If you’ve been following any social media recruiting communities over the past few months, you already know AI is all anyone is talking about. Recruiters are experimenting with AI tools to speed up processes. Some are nailing it. Others aren’t sure where to start, or have just started experimenting.
In our recent post on how recruiters are using AI in everyday workflows, we looked at how automation is already changing recruitment and hiring, from note-taking and sourcing to screening and outreach.
For this follow-up, we caught up again with Joe Atkinson, Scede’s Director of AI and Automation, to go one step further to look at what you can actually do with it today.
Here are five recruiter and TA tasks AI can take off your plate right now, with practical tips and examples.
How recruiters can start using AI today
AI isn’t here to run your entire hiring process. That being said, it can make the day-to-day work behind it faster, cleaner, and less repetitive.
Here’s how Julie Bedard, a managing director and partner at BCG, who specialises in talent strategies, put it:
“The opportunity is real and exciting, especially when it comes to freeing up recruiters to spend more time on relationship building and widening talent pools.”
Not only should you try AI, but it is likely to eventually become a requirement of future recruiter and TA jobs.
Joe broke it down into five areas where recruiters are already seeing real impact, starting with note-taking and interview documentation.
1. Note-taking and interview documentation
The use of AI in recruitment is still new, and recruiters and TA managers are still learning the ropes, but if there’s one task AI has already nailed, it’s note-taking. Every recruiter knows how much time disappears into writing up interviews or debriefs. AI tools now handle that admin reliably, letting you focus fully on what’s being said instead of multitasking.
Products like Metaview and Granola record interviews, transcribe the conversations, and turn them into structured notes that you can drop straight into your ATS. As Joe explained, tools in this category have taken off fast because they’re low-risk, high-reward: they capture what’s been said without trying to make decisions for you.
The result is cleaner data and more accurate records, especially helpful when hiring teams grow or run multiple processes at once.
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By automating this step, recruiters get back hours each week and reduce the risk of missing details or bias creeping in later. It’s a simple way to start using AI and one that instantly lightens the load.
2. Boolean building and sourcing
Boolean searches can feel like an art form (and a time sink). Recruiters spend hours refining strings, toggling filters, and chasing the right combination of keywords. It’s the kind of repetitive work AI is quietly taking off the table.
As Joe told us, recruiters are starting to use AI to translate hiring requirements into search logic. “AI can take a job description and generate the first version of a Boolean string or even a list of target companies,” he said. “You still need to refine it, but it’s a faster way to start.”
The key is to treat AI-generated searches as a starting point, not a shortcut to perfection. Just like Scede’s sourcing methodology, the goal is to start narrow and finish wide. This way, you can use AI to get a quick first draft, then manually adjust for nuance, seniority, or geography.
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Used well, AI speeds up the groundwork and helps you cover more of the market without burning hours on manual string-building.
3. Candidate outreach and personalisation
AI can be helpful for writing, but it still needs a human touch to make messages sound natural and on-brand. For instance, you can ask AI to build first drafts of outreach messages, adapting tone and content to each candidate’s background.
It’s important to get this right because more than half (52%) of candidates say they would decline an otherwise attractive offer if they have had some type of negative experience during the recruiting process, according to a BCG survey of 90,000 people across 160 countries.
The best results come when AI is fed with context like your company’s EVP, team culture, and role-specific hooks, rather than just a job title and a link.
As Joe explained, that context is what separates useful AI outreach from noise. “AI can help you start stronger, but if you don’t give it enough to work with, it’ll sound like everyone else,” he said. “The message still needs your voice and judgement layered on top.”
The payoff? Faster outreach cycles, higher engagement, and messages that still feel human.
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By combining automation with human insight, recruiters can keep their outreach personal and keep up with the volume of hiring that scaling demands.
4. Interview prep
Interview prep quietly eats time, collecting notes, pulling questions together, and refreshing yourself on each candidate before the call. AI can help with much of that groundwork. Recruiters are using it to summarise previous interviews, surface key details from CVs, and create structured question sets based on the role’s scorecard or competencies.
Used this way, AI helps recruiters and hiring managers show up better prepared and helps candidates have a smoother, more consistent experience.
Amazon’s EMEA recruitment team, led by Lauren Gladwell, started by building basic AI skills and experimenting safely. By linking up with their Global Talent Intelligence group, they turned GenAI into an ongoing innovation focus, launching projects like an AI Risk Register and embedding AI into their ATS to support skill-based selection. Following a successful UK pilot, they’re now planning to scale advanced assessment platforms across EMEA.
Used responsibly, AI helps recruiters prepare better and move faster through the funnel.
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Essentially, the aim is to remove the manual steps that slow down good decisions. That way, recruiters can spend less time filtering and more time talking to the right people.
5. Daily admin
It’s not the headline-grabbing part of AI, but for most TA managers and recruiters, this is where the time savings really add up. The small admin jobs, such as sending reminders and writing follow-ups, eat into your day.
AI can now handle much of that routine work. Integrated assistants can draft follow-up emails and even summarise daily activity for reporting.
Joe described it as the most immediate win: “Recruiters who use AI here aren’t just trying to reinvent their workflow, they’re just fixing the paper cuts. All those small jobs that steal time.”
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It’s a low-risk, high-return use case: instant time back, less context-switching, and more energy for the human parts of the role.
A quick note on: Guardrails and good habits
AI works best when it runs inside clear boundaries. Without them, good intentions quickly turn into risk, whether that’s bias, data exposure, or candidate mistrust.
Joe emphasised that point in our conversation: recruiters need freedom to test, but that freedom only works when there’s structure underneath. “You can’t have everyone plugging in whatever tool they fancy,” he said. “There has to be governance, such as who’s checking what data goes in, how it’s being stored, and whether it’s compliant.”
As a case in point, co-founder of Cappfinity, Nicky Garcea, says using AI to make decisions is a very different world;
“Employers are at different places in their experiences and implementation of AI. AI is being used for things like drafting job descriptions, as well as driving process efficiency through keyword matching. But using AI to make recruitment decisions is a very different world, exposing employers to a whole range of legal considerations under UK GDPR and the EU AI Act.”
Good guardrails are key because they set out what “safe experimentation” looks like, such as which tools are approved, what data can be used, and how to review AI-generated outputs before they go public or reach candidates.
At Scede, that idea mirrors how we approach any new process change: clear standards first, room to innovate second. When teams know where the edges are, they can move faster inside them, testing new ways to source, message, and manage data without worrying about compliance gaps later.
If you’re setting this up now, Joe’s webinar recap on AI compliance for TA teams covers policy, provision and education, plus practical templates.
Key takeaway
Regardless of whether you’re ready for it or not, AI is here, and it’s making its way into TA and recruitment. The best recruiters will stay on top of AI trends and learn how to leverage it to speed up production, manage the mundane, and generate ideas you may have never considered.
The critical takeaway for recruiters: AI tools are not solutions. They won’t immediately solve all of your problems and you are responsible for ensuring they give you the best outcomes.
If you’re tired of hiring constraints limiting growth, let’s talk. We’d genuinely love to help.
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