Automating repetitive recruiting administrative tasks

I’ll be honest.

I did not want an AI recruiter.

We’re in the people business.
Our reputation is built on relationships.
And I’ve spent 20+ years telling clients that great recruiting is instinct, judgment, and nuance.

So the idea of introducing a digital, agentic recruiter into Tier4 Group?
It felt… risky.

What if candidates hated it?
What if it diluted our brand?
What if it made us feel transactional?

But here’s what leadership really is:

It’s not protecting what’s comfortable.
It’s testing what’s possible.

So we built Taylor, powered by AlexAI.
And we measured everything.

Here’s what actually happened in our first 12 months:
11,500+ completed interviews
38,000+ invitations sent
30% completion rate
84% of candidates rate the experience 4/5 or higher

That 84% stat stopped me in my tracks.

Because I care deeply about candidate experience. It’s personal. Our name is on it.

What I’ve learned:

Taylor (AI) doesn’t replace our recruiters.
It replaces friction.

It doesn’t remove humanity.
It removes back-and-forth scheduling emails at 9:30 at night.

It doesn’t make decisions.
It creates structured insight faster so our humans can make better ones.

And here’s the part no one talks about enough...

Sometimes as founders, we resist change not because it’s wrong… but because it challenges our identity.

I built my career on being the person in the room reading between the lines.

But scaling that instinct requires tools.

Taylor hasn’t made us less human.
It’s made our humans sharper.

More time advising.
More time closing.
More time building trust.

We’re still learning. We’re still refining.

But I’m glad I didn’t let fear win.



Oh, and here are some stats I asked our team to pull on the time it would have taken a human to complete all of those interviews and the tasks associated with them. Go ahead and tell me we made the wrong move... I'll wait.

10,650 hours = about 266 full-time weeks of work (at 40 hrs/week)
That’s about 5.1 FTE-years (assuming ~2,080 hrs per year per person)

AI in TA is already here.
This week my team sat down to pressure test how we’re using it and where we need guardrails.

Our stance is simple:
AI can support.
AI can summarize.
AI can suggest.

But it doesn’t decide.
Recruiters still review.
Recruiters still recommend.

Speed matters.
Trust matters more.
The goal isn’t to replace recruiters.
It’s to elevate them.

How are you protecting the human touch while embracing AI?
#TalentAcquisition #AIinHR #FutureOfWork #RecruitmentLeadership #HumanCenteredHiring

I DID IT. I AUTOMATED MY RECRUITING BACKEND WITH CLAUDE CODE.
And ironically, it made me more confident in the future of recruiting, not less.

I recently learned about the "doorman fallacy". When automatic doors were introduced, many hotels assumed they would no longer need doormen. They believed the job was simply opening the door. What they failed to recognize was that the visible task was not the value. The value was the relationship. The doorman greeted guests by name, built familiarity over time, hailed cabs, carried luggage, and created a sense of trust and hospitality that no automated door could replicate.

That framing has been sitting with me because over the last two days I have nearly automated my backend recruiting workflow using Claude Code. I built systems that identify candidates in my vetted network, surface them to me for open roles, screen my inbox to determine who else I should be speaking with from the VC talent community, who I have not followed up with, and draft succinct notes pulled from my extensive candidate notes explaining to founders why specific matches from our network make sense. It is far from perfect. It is scrappy, occasionally messy, and could be significantly optimized. But it works, and it will only get better as the models improve. As a talent partner supporting an entire portfolio, that speed matters. More importantly, it means I am spending less time clicking through profiles one by one and more time going deep with founders, hiring teams, and our candidates.

This reinforced something I have believed for a long time. The mechanical parts of our jobs are not the reason we have them. Searching, tagging, sorting, summarizing, and writing repetitive emails were necessary steps, but they were never the moat. The moat is trust built between humans. It is a founder calling you first because they need someone in their corner, not just in their inbox. It is a candidate being honest with you because they know you will be honest back. It is pattern recognition that only exists because of years of real conversations with real people who chose to let you in. The moat is not what you do. It is who you are to people.

As a recruiter, if you define your role by opening the door, automation feels threatening. If you define your role by building the relationship, automation is leverage.

I use AI in recruitment, and I genuinely believe it has made parts of the process more efficient. It helps organize information, structure notes, and remove repetitive tasks that used to consume hours.

But I’ve become cautious about how quickly people assume AI can replace the human side of hiring.

Hiring isn’t just pattern recognition. It’s not just matching keywords on a resume with a job description. A big part of what we evaluate happens in conversation — how someone explains a decision, how they respond when challenged, how they think through ambiguity. AI can summarize experience, but it cannot interpret judgment, ownership, or intellectual curiosity.

Technology should support human work, not eliminate it. In recruitment especially, discernment still matters. The strongest hiring outcomes I’ve seen always involve a human who understands nuance, not just data.