Can an agent do recruitment?
Half, and the boundary is unusually sharp. Sourcing, screening, scheduling and coordination are agent work. Assessment is not — partly because agents judge candidates poorly, and partly because automated hiring decisions carry legal exposure in the EU and parts of the US.
- Hours back per week
- 12
- Human cost
- €4,000–8,000/mo internally, or 15–25% of first-year salary in fees
- Agent cost
- €40–120/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Write the job description
MOSTLYClear, structured, inclusive language checked. Needs your reality about the actual role.
Source candidates
YESSearches far more broadly than a human, including profiles that do not use your keywords.
Screen for hard requirements
YESRight to work, certifications, years in a specific tool. Objective and checkable.
- Yours
Screen for fit and potential
NOT YETThis is where bias enters and where models are demonstrably unreliable. Do not automate it.
Schedule interviews
YESThe coordination burden that makes hiring slow. Removing it shortens time-to-hire more than anything else here.
Keep candidates informed
YESThe thing every company promises and nobody does. An agent actually does it.
- Yours
Interview
NOT YETA candidate is also evaluating you, and an automated interview answers that question badly.
- Yours
Make the decision
NOT YETIn the EU, fully automated hiring decisions with legal effect are restricted under GDPR Article 22. Elsewhere, it is still a bad idea.
Reference and background checks
MOSTLYChasing and collecting, yes. Interpreting a lukewarm reference, no.
4/6 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Every assessment and decision
- Interviewing
- Offer conversations
- Anything that could be challenged as discriminatory
How this goes wrong
Automated CV ranking. It reproduces whatever pattern is in your historical hires, which means it encodes your past bias with a confident score attached — and under EU rules that is both a compliance problem and a fairness one.
What it needs access to
- ATS
- LinkedIn or job boards
- Calendar
- Assessment tools
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my recruitment coordinator, not my recruiter. For each open role: source candidates matching the hard requirements only — qualifications, right to work, specific verifiable experience — and never score, rank or rate a candidate on fit, potential, culture or communication. Present them in the order you found them with the hard requirements evidenced. Schedule interviews and handle all rescheduling. Send every candidate an update within 48 hours of any stage change, including rejections, in a warm and specific tone. Chase references. Never reject a candidate, never make an assessment, never tell a candidate anything about their chances.
Questions people ask
Is it legal to use AI to screen candidates?
It depends on what "screen" means. Filtering on objective, verifiable requirements is generally fine. Automated evaluation or ranking of people is regulated — GDPR Article 22 restricts solely automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects, the EU AI Act treats employment-related systems as high risk, and New York City requires bias audits for automated employment decision tools. Take advice before automating any judgement about a person.
Can an agent replace a recruitment agency?
It replaces the search and coordination that agencies charge a percentage for. It does not replace a recruiter with a genuine network in a tight market, which is what the fee is actually buying at the senior end.
What is the single biggest win?
Candidate communication. Most hiring processes lose good people to silence, and an agent that updates every candidate within 48 hours fixes that at zero marginal cost.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to ATS and LinkedIn or job boards, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a recruitment agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.