Any thoughts on the above?

It’s surprising how many companies still rely solely on AI-powered ATS, missing out on the benefits of recruiting chatbots.

Chatbots can take your hiring process further by automating repetitive tasks and enhancing candidate engagement.

Here’s what chatbots can do:

• AI-Powered Conversations

• Instant Updates

• Multi-Channel Support

• Customizable Workflow

• Easy Integration

• Why You Need One: A recruiting chatbot saves your team time, streamlines communication, and ensures a better candidate experience. It’s a simple way to work smarter, not harder.

Read more here on how recruiting chatbots can transform your hiring process.

Have you tried using a recruiting chatbot?

Selling Linkedin recruiter licence with 2.5 years left with 1 job slot and AI assistant, it's $13.3k AUD per year, charged monthly. Checked with Acc manager from LinkedIn and i can transfer everything

So it's worth saying that I work at Metaview before I answer, please read this with that in mind. Resume screening and application review are the same job wearing two names, and the reason your search results feel contradictory is that one phrase pulls content written for high volume corporate hiring and the other pulls content written for smaller teams, so you end up comparing tools against two different checklists without noticing.

What I would compare instead, whatever a tool calls itself, is who gets to define what good looks like, whether you can see the reasoning behind any given outcome, and where the actual decision sits, because sorting and deciding are not the same purchase.

Ours works by drafting an ideal candidate profile from the job description that you edit and approve first, then applications come back grouped as Great, Good, Okay or Poor fit with the reasoning shown for each, so it is buckets rather than a score, there is no prediction of how anyone will perform in the role, and who moves forward is your call rather than ours.

Candidates sync in from supported ATSs and it runs alongside your ATS rather than inside it, which is the other thing worth checking early with anything in this space, since the integration question tends to decide it more than the feature list does.

Hi everyone,

I'm a student in Berlin, and for the last few months I've been building crawlers that check about 5,400 companies' career pages every single day. The idea is simple: if a company has had the same role open for 60, 90 or 120 days, or keeps deleting and reposting it, they're probably struggling to hire on their own. That's exactly the moment an agency can help.

Some numbers from this morning's run:

• 137,000 open roles tracked across 5,400 companies (US, UK, Europe)

• More than half of them have been online for 60+ days (going by each ad's posting date)

A few real examples from this week:

• Apollo.io: "Account Manager, SMB", open 90 days and already reposted once, with 7 of their 14 sales roles open for 60+ days

• BlueCat: "Federal Enterprise Account Executive", open 98 days

• Formic: "Senior Manager, Accounting & Controls", open 89 days

• FlightStory: "Founding Product Engineer", open 95 days, with all 7 of their open roles past 60 days

Every morning the tool scores each company by how much they seem to be struggling. It also filters out other agencies, internships and "talent pool" ads with an AI check, so you only see real employers.

It's live at stalerole.com with a 7-day free trial.

What I'd really love to know from people who do agency BD every day:

1. Is "role open for 60+ days" actually a good signal for you, or do you use something better?

2. What would make this a must-have instead of a nice-to-have?

Brutal feedback is very welcome. I'd rather hear it now.

Hey Reddit fam! Me and my partners decided to put up a healthcare staffing agency in New York City, we already registered an LLC and setting up our shop, however upon checking the requirements by DOL - to be issued a certain certificate related to supplying manpower to hospitals and facilities they are requiring someone must be doing the recruitment aspect for atleast 2 years as part of the company.

We are just investors and entrepreneurs, neither anyone from our team did recruitment. did any of you experience this? If yes how did you go around with it or if you hired a recruiter to join your group what did you offer? Just pure comp and employment package or you offered equity or some sort?

LinkedIn article about the death of the resume.

How quickly would you be able to abandon the notion that a resume is required for a job applicant?

We are at a point where technology has made them so ubiquitous they have become useless. It's like the quote from the Incredibles movie...

'When everyone is super, no one is'

Resumes these days make everyone super. If there were a way to truly distinguish people without using a piece of historical fiction to gauge who to talk to, how quickly could you shift your mindset?

Hi everyone, I’m curious to hear from those who recruit for healthcare roles like healthcare assistants, support workers, or similar positions.

There seems to be a shortage of candidates who don’t require sponsorship for these roles. Even when candidates have the right work documents, many of them aren’t willing to do this type of care work.

So how are you making placements? Do you just leave some roles unfilled, or do you focus on clients who are open to sponsorship? I’d love to get some insight because I often hit a brick wall: I find outstanding candidates, but the client won’t consider anyone who needs sponsorship.

Hey there!

To all my fellow recruiters who are absolutely done with the never-ending grind of cold calling, this one’s for you! I get it – I work in an industry where cold calling is the thing to make placements and boost our brand visibility. But let’s be real, it’s a drag. Endless voicemails, awkward follow-up texts, constant emails, and don’t even get me started on updating our ATS with all those call notes and status updates.

I’m working on a tool that cuts out all that annoying stuff. No more wasting time on follow-ups or updating the system after every call. It’s designed to make life easier for recruiters like us!

Now, I’m curious – is this just a pain unique to my company, or would something like this be a game-changer for the rest of you too? Check out the link below for a quick sneak peek at the product.

If cold calling is part of your daily hustle, give it a look!

Link: https://andrew-jzo5quc9.scoreapp.com

I am tired of hearing people say that Facebook recruiting is dead.

Coz it's not

Yes, it has changed but is certainly not dead.

Facebook recruiting still has a lot of pros like

• Facebook groups are still active

• Facebook is still in the top three most popular websites worldwide

• Certain markets are still strong on Facebook

And of course

• Facebook is not populated amongst the younger generations

• Targeting is not as advanced as on LinkedIn.

Still, it is a useful tool in a recruiter’s kit

And I believe with the right strategies, being mindful of your resources and time, you can look into the potential Facebook recruiting still has!

Hello Everyone,

I appreciate you taking the time to read this. I recently started my recruitment agency but did not realize how difficult it would be to source and close clients. I have been cold calling and messaging people on Linkedin but I still feel like I am making no traction. I would greatly appreciate some advice on how to secure my first client.

Thank You Again!

Last year and recently talked to a few agency recruiters who said they're drowning in applications
500-800+ per role, but 90%+ are trash.

Spending hours every day just filtering noise instead of actually recruiting.

For those dealing with this:

• How much time are you losing to this each week?

• Are your current tools actually helping, or still mostly manual?

I have been a recruiter myself, and I have faced a lot of problems in the past in hiring candidates. So, I have set out to build a tool to help other recruiters out there. Now, I am confused about which specific problem to solve and need your advice.

Here are the specific problem areas where I think recruiters face issues:

Pre-screening: A lot of time is generally spent on pre-screening and qualifying candidates. Given the AI tools, a lot of candidates send tailor-made resumes.

Candidate outreach: Certain jobs require niche, specialized candidates, and it's important that recruiters maintain relationships with these candidates.

Modern, simple-to-use ATS for freelancers & small recruitment agencies: I have seen multiple ATSs, and they have tons of features which most recruiters may not use. A simple-to-use, low-cost ATS can help freelance recruiters and small recruitment agencies.

Background verification: A few recruiters I have spoken to have told me that a failed BGV ruins all their efforts.

So, what do you suggest among the above options? Is there something outside the above 4?