Agentic AI in Recruiting: Three Ways to Improve Hiring 

Candidates are already using AI to find jobs, research employers, polish resumes, and apply to more opportunities. Many employers are still catching up. 

I co-hosted a webinar with Kim Ullstrup, Product Operations Manager at Horizontal Talent, where we discussed how agentic AI can help employers adapt to this new recruiting reality. 

Research from LinkedIn shows that U.S. applicants per open role have doubled since spring 2022. Yet 66% of recruiters say finding qualified talent has become harder. 

At the same time, candidates increasingly expect the same personalized, responsive experiences they receive from companies like Netflix and Amazon. Agentic AI can help employers address both challenges by identifying qualified talent more efficiently and creating more engaging candidate experiences. 

During the webinar, we explored three key ways agentic AI can help employers drive efficiencies while keeping people at the center of hiring.  

1. Find qualified talent before buying more targeted traffic 

When a new requisition opens, the first step shouldn’t always be purchasing more recruitment advertising. Organizations have spent years building databases of previous applicants, ATS profiles, and talent communities. Agentic AI can help pinpoint and re-engage qualified candidates within these existing pools before employers invest in attracting net-new applicants. 

Recruitment advertising remains essential for enterprise organizations, as candidates continue to turn to job boards to discover opportunities. AI can help recruiters spend smarter by continuously optimizing advertising across channels based on job, candidate, and performance data. Rather than focusing on clicks or application volume, agentic capabilities enable employers to prioritize sourcing talent through channels that deliver the most qualified applicants. 

The result is a more targeted approach that makes better use of existing talent relationships and recruitment marketing budgets. 

2. Create more personalized career site experiences 

Candidates expect instant responses and relevant experiences during the hiring process, but traditional career sites often offer a limited path: search for a job and either apply or leave. 

Agentic AI enables a more flexible experience. Career site agents can answer questions, understand candidate interests, recommend relevant opportunities, and guide visitors toward appropriate next steps. 

Not every visitor is ready to apply, and not every qualified candidate will find the right opening immediately. Intelligent agents can help employers build talent communities and maintain relationships for future opportunities. 

As candidates also increasingly rely on their own AI agents during the job search, these interactions may also involve candidates’ agents communicating directly with employer agents. 

One thing to keep in mind when implementing any AI agents during the hiring process is the importance of transparency. Candidates should know when they’re interacting with AI and agents should accurately represent your employer brand voice throughout the process. 

3. Help recruiters look beyond the resume 

AI has simplified how candidates create polished resumes and cover letters, making it more challenging for recruiters to distinguish qualifications based on application materials alone. 

As Kim highlighted during our discussion, “The resume used to be that golden ticket. It was the primary tool used to identify qualified candidates. Now, we need to look beyond the resume and use more human judgement to determine who to move forward with, how to move forward, and how to be most efficient in that process.” 

Growing applicant volume adds to the challenge. According to LinkedIn’s September 2026 research, 64% of U.S. talent acquisition professionals say it’s becoming harder to know who to trust and what’s real when assessing candidates. 

Agentic screening and matching can help by evaluating job-relevant qualifications, asking role-specific follow-up questions based on each applicant’s responses, and offering informed recommendations of best-fit candidates. 

These capabilities give recruiters more bandwidth for skills validation, nuanced evaluation, relationship building, and making informed final hiring decisions.  

Where should employers start? 

Agentic AI presents opportunities across the recruiting journey, but adopting more technology alone won’t guarantee better outcomes. 

Kim shared an important piece of advice during our conversation: “Start by mapping the work, not simply shopping for technology. Map out a day in the life of a recruiter, including what they’re actually doing, not just what the job description says they’re doing. And work from there.” 

Based on mapping out recruiters’ day-to-day responsibilities, evaluate how AI can support existing workflows with appropriate transparency and human oversight. Consider how new agentic capabilities will integrate with existing systems, including your ATS, and which tasks these capabilities can take off recruiters’ plates. 

When researching potential agentic providers, evaluate how they approach transparency, bias, data privacy, and trust. Ask for documentation from their trust center to understand how each provider addresses these priorities, safeguards candidate information, and ensures a fair hiring process. Equally important is identifying what AI will handle, how decisions will be made, and where human oversight remains essential. 

Start building a smarter recruiting strategy 

As candidates increasingly use AI throughout their job search, employers have an opportunity to rethink how they attract, engage, and evaluate talent. Agentic AI can help recruiting teams work more efficiently while giving people more time to build relationships and make informed hiring decisions. 

With hiring challenges persisting and AI adoption accelerating, talent leaders face important decisions about where to invest their time, resources, and technology. Leoforce’s Q3 Workforce Trends Report can help inform these decisions by offering insights into the latest labor market data, evolving candidate expectations, and five actionable recommendations to prepare for success in 2027. 

Are you ready to identify where agentic AI could make the biggest difference in your recruiting process? Schedule a demo to see how Leoforce can help.