An AI agent helps a recruiter by drafting the writing that fills the desk: specs, adverts, outreach, CV summaries, rejections and client updates. You paste in the raw notes, it returns a draft in your format, and you check it and send it. Who gets shortlisted, rejected or offered stays your call.

It also remembers. Once it knows which client wants three lines on a Friday and which hiring manager always forgets the salary, the tenth advert of the month reads like the first. It can't see your inbox, calendar, ATS or job boards, and it never messages a candidate or a client. Everything leaves through your own systems, sent by you.

A Tuesday on the desk, with and without an agent

Without

07:15. Messages in bed: two candidate replies, a client moving an interview, and a brief from a hiring manager that reads as if it was typed on a train.

07:45. You start the operations advert by digging out a similar one from March, then spend twenty minutes deciding whether the salary line should say "competitive".

09:15. You call the hiring manager about the brief, ask eleven questions and get eight answers. The spec will have to wait.

10:00. Three CVs arrive. Forty minutes to read them, then a summary of each from memory because the client wants "a quick view".

11:00. You chase two interview slots and one piece of feedback. None of it is hard, and all of it interrupts.

14:00. The weekly client update, pieced together from a document, a notebook and what you remember of a call.

16:00. Offer paperwork, copied from last month's letter with great care, because the last rushed one had the wrong start date.

17:30. The 07:45 advert is still open, and the rejections you meant to send at lunch haven't gone.

With

07:20. You paste the brief and ask for a one-page spec, an advert and eight screening questions. They arrive before your coffee does, with a list of what you forgot to ask the client.

08:30. After the first call you paste your notes and get back a dated record with the three follow-ups you promised.

09:40. Three CVs, pasted as text, come back summarised against the same spec in the same format. You still read the CVs, but the comparison fits on one screen.

10:15. One instruction produces four rejection drafts. You change a line in two of them and send all four yourself.

14:00. The client update takes eight minutes, and you cut the paragraph that sounds like boasting.

16:00. The offer summary is drafted from the terms you pasted, and a colleague checks it against the contract.

17:00. You leave with the advert live and the rejections sent.

From intake call to live advert

Most adverts go wrong in an intake call that skipped half the questions. Paste your notes, however rough, and ask for a one-page spec (purpose, five responsibilities, must-haves, nice-to-haves) plus everything important you didn't cover. That gaps list is the agenda for your follow-up call.

Then the advert. Most job boards cut text at a fixed length, and few adverts are checked against it:

Write this spec as an advert for a board with a 1,500 character limit. Plain English, salary as a placeholder. Then give me a 600 character version.

Before it goes live, ask for a read-through for wording that narrows the pool. "Recent graduate" can shut out older applicants. "Native speaker" can shut people out by nationality. "Physically fit" excludes disabled applicants when the job doesn't need it. Ask for a replacement and a one-line reason for each, then decide which to accept. The agent catches the shortcuts people make at speed, but it doesn't know the employment rules where you hire, so your own check comes last.

Finish with screening questions: eight for a 15-minute call, asked in a fixed order so your calls are comparable. Ask it to mark any question that touches age, health or family, since those should never be used to filter anyone.

Outreach that doesn't read like a mailshot

Copy the text of a candidate's profile from the job board or network (the agent can't open links) and ask for a 90-word message that picks up two specific things in it and ends with one question. Ban the phrases you can't stand, such as "I came across your profile" and "exciting opportunity". If the same role is going to a head of department and a coordinator, ask for versions pitched at someone stepping up, someone moving across and someone stepping down, with the facts unchanged.

Boolean strings are fiddly enough to get wrong at eight in the morning:

Build a Boolean string for a job board: maintenance engineers, five years or more, commutable to Leeds, exclude sales titles. Explain each block in plain English.

When the search returns nothing, the explanation shows which block is too tight.

Your cheapest source is the people who applied last year. Paste twelve past applicants with the role each went for and the year you spoke, and ask for a short, different message to each that mentions that role. You send them one at a time, from your own account.

Can an AI agent screen CVs?

It can summarise them for you, and you do the screening. Paste a CV as text and ask for the same fields every time: current role, years in each relevant area, evidence for each must-have, gaps, and questions to ask. Tell it not to score anyone. You still read each CV in full, because a summary flattens an unusual career.

For a shortlist, ask for a grid: one row per candidate, one column per must-have, a quoted line of evidence in each cell, empty cells marked, and the recommendation left to you. Seeing the gaps side by side is often the moment you notice two candidates aren't really in the running.

Interviews benefit from the same structure. Ask for a guide with five competencies, two questions each, and a line on what a strong answer contains. Afterwards, paste your rough notes and ask for a scorecard that quotes your evidence and marks what you didn't cover. Either you fill the gaps or you accept that the evidence is thin. For the wider people process, see HR and people teams.

Keeping candidates and clients warm

Silence loses more candidates than bad news does. These are the messages that slip when the desk is busy:

  • The near miss. A rejection for the person who came second: warm, specific about what decided it, no false hope, an invitation to stay in touch, all in under 110 words.
  • The holding message. Six days on and the client still hasn't replied. Ask for a short update that invents no timeline and says when you'll next be in touch.
  • The weekly client update. Paste the week's notes and ask for what moved, what's stuck and what you need from them, under 150 words, in the format that client likes.
  • The offer summary. Paste salary, start date, notice, holiday, probation, location and reporting line. You get a one-page summary for the candidate and a list of anything to confirm first. Offers go wrong on details, so a second person still checks it against the contract.

The agent has no access to your inbox or phone, so nothing reaches a candidate or client until you've read it and sent it.

Check-ins that keep the pipeline moving

A scheduled check-in is a message your agent sends you at a set time, so the chasing happens even in a week when you'd forget. These suit most desks:

  • Weekdays at 17:15. It asks what moved today and turns your answer into three priorities for tomorrow, plus the one message you've been putting off.
  • Mondays at 08:00. A blank pipeline summary (roles open, candidates at final stage, feedback owed, client updates due) for you to fill in from your notes.
  • Wednesdays at 12:00. It asks which candidates haven't heard from you in seven days and drafts a holding message for each one you name.

To change a time or the wording, tell the agent. There's more on the habit in scheduled check-ins.

Skills that keep your house style

Start with your advert format. Once the agent has your structure, the length limit for each board, the phrases you use and the ones you refuse, "write an advert for this spec" comes back in house style. Able° can save a procedure like that as a skill after you've corrected it a couple of times, and agent skills explained covers how.

Others that pay back quickly:

  • The scorecard. Your competencies, rating scale and the rule that every rating needs a quoted example, so every candidate is judged on the same document.
  • Tone by audience. Short rule sets for candidates, clients and colleagues, including the phrases you never use.
  • The client update. Section order, length and level of detail for each client. If six clients want six different things, save six variants.

Which hiring decisions stay with you?

All of them. The agent can prepare a shortlist, but a person makes it and can explain it. "The system ranked them lower" won't satisfy a candidate or a client, and rules on automated hiring decisions vary by country.

  • Personal characteristics. Age, sex, race, religion, disability, pregnancy and sexual orientation. The agent can help you avoid asking about them and should never be asked to weigh them.
  • Right to work, qualifications and references. These are checks with real consequences, and a summary doesn't count as one.
  • Offer terms. It drafts from terms you give it and must never invent salary, notice or flexibility.
  • The difficult conversation. A candidate who's unhappy, or a client whose last placement didn't work out. You can delegate the writing around that call, never the call itself.

Candidate data: what goes in and what stays out

Recruitment runs on personal data, some of it sensitive. Treat anything you paste as handed over, however careful the provider is.

  • Keep health, disability, ethnicity, religion, trade union membership and sexual orientation out of the chat and out of memory, even when a candidate volunteers them.
  • Use initials and role codes. "Candidate A, operations role" is enough, and names, addresses and dates of birth add risk without improving the draft.
  • Paste only the client commercial data the task needs. Salary bands and headcount plans are confidential, and some client contracts restrict sharing hiring plans with any outside tool, so read yours first.
  • Decide what memory may hold (formats, tone, open roles) and what it never should (candidate health details, client salary data, anything said in confidence). Once a month, ask what it remembers and delete the rest. AI agent memory explains how.
  • Tell candidates. One line in your process note about where AI is used is easier than an awkward conversation later.

GDPR and your local data-protection law set the questions you need answers to: why you hold candidate data, how long you keep it, and what you'd say to a candidate who asks. Some places also have specific rules on AI in hiring. This is general guidance, not legal advice, and what happens to your data covers the wider picture.

What we set up with you, then your first week

We set Able° up for you on its own private server and guide you through connecting it to Telegram or LINE, which is the main step on your side. After that, Able° customers get a monthly tune-up with us.

Your first week on the desk:

  • Monday. Run three tasks on real work you'd do anyway: an advert, a CV summary and a rejection. Note what you had to edit.
  • Tuesday. Give it your three best adverts, say what makes them yours, and ask it to save the format.
  • Wednesday. Tell it your sectors, your tone, your client codes and what it must never assume. Then ask what it remembers and correct the answer. Most of the quality comes from this step.
  • Thursday. Start two check-ins: the 17:15 priorities and the Monday pipeline summary.
  • Friday. Tell it which drafts you rewrote and why, and delete anything stored that shouldn't be there.

When an agent won't change your week

  • Your process has to survive a complaint or an inspection. The record belongs in your ATS, because a chat thread isn't an audit log. Use the agent for the drafting around it.
  • You work retained search at the senior end. That work is mostly relationships and persuasion, and the agent only helps at the edges. AI agent vs a virtual assistant covers the human alternative.
  • You want something to rank candidates. No tool should make that decision for you, and one that promises to is selling a decision you can't explain.

Common questions

It depends on where you hire and what the tool does. Drafting adverts and tidying your own notes is low risk; letting software make or heavily shape selection decisions is where rules such as Article 22 of the GDPR on solely automated decisions come in. Check local rules or ask an adviser, keep a named person responsible for every decision, and tell candidates where AI is involved.

Can the agent message candidates for me?

No. It has no access to your inbox, phone or job board accounts, and it never contacts candidates or clients. It writes the message and you send it from your own systems, so every message goes out in your name after you've read it.

Does it connect to our ATS?

No, nothing syncs. You paste text in and copy drafts out. That means candidate data only leaves your system when you choose to move it, and the official record stays where your process says it should.

Can it remember our roles and clients?

Yes, within limits you set. It can keep your formats, tone, sector vocabulary and open roles. Memory reflects what you told it, including things that were only true for a week, so review it monthly and keep candidate health details and client commercial terms out of it.