Recruiters spend the majority of their working week on administrative tasks. Given the tight labour market, this is simply not sustainable. Matching and follow-up have proven to be real time-sinks, but the good news is that if you use AI technology to support you with these tasks, you can make more hires in less time. In the webinar by theMatchBox and MrWork This was explained during the session, but don’t worry if you missed it. We’ve got the summary for you!
TLDR | Recruiters spend the majority of their working week on administrative tasks. Manual matching and follow-up, in particular, are very time-consuming. With AI, you can streamline these processes. You start by enriching candidate profiles and then let your AI matching tool search for skills rather than individual keywords, so that synonyms and similar job titles are also taken into account. The right candidates are identified and approached by AI agents. The agents gauge interest and carry out pre-screening, whilst theMatchBox and MrWork exchange interaction metrics so that candidates who respond actively automatically appear at the top of the list in the next search. For recruiters, this saves an average of 8 hours per week on follow-up and pre-screening with the AI agents from MrWork, whilst theMatchBox users extract 30% more placeable candidates from their database. Furthermore, as candidates receive a response more quickly, the drop-out rate – which is currently often caused by a process that is too slow – decreases. This creates a continuous cycle: better data yields smarter matches; the time saved is channelled into face-to-face interviews; and those interviews, in turn, yield even better data.
The main challenges in matching
You can’t make a good match with inaccurate or missing information. A candidate profile containing only a name and contact details will never stand out when you’re searching – amongst thousands of profiles in your ATS – for the right person for a new vacancy. It all starts with high-quality and complete data, but this is often still lacking. In the webinar, 54 per cent of participants indicated that their data quality remains only moderate and that there are clear gaps or inconsistencies.
Jan Govaerts, CEO of theMatchBox, shares his vision in the webinar: “Data maturity is incredibly important. If you don’t get your data in order, you’ll always be playing catch-up in a few years’ time. You could enter all this manually, but it’s smarter to use technology for this.”
Once you’ve got your data in order, you’ll face the next challenge: finding suitable candidates based on the job vacancy. Sifting through profiles manually isn’t practical, so you end up searching by keywords and/or using filters. Unfortunately, these kinds of search functions often work literally and don’t understand the intent behind the search. Translations or synonyms, for example, aren’t taken into account, meaning you still miss out on the best candidates.
The main challenges in follow-up
Once you’ve found a few candidates, you get in touch. You want to find out if they’re still open to something new and check straight away whether the vacancy is actually a good fit for them. Speed is essential here. “We see this in many organisations: a candidate applies or responds to a match they’ve found, but it takes too long for the recruiter to follow up. A weekend goes by, or you’ve got a day full of interviews – all perfectly understandable. But by the time you ring the candidate, you’re told they’re already in talks with another employer and that you’re too late. There’s a big difference between finding a candidate and actually bringing them on board and retaining them. That’s precisely where there’s a huge opportunity for automation,” explains Martin de Ruiter, CRO at MrWork.
Incidentally, it’s not just about speed. Making contact and following up takes time – far more than you’d like. The webinar revealed that recruiters spend, on average, only 30 per cent of their time talking to candidates. The rest is taken up by all sorts of administrative tasks. Martin: “If you do all the follow-up and pre-screening manually, you’ll be swamped with clickwork, whereas you became a recruiter precisely to have conversations with people.”
Make the process smarter with AI for matching and follow-up
There is another way! The webinar covered two steps: first, getting your data and matching in order (theMatchBox), then automating follow-up at scale (MrWork).
As Jan Govaerts says: “Let technology do the tedious work, so you can focus on the human side.” With an AI matching tool – integrated into your ATS – enriching profiles and improving your data quality suddenly becomes much easier. This goes beyond just the CV: notes and interview transcripts are also taken into account, so that information which would otherwise never have ended up in a searchable profile becomes usable after all. You can then find the right person, because your data is more complete and the AI understands that the search term ‘account manager’ could just as easily refer to a ‘field sales consultant’ or an ‘account executive’. Or better still: simply select the skills required for the vacancy and let AI do the actual searching!
You can then use AI agents to easily contact candidates (at scale). You can gauge their interest, update their details and carry out a pre-screening straight away. If you opt for AI technologies that work together, such as theMatchBox and MrWork, interaction metrics are even shared between them, so that in future searches, candidates who respond well to previous messages (and match the desired profile) will appear at the top of the list. You already know that these candidates are open to a new challenge, so your chances of a placement are therefore greatest.
In addition, you can expand your database by requesting permission in good time to retain data for longer. AI agents come in very handy here too. They can take care of this process entirely, giving you a large pool to draw from without any extra manual work. This, in turn, increases your chances of finding a strong match for your next vacancy!
The results: greater speed, fewer dropouts, greater efficiency and lower costs
Recruiters who use AI to match candidates and follow up more effectively are seeing their success grow on several fronts.
- By using MrWork ’s AI agents to communicate with candidates, a quick and clear response is guaranteed. Given that a slow process accounts for the lion’s share of drop-outs (according to the poll among participants), this is an improvement you’ll notice straight away. In addition, recruiters save an average of 8 hours a week on follow-up and pre-screening.
- On average, users of theMatchBox find 30 per cent more placeable candidates in the database than before, and smart matching saves them 14 per cent of their time.
Those time savings alone result in lower costs, but when you factor in that you need a smaller advertising budget to attract candidates (you’ll have more high-quality candidates in your ATS) and the application-to-hire ratio increases thanks to immediate follow-up, it really is a no-brainer.
We’ve come full circle
In this way, theMatchBox and MrWork come full circle together. Better data leads to smarter matching, and the time saved through this – as well as through using AI agents for follow-up – in turn enables more personalised conversations between recruiters and candidates. These better conversations, in turn, lead to better data. And so the circle is complete!
