Top AI recruiting tools and software of 2025

Integration blues no more

There is a long-running argument about which is better: an integrated suite or best-of-breed. Remnants of that dilemma still face buyers as they consider products from their ERP vendors -- often Oracle, SAP or Workday, offering AI-powered tools that seamlessly integrate with their HCM and business suites -- or one of the over 100 providers of standalone, AI-based talent acquisition that might have a newer, shinier bell or whistle to attract a recruiter's attention.

A technological difference prevails here. Long-standing names in talent acquisition have been augmenting their products with AI-driven workflows, chatbots and agents. Newer entries to the market, such as Eightfold, Paradox and Phenom are AI-native, built from the bottom up on AI. As always, there are tradeoffs: Heritage vendors have the breadth of functionality that newer companies are still trying to attain, as well as deeper pockets and experience in deployment and support services.

Ease of integration has come a long way since the issue first became prominent, yet there are still integration considerations when choosing a smaller vendor with a single product line over an ERP provider with greater breadth of functionality.

Tools target key steps in hiring process

AI-based recruiting products remain more similar than distinctive. The sourcing and hiring tasks faced by recruiters vary little, and a buyer will likely be able to source, engage, screen, hire and onboard job candidates successfully with almost any of the popular systems, most of which provide personalization capabilities, AI-based agents, and sophisticated content creation tools. AI enables people to search more widely across many more sources of candidates than humans have time for, creating talent pools that are more diverse. AI can also match candidates to requisitions and rank them in an instant, and it supports searching the employee and alumni population for internal candidates.

In general, buyers can expect most of the following functions of talent acquisition products to be supported by AI:

• Programmatic job advertising. Automated job distribution and budget optimization based on historical data and real-time campaign performance.
• Candidate sourcing. Surfacing qualified candidates from internal and external talent pools.
• Candidate matching. Identifying and evaluating the strongest active or passive candidates for an open position based on their relevant skills, experience, or other criteria.
• Profile enrichment. Automatically sourcing additional information about a candidate from publicly available data across the web.
• Applicant screening and ranking. Analyzing candidate profiles and determining their fit for a job opening.
• Interview scheduling. Managing calendar coordination, reminding relevant parties, and rescheduling.
• Screening tools. Generating customized prescreening questions as well as interview guides focused on the position and candidate in question.
• Personalized assessments and training. Tailored offerings that adapt to each candidate's skills and abilities.
• Chatbots. Conversational UI for candidates or prospects for prescreening, Q&A, scheduling and more.
• Copilots. GenAI tools to assist in composing job reqs, posts, personalized correspondence, etc.
• Agents. AI bots that communicate with other AI bots.

In addition, whether through AI or not, modern products maintain candidate records from email, telephone conversations, text and written communication to ensure a complete candidate-recruiter history.

Different strokes

Products differ in their focus -- for example, their ability to service large-volume hiring needs vs. hiring white-collar workers. Some AI applications are specific and intended to augment a traditional applicant tracking system (ATS). Examples include Eightfold AI for skills and insights; Fuel50 for its skill ontology for workforce mobility and talent management; VONQ for job advertising and distribution; and Datapeople.io or Textio, which provide language guidance for inclusive and diverse hiring.

Some products are tailored to specific industries. A feature in Oracle Cloud HCM Recruiting called Oracle Healthcare Talent Network enables healthcare providers to automatically generate and post job requisitions across talent agencies to find full-time and part-time job candidates with the needed skills, certifications and experiences in the target pay range. Staffing Engine is designed for use by staffing firms, while Codility and HackerRank (hardly a newcomer) are used to evaluate software developer skills objectively.

The key for buyers is twofold: Remember you are not buying AI, per se -- it is solely an underlying technology to help with the task at hand -- and that the product must address the primary business issues the recruiting organization faces.

Chatbots wise up

Yesterday's chatbots were often little more than popups that gave people a menu of choices from which to select more information. (These should never have been called chatbots.) With no intelligence and only the ability to jump to a canned FAQ answer, they were mainly useful for standard questions, such as, "What are my company's paid holidays for 2025?" AI provides natural language recognition to interpret the question and give a more specific and tailored response to the searcher for information. These are real chatbots; they can "chat."

The past 18 months have seen another jump: to copilots. Copilots are the ferrets of the internet. They can instantly find information in response to a query, including the sources. But an issue arises: Eventually copilots will spit out information from other copilots and accuracy might well become diluted. In addition, copilots are the GenAI assistants that can generate new content, hence their use in crafting job reqs and postings, personalized offer and rejection letters, and -- beyond talent acquisition -- performance reviews. GenAI is also a powerful tool in the hands of applicants, who use it to write application letters, resumes and the like.

Today's talent acquisition products have a variety of helpful bots with varying personalities. SmartRecruiters' SmartPal has apparently morphed into Winston, a bot that looks like a green alien; there's Taira of MyInterview, a Lego-looking scheduling assistant; Eightfold's Copilot and EVA (for Eightfold Virtual Assistant), and Paradox' Olivia. The AI-powered Digital Assistant from iCIMS answers candidate questions in real time, schedules interviews and identifies best-fit roles. Also, iCIMS Copilot further enhances productivity by generating tailored interview guides, optimizing job descriptions and writing emails to candidates in seconds. SAP has Joule, a copilot function for HCM users. Workday's new Recruiter Agent provides intelligent sourcing and streamlining for recruiters.

Chatbots, such as Paradox' Olivia and StepStone's Mya, are increasingly sophisticated and friendly. Most bots can help navigate career sites, present pertinent jobs to site visitors and assist in the application process. They then manage interview scheduling, calendar coordination and reminders. Olivia can manage an entire hiring process for an hourly worker in a series of friendly text conversations.

Enter agents

An AI agent is software that can interact with its environment, collect data and use the data to perform autonomously self-determined tasks to meet predetermined goals. It uses foundation models to execute complex, multistep workflows across a digital world. AI agents are action-oriented and interact with other agents. They analyze the collected data to predict the best outcomes that support the goals. They also use the results to formulate the next action they should take.

Gartner calls agents the future of AI. Indeed, agentic AI systems are the next frontier in HCM and workflow-dependent tasks like sourcing, recruiting and hiring. Buyers should make sure they know the current status and roadmap for agent support in any product under consideration.

Introduction to AI recruiting tools

There are many ways to evaluate products and vendors: breadth or depth of functionality provided, technology used, price, global availability, the software's sophistication and complexity, the degrees of support and training provided and the vendor's reputation for integrity or eco-consciousness, among others.

Below is a review of products that merit consideration in 2025. They were chosen because they rank high in web search results, are from established vendors, are comprehensive or in my judgment represent the best of today's leading edge.

The products tend to address the needs of at least three distinct user groups: candidates, recruiters and hiring managers, and often already-hired employees. The ATSes in general all support sourcing, job posting, data parsing, candidate shortlisting or ranking, multichannel communications, career site and mobile device chatbots, and intuitive UIs geared to the needs of the candidate, hiring manager and recruiter. All deliver analytics relevant to their product scope. They also provide bot-supported scheduling of interviews and follow-up conversations, a great boon to both candidates and recruiters. Several have extended their capabilities to current employees to meet the growing demand for career growth and mobility.

Serious buyers of new AI-powered recruiting software should not neglect products from ERP vendors, such as Oracle and Workday, or HCM providers, such as Dayforce, iCIMS and UKG. These companies are deeply vested in recruiting and talent management expertise and have the support teams, cloud infrastructure, secure platforms and deeper pockets than startups. While startups are still in the early stages of their product releases, these older companies have developed and refined their recruiting software and their support for customer initiatives. They also offer more complete products that reflect their time in the market.

The goal here is not to cover every feature or function; vendor websites have product briefs with that information. Again, because the requirements of the recruitment process are clearly defined, the products are more similar than different. Therefore, points of uniqueness or specific strengths form the basis of differentiating the vendors here, in alphabetical order, not ranked.

Dayforce

Dayforce, a small and mid-market HCM suite vendor, provides AI-powered talent acquisition as part of its integrated HCM suite. AI and machine learning are built in to automate time-consuming manual tasks. As is typical of suites, recruiting and onboarding are built into a single platform to facilitate new hires' success. AI-powered screening and matching tools help locate candidates with the right skills. Dayforce Co-Pilot automates manual processes and streamlines the creation of job requisitions, as well as the ability to move from offer to acceptance faster with simplified offer management.

AI helps identify top candidates faster with prescreening questions and AI-assisted candidate matching. Recruiters also use it to generate job descriptions in just a few clicks based on skills, profiles, keywords or previous postings.

Dayforce claims its Dayforce AI Agents are built to remove points of friction in the user experience and support human judgment while simplifying workforce complexity and enhancing productivity. By using a conversational AI interface in Dayforce Co-Pilot, Dayforce AI Agents simplify various workflows across the Dayforce application suite of HR, payroll, time, talent and analytics to drive improved efficiency for employees.

Eightfold AI Talent Intelligence Platform

Eightfold markets an AI-native talent intelligence platform that enables "holistic" talent strategies. Through its proprietary global data set of more than 1.5 billion talent profiles and skills, its AI generates recommendations to help employers decide how and when to build, buy or borrow talent. It employs a skills-based framework that matches people to opportunities, including full-time, part-time, project and gig work. Eightfold uses that data to understand the availability, maturity, relevance, learnability and evolution of skills in specific organizations and throughout the global market.

Eightfold's Talent Design supports skills-based talent decisions about the job requirements needed for every role in an organization. This skills-based approach drives decision-making around upskilling, reskilling, hiring, staffing of contractors and attaining diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals. Additionally, Talent Design examines skill adjacency and context to determine future capabilities and needs as organizations grow. The platform also enables self-learning, data-driven updates that help to ensure consistent, unbiased evaluations of individual capabilities and ability to learn against globally standardized job descriptions and requirements.

The Eightfold AI talent intelligence platform and accompanying suite of applications are available in 155 countries and 24 languages. One of the signature applications, Talent Management, enables employees to find reskilling and upskilling opportunities across courses, mentors and projects based on current skills and career aspirations. The goal of people developing their own skills and assuming responsibility for their career growth is addressed through curated opportunities for continuous learning. In addition, Talent Management includes succession planning capabilities. By using Eightfold, organizations can better understand the potential of their workforce on a global scale and guide individual employees to further learning, skill development and career opportunities.

The other main module of the talent intelligence suite, Talent Acquisition, represents the original functionality that Eightfold AI focused on when it was founded in 2016. Eightfold Talent Acquisition provides functions for sourcing, candidate relationship management (CRM), applicant tracking (requisition management, job distribution, offer management and such), interview scheduling and more. Eightfold AI also introduced Copilots that use GenAI to improve productivity and experiences for candidates, employees and recruiters.

Eightfold integrates with Workday, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, Oracle Taleo, Oracle Recruiting Cloud, Greenhouse and others.

Fuel50

Most of the products that play a part in recruiting begin with the job or role. Fuel50 turns that premise on its head, looking first at the skills across the organization and how to better position them. This requires reviewing every job description and updating it with the talents and skills needed for each role, rather than the degrees, years of experience and certifications required. Fuel50 helps people identify their talents and skills and supports their growth with career development actions, feedback and learning. The result is not just internal talent mobility but also workforce agility.

A woman-owned company founded by Anne Fulton, Fuel50 provides an AI-driven talent marketplace that also fuels engagement and employee retention with global coverage. Its tool helps organizations understand their bench strength, build talent pipelines, predict skills shortages and conduct workforce mapping.

Fuel50's AI architecture uses validated career frameworks to fast-track the rebuilding of an organization's career framework to eliminate the manual process of creating and maintaining job profiles, which change often in growing companies. Fuel50's latest release, the Skills Intelligence platform, combines the robust skills architecture underpinnings with market data, enabling organizations to inventory skills and predict and benchmark skill demand in a way that enables an organization to be truly skills first.

HireEZ

HireEZ (formerly Hiretual) is a near decade-old AI-powered CRM platform created to address candidate sourcing and management from the recruiter's point of view. The product pulls together data from more than 800 million candidates from 45-plus open web platforms, market insights to build strategic recruiting campaigns and candidate engagement capabilities. One recent addition is HireEZ Rediscovery, which looks at ATS pools and transforms outdated profiles into actionable talent data. It de-dupes and enriches candidate profiles, giving the recruiter the ability to reengage talent already familiar with the organization and hire directly from the existing database. Another important feature is its deep integration with the ATS for two-way synchronization to align recruiting efforts with the ATS open req process without having to switch between systems.

Other features of interest include top-of-funnel automation and analytics capabilities, HireEZ's AI sourcing hub and a text campaign feature for candidate communication. HireEZ described the value of texting in a recent blog post: "Texting is the communication parallel to a dating app swipe. It's casual, direct, and incredibly high-stakes. Mess up here, and your message is as appealing as political campaign spam. But nail it? You've got their attention in a way email never could."

HireVue

HireVue calls its product a "talent experience platform" designed to automate workflows and scale hiring. Long noted for its video interview capabilities, HireVue has made them less bias-prone by using natural language recognition to provide a transcript for hiring managers and recruiters. The process creates a blind interview and eliminates potential discrimination by race, gender, color, appearance, dialect, name, age, etc.

New this year is HireVue's Find My Fit, one of the 13 products that were named top HR products of the year by Human Resource Executive and the HR Technology Conference. Find My Fit helps candidates identify roles that best match their potential by quickly assessing their skills, interests and personality. Candidates complete a brief assessment covering these areas, and the results are compared to the organization's open opportunities. This comparison recommends roles that align with the candidate's profile. By matching candidates based on their skills and interests, Find My Fit is intended to drive candidates to better-suited roles but also help expand the talent pool's diversity.

HireVue's Hiring Assistant matches candidate skills with available job opportunities. Its AI recruiting features are smart enough to ensure that tricky titles or confusing job descriptions don't slow down the recruiting process. HireVue's AI recruiting assistant bot is text-only and provides chat-based job matching. It supports mobile devices and smartwatches via text messaging and WhatsApp.

HireVue uses static algorithms in AI recruiting because the company believes algorithms should be highly controlled and tested by expert industrial-organizational (IO) psychologists and data scientists throughout a model's entire lifecycle. The company says this approach can help to reduce hiring bias and make the process fairer. Its AI is both static and deterministic, meaning algorithms are not being retrained or "learning" on the fly, and they provide repeatable output each time they are used. With HireVue AI systems, the algorithm is trained and tested in the "lab" and then locked before deployment. The system can only learn new things if someone chooses to update it.

The vendor's documentation, which is prominently placed on its website, merits attention. HireVue has done something I have nagged vendors about for half a decade: It explained how its AI engine works to mitigate adverse impacts on protected groups. It has articulated a very clear, detailed and understandable "Explainability Statement" providing the transparency that is essential when using AI-based products for hiring and assessment. In addition, a second statement, "Bias, AI ethics and the HireVue approach," documents HireVue's approach to ethical AI in online hiring.

Every purveyor of AI in talent acquisition should make sure buyers have such an understanding.

iCIMS Talent Cloud

A leader in the standalone talent acquisition marketplace, iCIMS fortified this position with its iCIMS Talent Cloud. iCIMS employs native purpose-built AI across its integrated platforms to improve how an organization can attract, engage, hire and advance top candidates through an AI engine trained on billions of real-world recruiting data points. The AI-based Digital Assistant answers candidate questions in real time, schedules interviews and identifies best-fit roles.

iCIMS Copilot is a GenAI-powered recruiting assistant that delivers experiences and insights across the talent acquisition lifecycle to improve efficiency, accelerate hiring velocity, reduce cost of hiring and build a competitive hiring edge. Features include a Copilot that assists users in crafting edits to job descriptions and generates tailored interview guides, optimizes job descriptions and writes emails to candidates in seconds.

From the Scheduling Management page, interviewers can launch another Copilot, answer a short series of prompts, and it will provide potential interview questions.

A Copilot writing assistant automates the creation of personalized, high-quality emails, helping recruiters reach talent faster and more effectively.

AI and GenAI are implemented throughout the iCIMS portfolio, including the ATS, iCIMS CXM and career sites. AI sources and matches applicants, reviews and ranks candidates, identifies equally skilled candidates based on experience, and enables job seekers to surface relevant open jobs at a company quickly, using self-service resume uploading.

iCIMS AI exposes the logic behind the candidate recommendations with visual confirmation of the criteria and hierarchy used to identify matches. AI also shows the relationship between the title of the requisition and the skills named in it, and the job titles and skills in a candidate's profile.

Oracle Recruiting

For organizations using Oracle Cloud HCM for core HR, this closely integrated recruiting product makes sense. Thanks to its long time in the market and experience in hiring-management applications, Oracle provides sophisticated breadth and depth to address CRM and hiring management. It also applies a wealth of experience in UI creation, outshining some newer market entrants. Both traditional and generative AI span the Oracle HCM products, with examples as follows:

• Generating job postings. As recruiters work on requisitions, GenAI creates an engaging job description based on the job title, similar postings and job parameters. It also suggests recommended skills to include.
• Composing messages to candidates. Recruiters can use GenAI to craft personalized messages to candidates that draw on job and applicant details to provide context. They can also indicate the tone, such as friendly or professional.
• Summarizing candidate experiences. GenAI helps candidates by summarizing relevant skills, qualifications and work experience from their resumes. This also benefits recruiters, who get a concise, easy-to-read synopsis that prioritizes important information when they're viewing applicant profiles.
• Time-to-hire prediction. AI-based predictive modeling benchmarks and predicts how long it will take to fill a job based on past hires.

Oracle Recruiting takes advantage of GenAI to create a customized career site that's accessible across devices without help from designers or programmers. It allows candidates to use their resumes to get job recommendations, browse jobs with AI-powered feedback on fit, and apply for positions.

A new Direct Apply function creates two-way integration between Oracle Recruiting and partnered talent marketplaces such as LinkedIn and Bayt, with Indeed coming soon. Job seekers can apply quickly without leaving the marketplace, and with job applications in Oracle Recruiting that are populated with clean, complete data. AI and GenAI are also deployed for use in employee skills growth and career development, performance management and peer recognition, and HR service delivery.

Oracle provides AI agents throughout its Fusion Applications. There are four kinds: conversational, functional, supervisory and utility. Conversational agents interact with humans, but also with other software programs. Functional agents, also called user-proxy agents, are most commonly associated with a particular organizational persona or role. The hiring manager functional agent, for example, performs tasks including documenting requirements, such as candidate skills and experience, which can be applied to assist with hiring decisions and reviewing job postings created by other GenAI systems for accuracy. A supervisory agent directs other agents and drives the planning and reasoning needed to achieve an objective, while a utility agent is usually associated with a specific function and tool and is called on by other agents to perform a task, such as querying a database, sending an email, performing a calculation or retrieving a document.

Paradox

Paradox' conversational software is underpinned by an intelligent AI assistant that helps get repetitive, manual hiring work done across both high-volume hourly and high-value corporate use cases.

In March 2024, Paradox launched the world's first conversational ATS, a next-generation innovation built to help employers with large frontline, hourly staff to hire faster, take work off frontline managers' plates and save money. The product suite, which includes an ATS, CRM and career sites, is powered by a conversational AI assistant, Olivia.

Paradox is an SAP-Endorsed App and the vendor recently announced its Workday Certified Badge for its scheduling automation integration with Workday Recruiting. The latter makes it easier for talent acquisition teams to use Paradox' conversational interview scheduling directly from Workday Recruiting through a simple API. In September, Paradox was also named among the early adopters of the Workday AI Marketplace, a curated effort to make it easier for Workday customers to find trustworthy AI products that meet Workday's AI standards and values.

The company has been ranked one of the fastest growing companies in HR tech by the Deloitte Fast 500 and has made the Inc. 5000 list for four consecutive years. One client, Southern Rock Restaurants, reports saving more than $840,000 in a single year after implementing Paradox. In addition, the Josh Bersin Company published a case study illustrating the tangible results this type of automation can have on talent acquisition teams, in which Paradox helped General Motors save more than $2 million in operational recruiting costs in under a year.

In a slightly different vein, after acquiring Traitify, a mobile-first assessment platform, Paradox debuted Animated Assessment. Starring a character named Ash, the two-minute mobile phone app measures a person's openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism through "me" and "not me" responses. Recruiters can then use the results to ascertain the fit with their current openings.

Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience

Phenom is one of the AI-native products that ties recruiting to follow-on talent management by including employee career pathing and supporting internal mobility. The Phenom Automation Engine was named one of 13 top HR products of the year by Human Resource Executive and the HR Technology Conference. It integrates advanced automation into each stage of the talent lifecycle to support HR teams in designing, implementing and monitoring workflows. By automating tedious tasks, such as candidate sourcing, screening and scheduling, the engine accelerates hiring and enhances candidate experiences. Its process mining capabilities uncover new optimization opportunities, leading to improved conversion rates and higher volumes of quality hires. This innovation, according to Phenom, provides personalized and efficient hiring, growth and retention processes, helping organizations engage employees with relevant recommendations that support career development and upskilling.

Phenom's high-volume hiring system enables companies to engage candidates via chatbot or SMS, letting them search for jobs, apply, complete an assessment, submit a video and schedule an interview with no recruiter interaction. The assessment feature is a newer addition built by Phenom's IO psychologists to succinctly capture the qualifications needed for frontline jobs in several industries.

Knowledge worker roles, in contrast, need AI that provides the personalized process and engagement candidates expect, and the AI-driven analysis recruiters and managers require during the interview process. For roles in the middle, a mix of automation and personalization can be used to streamline filling positions that require some education and certifications, such as electricians and medical assistants.

To improve the candidate experience, Phenom Talent Companion employs an AI chatbot that creates a streamlined but highly personalized engagement with knowledge worker candidates to find relevant jobs and get them through the application process faster.

To aid the growing trend of doing more with less among talent marketers, the Phenom Talent Experience Engine integrates GenAI with a connected Talent Data Platform that eases the ability to create content at scale. Marketers will also be able to dig deep into their candidate, employee or alumni data to craft segments for personalization of content to drive higher levels of engagement and conversion.

Post-application, Interview Intelligence provides a centralized location for the hiring team to evaluate potential hires. Interviewers are provided with an AI summary of the interview, highlighting areas of interest based on the job requirements, as well as potential biases of the interviewer.

The AI assistant, Phenom X+, helps generate interview guides for keeping interviewers on track and avoiding bias or potentially illegal questions. X+ also enables recruiting teams to improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks like scheduling interviews, adding notes to candidate profiles, drafting individual emails and generating job descriptions. Phenom has also included this technology at the front end of the process, allowing the X+ assistant to augment intake discussions, record the meetings and make suggestions for improvements to job descriptions and matching criteria.

Sourcers will also benefit from X+ features with the recent release of the Phenom X+ Source tool, giving them the ability to use natural language queries to quickly find best-fit candidates from their CRM or Phenom's public data set. Sourcers can also use the powerful campaign tools and email generation assistant to improve their outreach.

Phenom also provides users with the tools they need to onboard, develop and retain hires. Skills are central to the technology that drives the entire platform, and they are especially relevant to Phenom's workforce intelligence system. This holistic suite of products is meant to engage employees and managers in talent management to facilitate personalized talent development, mentorships and internal mobility. With a skills ontology almost 15 years in the making, workforce intelligence makes it easier for HR to identify and fill skills gaps, managers to designate successors and promote career progression and employees to gain visibility into opportunities that might help them excel in the organization.

All of this ties back to talent acquisition activities as well, enabling recruiters to employ skills technology to quickly find the best fit for an open role, whether inside or outside the organization. The AI does the heavy lifting but keeps the human in the loop by letting recruiters and managers incorporate their needs when a role opens.

TurboHire

TurboHire uses AI and automation to create login-less, mobile-first hiring experiences for mid-market companies. Designed for all stakeholders, the platform addresses many corporate, sales, bulk hiring and campus hiring scenarios.

Its applications of AI include the following:

• Streamlining the hiring process for blue- and grey-collar roles with AI-driven automation, bulk processing, WhatsApp bot workflows and secure document management for efficiency and compliance.
• Managing high-volume walk-in hiring with AI-driven tools, automating candidate screening, scheduling and communication for a seamless and organized process.
• Supporting AI for tasks all recruiters face, such as job marketing and screening, interview scheduling, feedback collection, and candidate engagement and inquiry.

Like in other products reviewed here, customizing is possible without touching code, so recruiters can adapt TurboHire for their preferred practices.

TurboHire has AI-enabled many of the standard workflows of recruiting and hiring, delivered in a series of modules. Like most such products, the focus is on productivity and efficiency. The company claims to have automated 85% of manual recruiting activities. Its platform integrates with products from companies such as Oracle and SAP SuccessFactors. Single sign-on is accommodated with Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace.

Workday

All the major contenders in the HCM market have integrated their own AI capabilities in the augmentation strategies discussed earlier. Then there is the build-or-buy decision, and Workday's decision to buy AI-native HiredScore leapfrogged its own product's AI capabilities. HiredScore provides what it calls talent orchestration, which enables companies to use explainable AI-driven insights to match, rediscover, and coordinate talent for hiring stakeholders. The combination of Workday and HiredScore will provide organizations with a comprehensive and intelligent talent acquisition and internal mobility system that, according to the company, includes the ability to use responsible AI to solve recruiting challenges by providing an explainable way for customers to match, hire and manage talent from across their talent ecosystem.

Workday also claims HiredScore helps manage the talent lifecycle by enabling recruiters to better use data to connect talent with open opportunities. It also enhances internal mobility and upskilling by helping employees to more easily identify and prepare for new opportunities.

Workday unveiled four new AI agents at the 2024 HR Technology Conference: Recruiter, Expenses, Succession and Workday Optimize Agents. The agents are powered by Workday Illuminate, its next-gen AI with models that are fueled by the more than 800 billion business transactions processed by the Workday platform annually. The agents are the first of many to come from Workday as the vendor seeks to radically simplify business processes for users and elevate humans at work.

The Recruiter agent is most relevant to this discussion. It will proactively source passive candidates, automate outreach and recommend top talent for open roles -- significantly reducing time-to-fill and improving hiring quality. The agent automates tasks like creating job descriptions, sourcing candidates and scheduling interviews, and it provides AI-based insights into candidate profiles. The agent also integrates with communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, enabling hiring managers to receive notifications and leave interview feedback in users' natural flow of work.

There are plans for agents to talk to other agents to deliver outcomes and answers mined from multiple platforms. Workday is integrating these agents with tools like Salesforce and Microsoft to support enterprise-wide use.

Another tool, Workday Assistant, offers AI-powered, role-specific support to employees. It provides quick answers to HR questions and is accessible from any device. It also helps employees take faster action, offering company-specific guidance to complete complex tasks.

Workday recently acquired Evisort, an AI-native document intelligence platform. Evisort's AI capabilities will be integrated into Workday's finance and HR suite, enabling customers to unlock insights from unstructured data, such as contracts and policy documents, for faster decision-making.

AI in talent sourcing

While AI-powered sourcing is included in most of the talent acquisition products reviewed here, there are also AI tools specific to sourcing that can augment an ATS. Products that use AI in sourcing have the advantage of searching huge, widespread sources of talent almost instantly. As the first product offerings from their respective vendors, these might grow into full-fledged ATSes over time, be acquired and added to an ATS player's product or remain as a separate tool for at least the short term.

Fetcher

If there were a reward for clever product names, Fetcher might win because it does just that: fetches potential applicants. Fetcher is a candidate sourcing and scheduling tool with the recruiting analytics buyers expect. Used by small businesses with English-only needs, it identifies candidates based on AI-driven keyword matches. Over time, it learns a company's candidate preferences and identifies potential talent accordingly.

The platform automates the standard requirements for email outreach campaigns, provides a duplication option to reuse previous search criteria and has a notes feature for recruiter feedback. The information provided is piped directly to the vendor's internal teams to further tailor the search, enhance the algorithms and help Fetcher find and deliver the candidates sought. The scheduling plugin allows for rapid company-branded scheduling of telephone screens and interviews.

While the sourcing functions of this product are not unique, it is nonetheless an intuitive tool for recruiters in small businesses. It integrates out of the box with Ashby, Fountain, Greenhouse, Lever, JazzHR, Oracle Taleo, Recruitee, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, SmartRecruiters and Teamtailor.

SeekOut

SeekOut provides an AI-powered talent search engine to help recruiters quickly find and hire the most qualified passive candidates. It appears to be Boolean-based, a potentially limiting approach that can be hard to use. The company says it provides access to hundreds of millions of candidates from potentially untapped talent pools, including public profiles, GitHub, the papers and patents of experts, employee referrals, company alumni and candidates already in the organization's ATS. There are more than 100 searchable fields that include skill sets, background, experience, education and diversity, as well as fields such as security clearance, which is useful for U.S. federal government positions. A healthcare talent pool, for example, includes 5.5 million healthcare professionals. In all, the company claims to have over 800 million public profiles, 330 million of which are underrepresented candidates.

SeekOut supports the concept of a total talent pool as well as individuals. Recruiters can see total amalgamated talent by location and specific people with that talent in that location. This is a potentially valuable feature many other platforms lack.

SeekOut's ability to locate and screen tech talent should be a draw for organizations that need technologists. From GitHub, the app can provide and review code to better evaluate a potential applicant's technical prowess. It appears to be easy and intuitive to use, albeit with an underwhelming UI for people accustomed to today's glitzier applications.

AI planning for buyers

If you are in the market for a new talent acquisition system or are augmenting an existing system, you will very likely be looking at a product that has AI capabilities. Traditional AI, GenAI and intelligent agents can greatly assist recruiters and hiring managers because of the speed and accuracy with which hiring needs can be addressed.

This means carefully evaluating the vendor in addition to the product by asking the following questions:

• First and foremost, does the product address your organization's specific needs?
• How big is the support team that works with each customer on organization-specific machine learning? How do they prevent a cold start and ensure the model has enough historical data to make good predictions?
• How often is the system refreshed with new learning?
• What is the AI development team's roadmap for the year ahead?
• Will AI-savvy support teams be spread too thin to accommodate a growing customer base?
• What kind of customer education is provided about how the system works?
• How does the vendor support the AI transparency essential to explainability?
• What is the model for anomaly detection?
• How often do the vendor's data scientists monitor the system for signs it has drifted away from intended outcomes?
• How and where are intelligent agents used in the product and where will they be added in the future?

Take the time to also ask questions on data privacy, sovereignty, network security and the vendor's ability to provide support for the solution.

Conclusion

The quest for superior talent is never-ending. Recruiters will be able to accomplish this faster and more easily through smart technology choices that include traditional AI, machine learning, GenAI and natural language processing. Just as important: by making wise purchasing decisions, they can also ensure their ability to ethically hire a diverse employee base.

Today's tools cover every aspect of talent acquisition, from recruitment marketing to sourcing, job description management, candidate assessment and pre-screening; recommending other positions in an organization to qualified applicants; offer and rejection management; skill assessment; and career and learning assistance and direction -- all with far more sophisticated analytics than were available in the past.

Empty positions, delays in hiring decisions, and losing candidates to competitors are an economic hit to organizations. The use of AI in talent acquisition changes that dynamic. Today's AI adds efficiency, speed and economy to every major step in the sourcing and hiring process. And this is just the beginning. Advances in intelligent agents that communicate with one another will herald the next significant step of AI in talent acquisition.

Katherine Jones is an independent market analyst and consultant. She was an analyst at the Aberdeen Group and Bersin by Deloitte and partner at Mercer following a career in high-tech companies and higher education.