Solutions / Recruiting and staffing

AI automation for recruiting and staffing firms

The parser reads the resume, then somebody corrects the employment dates it merged, which is most of the time it was supposed to save.

Resumes arrive in every format that has ever existed, including scans with no text layer and designed templates in two columns that get read in the wrong order. Parsing is nearly always a third-party component, and its characteristic failure is employment history: dates written as ranges with words in them produce merged employers and wrong tenure.

Where a client mandates a vendor management portal, entry into it is manual by contract rather than by technical accident. The agency holds the candidate in its own system and types them again into the portal, then types timesheets into both, every week, for the length of the assignment.

Submission records are legally significant here in a way outsiders miss. When two agencies present the same candidate, the acknowledgement of representation and the timestamps decide the fee, which makes the integrity of that record more important than its convenience.


Figure 01 / the ground

What this work runs through

Systems / commonly in place Yours may differ, and that is the point of week one
  • Bullhorn
  • JobDiva
  • Greenhouse
  • SAP Fieldglass
  • Checkr
  • Textkernel
  • Outlook

Artefacts that move through the business

  • Job order on the agency side, requisition on the client side
  • Submittal, the packaged candidate that is the billing-relevant event
  • Right to represent, which is a permission rather than a document
  • Placement record with rates, and the guarantee period attached
  • Timesheets, entered weekly into the portal and the back office
intake
Intake and triage
documents
Documents and records
scheduling
Scheduling and dispatch
follow up
Follow up and status
compliance
Compliance and audit

Figure 02 / where it breaks

The specific things that go wrong here

Parsers mangle exactly the field that matters

Ranges written with abbreviations or the word current produce wrong tenure, merged roles, dropped positions or a title filed under the wrong employer. Any ranking that trusts parsed tenure inherits the error and presents it with confidence.

The client portal is mandated and closed

Entry into a vendor management system is a contractual obligation with no interface offered to the agency, so the duplicate typing cannot be engineered away from the agency side.

Duplicate candidate records multiply

The same person arrives from a job board and from a referral, and again as a direct application, and matching on name or address is unreliable enough that the duplicates survive.

Sourcing automation runs into platform terms

Job board interfaces are rate limited and restricted by terms, and scraping the large professional network violates its terms and ends accounts. This is a hard boundary on the obvious idea.


Figure 03 / candidates

What we would automate, and when we would not

vms requisition intake

Turning portal requisition alerts into one owned job order

A requisition posted in SAP Fieldglass reaches a supplier as a notification, and the distribution tier the agency sits in decides how long it holds the posting before a second tier is released into it.

Runs against SAP Fieldglass / JobDiva / Bullhorn / Outlook

submittal precheck

Checking a submittal against the rules of the client

Fieldglass refuses a job seeker outright once a supplier has used the submission slots allowed on that posting, and the error names the limit rather than the fix.

Runs against SAP Fieldglass / Bullhorn / Greenhouse

duplicate candidate merge

Collapsing one person into a single candidate record

The same person arrives as a board application, then as a referral, then again when a second recruiter uploads a document that came in by email.

Runs against Bullhorn / JobDiva / Textkernel

interview slot confirmation

Confirming an interview slot in every place it lives

Free busy lookup stops at the boundary of the tenant, so the calendar of a hiring manager is invisible to a supplier and availability comes back as prose in an email.

Runs against Outlook / Bullhorn / Twilio / SAP Fieldglass

screening order stall

Noticing a screening order that quietly went nowhere

Checkr fires an invitation expired event when a candidate never finishes the form, and most integrations listen for a completed report and nothing else.

Runs against Checkr / Bullhorn / Twilio

work authorisation expiry

Catching work authorisation that expires mid assignment

Reverification lives on Supplement B of Form I-9, which replaced the old third section, and it is triggered by a date on a document rather than by an event anyone announces.

Runs against Bullhorn / JobDiva / Outlook

timesheet invoice reconciliation

Matching approved portal hours against what you billed

Where automatic invoicing is switched on against the supplier record, the portal raises the invoice and the agency is left matching a document it did not write against hours it has already paid out.

Runs against SAP Fieldglass / Bullhorn / QuickBooks Online / Excel


Constraint / why a person stays in the loop Checked against your own jurisdiction

This is the sector where the boundary is sharpest, and it is worth stating plainly: rejection is the regulated act, not enrichment. Parsing and deduplication carry little exposure, and so do formatting, scheduling and the chasing of timesheets. Ranking, scoring, filtering or automatically rejecting candidates engages selection-procedure rules on adverse impact, and several jurisdictions now impose specific duties on automated employment decision tools, including bias auditing with published results and advance notice to candidates in one city. Another state requires notice and prohibits using postal code as a proxy for a protected class, and recordkeeping obligations covering the system and the selection criteria in another. Adjudicating a background report separately triggers a required sequence of pre-adverse and final notices with a copy of the report. Those steps need a named human decision maker and a retained record.

Related: Accounting and bookkeeping Law firms. Or start from the four shapes of work instead of from an industry.