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7 direct sourcing best practices in talent acquisition

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7 direct sourcing best practices in talent acquisition

Direct sourcing has emerged as a pivotal talent acquisition strategy, empowering organizations to proactively identify, attract, and engage candidates. As the growth of the gig economy blurs the line between full-time and temporary employment, workers are increasingly open to both permanent roles and contingent placements. By using your own talent database rather than third-party agencies,…

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7 direct sourcing best practices in talent acquisition

Posted on by akessler

Direct sourcing has emerged as a pivotal talent acquisition strategy, empowering organizations to proactively identify, attract, and engage candidates. As the growth of the gig economy blurs the line between full-time and temporary employment, workers are increasingly open to both permanent roles and contingent placements.

By using your own talent database rather than third-party agencies, direct sourcing allows you to build pools of qualified candidates. Instead of starting fresh with every opening, you cultivate ongoing relationships with people who already know your organization, such as former employees, past applicants, and referrals. Ultimately, nurturing a blended talent pool enables organizations to eliminate friction and connect with top talent more efficiently.

Below are seven best practices for implementing direct sourcing within your organization.

1. Start with the talent you already have

The quickest way to build a direct sourcing program is often to look at who’s already in your ATS. Many organizations hold years of candidate data, including past applicants, expression-of-interest submissions, and candidates who reached the final stages of an earlier search but didn’t receive an offer. Former employees and contractors who left on good terms are another valuable source, because they know your culture and ways of working.

Rediscovering this talent gives you a head start. These candidates have some familiarity with your brand, and you’ve already invested in attracting them once. Before you reach out, check that your candidate data is current and that you have permission to contact them, in line with local privacy rules. Starting here can help you show results early, which makes it easier to build support for the wider program.

2. Focus on your employer brand 

A strong employer brand showcases what makes your company unique and appealing, serving as a powerful magnet for skilled professionals seeking temporary, project-based, and full-time work. To build an effective employer brand, start by developing a compelling employer value proposition (EVP) that highlights the distinct advantages of working with your organization. This should encompass your company’s values, culture, and the opportunities you offer. Consider factors such as flexible work arrangements, challenging projects, and professional development opportunities. Communicate these elements clearly and consistently across your website, social media platforms, email nurture campaigns, and other channels to create a cohesive brand image.

Because direct sourcing talent pools often include both permanent and contingent workers, it’s important to ensure that your EVP applies to both. Have you formally defined the value proposition for contractors? Contingent workers are a part of your culture, too, and deserve the same experience as full-time workers. It may help to shift from using the term EVP, which implies the value is only experienced by those you employ directly, to using talent value proposition (TVP) to make it more inclusive. Direct sourcing gives you a way to share that value proposition with every worker in your talent pools, regardless of classification.

3. Segment your talent pools 

Segmenting your talent pools by skills, experience level, and job type helps you target your efforts. When a permanent role or contract assignment opens, you can go straight to the right group of candidates.

It also helps you coordinate outreach, so the same candidate isn’t approached separately for a permanent role and a contract assignment. Over time, analytics can show you what each segment values, which helps you tailor your talent value proposition for different groups.

4. Keep your talent pools engaged 

Once your talent pools are in place, the goal is to keep them engaged until the right opportunity comes along. Tailor your outreach to each segment, sharing relevant updates, feedback, and opportunities so candidates stay connected to your organization. Use the channels each group is most likely to respond to, whether that’s email, text, social media, or industry events.

By staying in touch with passive talent, you build a ready pipeline of qualified candidates you can call on as your hiring needs change.

When someone from your talent pool does apply, the hiring process should reflect the relationship you’ve built. In PeopleScout’s Inside the Candidate Experience 2026 report, 64% of candidates heard nothing back from more than half of the employers they applied to. Silence at that stage can quickly undo months of nurturing. Whether a candidate is being considered for a permanent or contingent role, keep the process transparent, set realistic expectations about timelines, and close the loop with everyone.

5. Use technology to scale 

Most of the practices in this article depend on having the right tools in place. Technology provides the infrastructure that makes direct sourcing work at scale.

Look for solutions with AI-powered matching that can surface a pool of strong-fit candidates from your existing database and rank them against a role’s requirements. Recruiters and hiring managers can then start with the strongest matches rather than a blank search, while people continue to make every hiring decision. External sourcing tools can extend your reach further, and inbound channels like custom career sites, internal job portals, expression-of-interest forms, and programmatic advertising can all feed your talent pools.

To keep those pools engaged at scale, you’ll also need a CRM and recruitment marketing tools that automate personalized outreach, freeing your team to focus on building relationships.

6. Measure what matters

Track key metrics such as time-to-fill, quality of hires, cost-per-hire, candidate engagement rates, and source of hire. Additionally, monitor the size and quality of your talent pools, the effectiveness of your engagement strategies, and the overall satisfaction of both candidates and hiring managers.

A few measures are specific to direct sourcing and show whether the program is paying off.

  • The share of hires and placements that come from your talent pools
  • Changes in your staffing agency spend
  • How often contractors move into permanent roles and vice versa

Regularly analyzing these metrics will give a clear view of your direct sourcing program’s performance and highlight areas for improvement. For instance, if you notice a particular talent pool consistently yields high-quality candidates with shorter time-to-fill rates, you might allocate more resources to cultivating that segment. Similarly, if certain engagement tactics result in higher response rates, you can refine your communication strategies accordingly. The goal is not just to collect data but to turn it into program improvements.

7. Consider a talent partner 

Implementing direct sourcing well requires substantial resources, expertise, and ongoing management. This is where a total talent partner can help.

Providers that offer both recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and managed service provider (MSP) programs bring scale and specialization. They invest in sourcing technology, follow market trends, and refine their strategies using data from clients across industries. A partner can also bring a consultative view, assessing your skills gaps against anticipated demand to support more formal workforce planning, so your talent pools are ready when you need them.

With the right partner, direct sourcing can become a foundation for bringing your permanent and contingent hiring together, and a step toward total workforce management.

PeopleScout Direct Sourcing is powered by Affinix®, our AI-powered total talent technology suite. It helps you rediscover strong-fit candidates already in your database, search more than 1.3 billion external candidate profiles, and nurture talent pools through personalized email and text campaigns. ScoutAI, a built-in AI assistant, shows candidate match scores and insight summaries to recruiters, so they can focus on the strongest matches first.

Affinix® ScoutAI for recruiters

Posted on by akessler

Affinix® ScoutAI for recruiters

ScoutAI is your AI assistant for recruiters and hiring managers. It
adds a new layer of intelligence to Affinix®, taking on the administrative work that slows recruiting down. Access the power of AI to write job descriptions, get insights into candidate skills and experience, score candidates against roles, prep interview questions, and more.

Download this fact sheet to learn more.

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Agentic AI in recruitment: How close are we to true autonomy?

Posted on by akessler

The talent acquisition technology market is full of talk about agentic AI—autonomous systems that make independent decisions, adapt in real time, and carry out multi-step work without human intervention. Agentic AI has the potential to transform recruitment end to end, but the concept has spread so quickly that many tech capabilities are being mislabeled as “agents.”

The truth is that agentic AI in recruitment is still in its infancy, with most of what’s being billed as AI agents more closely resembling robotic process automation (RPA), rather than being truly agentic. While the potential is genuinely transformative, the technology remains fairly unproven in real-world talent acquisition environments today.

Regardless of whether an AI-supported tool is an agent, an assistant, or automation with a new label, when AI is involved in hiring, humans should still make the decisions. That does not change as technology evolves, and it is a guiding principle for talent acquisition leaders to maintain while the vocabulary keeps shifting. So, in this article, we’ll explore what agentic AI is, what it isn’t, and what that means for the technology decisions you’re making today.

Defining agentic AI: What makes it different

To understand why agentic AI represents such a significant leap, it helps to clarify what distinguishes it from the generative AI tools you may already use.

Generative AI (Gen AI) operates within clearly defined parameters. It automates predefined, repeatable tasks by following fixed rules and workflows. Need a job description written? Gen AI can draft one based on patterns it has learned. Want to send personalized outreach emails? Gen AI can generate variations at scale. These applications have proven valuable as sophisticated pattern-matching and content generation tools. They do what they’re programmed to do when they’re told to do it.

Agentic AI, by contrast, is designed to operate with genuine autonomy toward defined goals within the organization’s AI governance. In theory, these systems can make independent decisions without constant human intervention, adapt their approach in real time based on changing circumstances, engage in self-learning to improve their performance, and collaborate across multi-step processes that require coordination between different functions.

The vision is compelling. Imagine an AI agent that doesn’t just help you write a job description, but independently analyzes your hiring needs, sources candidates across multiple platforms, evaluates their fit using various data points, initiates outreach with personalized messaging, schedules interviews based on candidate and hiring manager availability, and continuously refines its approach based on which strategies yield the best hiring outcomes.

That’s the promise of agentic AI.

The maturity gap: Where we really are

Understanding where we are on this journey is essential for making smart investment decisions and setting realistic expectations with stakeholders.

Notably, research from Everest Group, Systems of Execution: The Next Evolution in Talent Acquisition Technology, describes AI agents as layer three in a four-layer model of where recruitment technology is headed. Most organizations remain at a “Foundational” stage of maturity, early in their journey and experimenting with automation pilots in limited areas. Very few organizations, if any, have reached the “Orchestrated” phase where true agents collaborate across sourcing, screening, and engagement. Today, that level remains aspirational for most recruitment programs.

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Your Maturity Stage Is

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Where To Focus Next

You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone

This assessment tells you where you are. But moving from where you are to where you want to be requires a plan tailored to your situation.

That’s what we’re here for.

Schedule a Technology Diagnostic with PeopleScout to:

• Assess your specific situation (not generic)
• Identify your biggest opportunities
• Get a realistic timeline and investment expectations
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What makes human oversight real rather than nominal

When AI makes a mistake in generating a job description, a human can catch and fix it before it goes live. When an autonomous agent decides whether to move a candidate forward or eliminate them from consideration before a human can review it, the consequences are more serious.

It also matters whether oversight is meaningful or merely procedural. Having a recruiter review 100 automated decisions at the end of a day—when they only have time to properly assess half of them—does little to mitigate risk. Oversight becomes meaningful when four conditions are met:

  1. The person has the information they need to form a judgment, including why the system reached the conclusion it did.
  2. Their current workload allows the time and capacity to exercise that judgment.
  3. They have clear authority to overrule the system and know when to use it.
  4. The decision, including any override, is recorded well enough that it can be explained later.

None of these are technology specifications. They’re about how the work is organized, who owns which decisions, and who is responsible for the outcome.

The regulatory landscape is rapidly evolving to address these exact concerns, consistently emphasizing human oversight of decisions that materially affect people. Requirements differ by market and continue to evolve, so organizations should refer to their own legal counsel on what applies to them. The direction of travel, though, has been steady, and it does not favor removing people from hiring decisions. Meaningful human oversight isn’t just good practice—it’s becoming a legal requirement.

How we approach agentic AI

For PeopleScout, our goal is never to add the latest tech for the sake of adding the latest tech. It’s to add technology that makes hiring measurably better for the people involved. Designing AI-supported processes to maintain human judgment is what makes talent technology valuable at scale.

That principle guides how we’ve built AI capabilities into our proprietary technology. Affinix® supports recruiter judgment through AI-enabled sourcing, screening, and scheduling, leaving the decision-making to your team. Embedded right into Affinix ATS, ScoutAI is an AI assistant that helps recruiters and hiring managers write job descriptions, get insights into candidate skills and experience, score candidates against role requirements, and prep interview questions that they can then refine. That is a deliberate choice about where responsibility sits, and it’s one we’ll maintain as our AI capabilities grow.

We develop and test new capabilities continuously, in partnership with clients and in live hiring environments, so that what reaches your team has been proven to help rather than simply shipped. Affinix is ISO 27001:2022 certified and GDPR compliant, so those capabilities operate within an enterprise security and privacy framework.

Making smart decisions today

Agentic AI in recruitment will continue to evolve. The question for talent leaders is not whether to embrace that evolution, but where its autonomy creates value and where human judgment remains essential.

The most effective organizations will be thoughtful about that distinction. They’ll use AI to create capacity, accelerate processes, and surface better insights, while keeping people accountable for hiring decisions. As the technology matures, that balance—not the label attached to the tool—will determine how successfully organizations put AI to work in hiring.

Green jobs, green skills: Hiring for a renewable future

Posted on by nfuqua

The future of work is green. According to the World Economic Forum, the “green transition” will create a net gain of 9.6 million jobs globally by 2030. As industries like energy, transportation, and construction adopt more sustainable practices, workers with green skills are in growing demand. Additionally, the need for these skills continues to spill into non-traditional green industries including finance, logistics, manufacturing, and technology.

However, the supply hasn’t kept up. According to LinkedIn’s Green Skills Report 2025 (released November 2025), green hiring grew 7.7% between July 2024 and July 2025, while the share of workers holding at least one green skill grew 4.3%. Demand is expanding at almost twice the pace of the talent pool.

In this article, we’ll explore the drivers for green jobs and the need for green skills, which green skills are in the highest demand, and how employers can find and hire top green talent.

What are green jobs? 

So, what qualifies as a green job? The International Labour Organization defines green jobs as roles that help improve “energy and raw materials efficiency, limit greenhouse gas emissions, minimize waste and pollution, protect and restore ecosystems, and support adaptation to the effects of climate change.”

Those roles are growing quickly. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 places renewable energy engineers and environmental engineers among the 15 fastest-growing jobs globally through 2030, drawing on a survey of more than 1,000 employers representing 14 million workers across 22 industries.

What’s causing the shift? According to WEF, employers say climate-change mitigation is the third-most transformative trend facing their business over the next five years, and the biggest driver of their green transition. In addition, the rise of AI and the broader shift toward electrification are accelerating changes in how energy is produced and used, increasing demand for green skills across industries.

The demand shows up almost everywhere. LinkedIn found that the share of green hires increased between 2021 and 2025 in all 47 countries for which it has data. Switzerland now has a green talent concentration of 22.6%, with Germany (21.1%), Saudi Arabia (20.8%), Ghana (20.1%), and Nigeria (20.1%) also above the one-in-five mark. India sits lower at 14.4% but recorded one of the highest year-over-year growth rates at 6.2%.

But the need for green jobs goes beyond installing solar panels and building electric vehicles. According to LinkedIn, one of the most important sectors in sustainability is finance, and it is lagging. Only 10.7% of financial services workers hold at least one green skill, the second-lowest concentration of any major industry, despite the sector’s role in pricing climate risk, structuring the capital behind wind farms and charging networks, and navigating a growing body of disclosure regulation. There are signs of movement, however, with financial services recording the fastest year-over-year growth in green hiring share of any industry at 16.3%.

With increasing competition for green talent, employers need an in-depth understanding of the most in-demand green skills and how to attract, hire, and train top talent.

What are green skills?  

It is easy to mistakenly associate certain green skills with specific industries. Unlike the ability to set a broken bone, which will qualify a worker for a job in healthcare but isn’t relevant if they’re applying for a role with a law firm, green skills are more versatile. Like tech and digital skills, green skills can be applied across a wide range of industries. For example, carbon accounting—estimating the carbon footprint of different organizations—can play an important role in a variety of industries, from consulting to waste management. While there might be a concentration of workers with green skills in green industries, those skills are in demand across the global economy.

According to LinkedIn, the fastest-growing green skill category in the world is now energy management, which focuses on reducing power consumption, optimizing efficiency, and integrating low-carbon power sources. The proportion of members adding this skill grew 17.4% in 2025. It’s growing particularly quickly in the technology, information, and media sector as well as in utilities. AI has created significant new demand for energy, and renewable and nuclear energy supply continues to expand.

Energy management is another example of how portable green skills have become, with applications in roles such as plumbing engineer, utilities manager, facilities manager, or HVAC specialist, none of which would typically be classified as a green job.

That portability is now the dominant story in green hiring. For the first time, LinkedIn’s data shows that workers with green skills in non-green job titles make up 53% of all green hires. The practical implication for TA leaders is that green skills may be hiding in atypical roles. So, if you’re hiring for green skills based only on job titles, you may be missing out on a huge portion of the talent pool. And competition for those workers is real. Green talent is hired at a rate 46.6% above the workforce average.

How to hire for green skills  

To meet their own hiring and sustainability goals, employers need to understand where to find candidates with in-demand green skills, how to attract them, and how to train green-adjacent workers to help fill skills gaps. Here, we cover three options for talent leaders struggling to fill green roles.

1. Hire for skills, not job titles

The case for skills-based hiring for green jobs is strong. When more than half of green hires are landing in roles that aren’t labeled as such, screening on job title history and formal credentials alone filters out a large share of the people who could do the work. Candidates who built green capability on the job rather than in a classroom are the ones most likely to be missed.

One solution is to update the screening or assessment process. Rather than eliminating candidates who lack certain degrees or years of experience, develop criteria and assessments that objectively measure the skills necessary for the job. An RPO provider with talent advisory capabilities can help organizations move to a skills-based screening and assessment strategy.

2. Build pathways from adjacent work

Additionally, employers can build gateway roles—positions that let workers develop green capability while doing useful work—and look for candidates with green-adjacent skills.

Supply chain management is a good example of a gateway job. As organizations work to cut emissions across their supply base, people in those roles acquire green skills they didn’t arrive with.

An effective strategy for hiring candidates for these roles is looking for green-adjacent skills. These are skills that don’t necessarily fall under the green umbrella but would give the candidate the ability to do many functions related to the role. For example, STEM and digital skills would be applicable in helping an organization reach its sustainability goals. Experience in industries currently undergoing a green transformation, like utilities, energy, mining, transportation, and agriculture, can also be applied to green jobs.

To find these candidates, employers need a robust sourcing strategy to identify those with adjacent skills. The right technology solution, with AI sourcing, can identify both active and passive candidates with specific skills, expanding the talent pipeline. For employers who want to test a specific capability before committing to a full program, PeopleScout Amplifiers™ includes talent mapping and talent sourcing modules that can be pointed at a single hard-to-fill role family.

3. Focus on reskilling and upskilling

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. In response, 85% say they plan to prioritize upskilling their workforce.

Green skills training specifically is becoming more available, but employers aren’t always getting credit for it. According to LinkedIn, while 49% of workers in green jobs said they had access to formal green skills training, most did not attribute that training to their employer. This points to a disconnect between what leadership is investing in and what workers experience.

Reskilling and upskilling can happen at different levels, from government programs to higher education and private employers. However, organizations shouldn’t rely solely on external programs. By building effective reskilling programs, businesses invest in services tailored to developing their own workforce while also assisting the global need for more sustainable work.

A renewable future 

As the demand for green skills increases, so does the need for effective solutions for finding, hiring, and training top green talent. RPO providers, especially those with talent advisory services, can be a valuable resource for talent leaders looking to revamp their recruiting programs for a renewable future.

How a government healthcare employer turned a full day of résumé review into an hour

Posted on by akessler
How a government healthcare employer turned a full day of résumé review into an hour

Affinix®

How a government healthcare employer turned a full day of résumé review into an hour

Affinix® and ScoutAI helped this healthcare organization cut résumé review time by over 80%, gave hiring managers visibility they never had, and reduced job board spend by 25%.

25 % reduction in job board spend
80 %+ drop in time spent reviewing résumés

Situation

This government healthcare organization hires the people who keep public health programs running, from clinical staff to program managers. Much of that hiring is grant funded, so roles must be filled quickly to make the most of the funding window. Plus, recruiters must screen for specific credentials, degrees, and experience, which is crucial for compliance in healthcare hiring.

The team was working in an aging recruitment system that gave them almost no reporting. Recruiters struggled to see where to focus their efforts. Hiring managers had no visibility at all, so they depended on recruiters for status updates. And leaders had no reliable picture of where their advertising money was going, or which sources produced their best candidates.

Solution

To give recruiters, hiring managers and leaders greater visibility into the hiring process and help the team make faster, more informed decisions, the organization moved to Affinix®, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology suite, which is now available directly to employer recruitment teams.

Screening that starts with the best-qualified candidates

ScoutAI, an AI assistant built into Affinix, scores each résumé against a skills matrix which is weighted to the credentials and experience the role requires. Recruiters then focus on screening the candidates who match at 80% and above.

Before implementing Affinix, recruiters had to review hundreds of résumés to find the qualified few, which often took an entire day before a single conversation with a candidate could happen. Now, with the help of ScoutAI, they begin with the strongest matches and apply their own judgment to what AI can’t assess, like soft skills and technical depth. Recruiters now spend an hour per role on average reviewing résumés, reducing time spent on this task by over 80%.

Another powerful feature transforming how this team works is ScoutAI’s candidate summaries. During phone screens and interviews, recruiters use the strengths and weaknesses contained in the summary to explore the candidate’s experience and address possible concerns to help determine fit. When they present shortlists, the AI summary helps them write the cover sheet that goes to the hiring manager for each candidate.

Job postings created in the same system

Previously, the team drafted job descriptions in a separate AI tool, then moved the copy back into their old recruitment system. The AI Job Ad Generator feature does that from anywhere in Affinix. Now, recruiters write, refine, and publish job postings without switching systems. Plus, with Affinix’s built-in job board integrations, postings update automatically.

Reporting the whole team can act on

Affinix Analytics gives the organization the visibility its old system never could. Hiring managers can now see how many candidates have been screened, which have been rejected, and where candidates are in the process. Working from the same information takes the pressure off recruiters to keep managers updated. Leaders can also review activity by recruiter and by role, and the pipeline view gives them a clear read on the health of every requisition.

Source tracking gives the organization insight into what they spend on each job board and where their best candidates come from. They use that data to shift spend toward the sources that perform, which has cut job board spend by 25% in the first year.

Results

  • 80%+ reduction in time spent reviewing résumés. Now recruiters focus on the best-matched candidates first—those with the correct credentials and experience.
  • 25% reduction in job board spend. Source data showed which channels delivered qualified candidates, so budgets can be weighted toward top-performing ones.
  • Shared requisition visibility. For the first time, hiring managers and leaders can see status, screening progress, and pipeline health without having to ask a recruiter.
  • Strong recruiter adoption. The team lead describes Affinix as “phenomenal” and reports that recruiters genuinely enjoy using it.

Grant-funded healthcare hiring leaves little room for delay. By giving recruiters better information faster and giving hiring managers a clearer picture of the process, Affinix and ScoutAI freed this team to spend more time on the part of hiring only people can do, judging fit and building relationships.

At a glance

  • COMPANY
    Government healthcare organization
  • INDUSTRY
    Healthcare
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Affinix
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What the Candidate Experience in India and Germany Can Teach TA Leaders 

Posted on by akessler

Most conversations about AI in hiring start with technology: which tools to use, how to screen faster, where automation can take over. Far fewer start with the candidate—how they are using AI, how they feel about employers using it, and what happens to their experience when nobody explains any of it. 

Those are some of the questions we asked in our latest research, Inside the Candidate Experience 2026. We surveyed more than 1,000 job seekers across 10 markets and found that how employers communicate, particularly about AI, is the clearest differentiator when it comes to creating better candidate experiences. 

Two markets stood out as top performers: India and Germany. What sets these markets apart is a higher willingness among employers to communicate. And in both, candidates reported less ghosting and better experiences than their regional peers. 

Here’s what talent acquisition leaders everywhere else can learn from them. 

India: More AI Has Not Led to Less Trust 

India is the most AI-advanced market in our study: 84% of Indian job seekers used AI in their job search, the highest of any market globally, against a global average of 52%. Faced with that, Indian employers have not gone quiet. Sixty-four percent of Indian candidates received some communication about AI from at least one employer they applied to, again the highest rate of any market in the study. Plus, more than a quarter (28%) were given practical guidance on how to use AI well. 

The payoff shows up in the sharpest single finding in the APAC dataset. Where Indian employers communicated openly about AI with all candidates, 56% of those candidates reported being very confident a human had reviewed their application. Where employers said nothing, just 24% were. 

Germany Confirms the Link Between Communication and Better Experience 

When it comes to AI usage, 43% of German job seekers heard something from at least one employer, and 13% said every employer they applied to mentioned it, the highest rate in the EMEA region. Silence is not the default there in the way it is elsewhere—in the UK, 75% of candidates report hearing nothing about AI from any employer at all. 

While the EU AI Act means some of this transparency is required rather than chosen, that doesn’t weaken the point, because the effect on candidates is the same. Germany has the highest positive experience rate in EMEA at 47%. 

Why Communication Matters 

The hiring cultures, legal contexts, and candidate expectations differ significantly between Germany and India. What they share is a higher commitment by employers to communicate openly about AI, resulting in a measurably better candidate experience. 

Globally, candidates who suspected AI was screening their applications were far less confident a human reviewed them. Just 20% said they were very confident, compared to 55% among candidates who had no such suspicion. That gap is not caused by AI itself but by the silence around it. Employers who explain how AI is used in their hiring process — and crucially, where humans remain involved—foster more trust amongst candidates.  

For most employers, that explanation takes the form of a transparency statement, a short, direct message about how AI is used in screening and where human judgment comes in. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does require a clear decision about what to say and where to say it. Explain how your organization is using AI, what role human judgment plays, and what candidates can expect to hear and when. It should appear in job postings, on your careers page, and in the application acknowledgment email.  

The Broader Lesson 

There is a tendency in conversations about AI in hiring to treat communication as a soft element, important but secondary to the technical work of implementing and optimizing screening tools. India and Germany suggest the opposite. 

In both markets, higher employer transparency about AI correlates with materially better outcomes when comes to candidate sentiment. Data from both countries illustrates what the outcome looks like when disclosure does happen, and India shows the same outcome is reachable without regulation enforcing it. 

This level of communication costs almost nothing. And the data from two very different markets, in different parts of the world, confirms that it produces better outcomes than technology investment alone. 

To get the full research and more actionable insights, download the Inside the Candidate Experience 2026 report.  

Raising the Bar on High-Volume Telecoms Recruitment

Posted on by akessler
Raising the Bar on High-Volume Telecoms Recruitment

Raising the Bar on High-Volume Telecoms Recruitment

How PeopleScout rebuilt a 14-year RPO partnership around on-demand video assessment, a global delivery model and a more senior team, cutting time to offer by 42%.

42 % faster time to offer in field sales
96 % fulfillment rate, beating the SLA target
+ 46 point improvement in candidate NPS in one year

Situation

PeopleScout has been this telecommunications provider’s recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner since 2011, supporting high-volume hiring across field engineering, field sales, customer service, and retail.

When this client reset its strategic priorities following an acquisition, hiring sat at the center of almost all of them. We were delivering good candidates, but the business wanted them faster, assessed more consistently, and with an experience that better reflected the brand.

PeopleScout’s response was to propose rebuilding the model rather than adjusting it. It required a step change: a fundamental rethink of how recruitment was designed, delivered and measured, so that PeopleScout could show up as the strategic partner the client needed.

Solution

The starting point was an honest conversation. Both teams sat down and talked candidly about the existing processes, the recruitment technology ecosystem, and what a realistic workload looks like when you want people doing their best work.

Rebuilding the foundation

We mapped every workstream end to end, looking for anywhere that candidates dropped out, handoffs slowed things down and recruiter time was going to avoidable admin. Real-time pipeline dashboards gave both teams the same view of the same data. A priority and hard-to-fill tagging system focused effort where it mattered most.

We also expanded multi-country delivery across our centers in Poland and India, and stood up a dedicated offers and onboarding team. Separating offer administration from recruiting reduced errors, improved consistency, and gave recruiters their time back to connect with candidates and hiring managers.

From telephone screening to on-demand video

The single most consequential change was to candidate assessment. We replaced telephone interviews with on-demand video interviews, which candidates complete at a time that suits them, available immediately after applying.

Removing scheduling as a barrier gave every candidate equal and immediate access to assessment regardless of geography or availability. It also produced richer insight. A phone interview captures voice alone. Video lets hiring managers assess energy, presentation and body language, which matter enormously when recruiting customer-facing retail roles. Every candidate answers the same questions in the same format, which reduces variability between interviewers. And because hiring teams review responses asynchronously, the scheduling bottleneck disappears entirely.

The impact was immediate. Interview attendance improved by 27 percentage points. Average time to offer in field sales fell from 16.6 days to 9.5. Recruiter admin time per candidate dropped from 15 minutes to 8.

Raising the level of the partnership

A stable operating model created room to do more than deliver. We introduced a Talent Acquisition Partner layer into the RPO structure, promoting four PeopleScout recruiters into roles designed to bring proactive workforce planning, market intelligence, and continuous process improvement into every client conversation.

The effect compounded. A more senior team built better stakeholder relationships, surfaced opportunities, and earned talent acquisition a seat at the table as a business partner rather than a back-office function.

Scope expanded alongside it. We delivered 32 hires in four and a half weeks through a complex change program in field operations, absorbing several late-stage changes from client stakeholders along the way. A separate hiring project filled 49 retail roles ahead of Black Friday, with new hires starting within four weeks.

Our Talent Advisory team also ran a targeted recruitment marketing campaign to increase the representation of women in field technician roles. It generated 4 million impressions and 55,800 clicks, with click share from women reaching 32% on Meta and 58% on Google Display Network. It also proved something useful: attraction was no longer the limiting factor, which shifted the conversation to barriers further down the funnel that were able to address with the client.

Results

  • 96% average fulfillment rate, exceeding the SLA target
  • Every SLA metric now met in full
  • Candidate NPS improved by 46 points in a single year
  • Time to offer in field sales down 42%, from 16.6 days to 9.5
  • Retail time to offer down from 38 days to 12
  • Full-year average time to offer of 15.4 working days, against an 18-day target
  • Contract renewed for a further three years

Fourteen years into a partnership, the measure of its strength isn’t whether challenges arise. It’s how both sides respond when they do. When this client’s ambitions grew, we grew our model to match: new technology, a restructured team, and a higher level of service. With the partnership renewed, the next chapter is already underway.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Leading telecoms provider in the UK
  • INDUSTRY
    Telecommunications
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory
Contact Sales

How Different Generations are Experiencing AI in Hiring 

Posted on by akessler

Ask a 22- and 60-year-old jobseeker about their recent hiring experiences, and you’ll get two completely different answers. To find out why, we took the data from our global Inside the Candidate Experience 2026 research report—including a survey of more than 1,000 job seekers—and explored a cross-section of data not included in the report itself—by generation. 

Gen Z and Baby Boomers are navigating fundamentally different versions of the same hiring market, and the data suggests the industry is addressing neither particularly well.

Gen Z: The Most Ghosted, the Most Vocal

Gen Z candidates are bearing a disproportionate share of the disconnected hiring experience. Seventy-six percent of 18–24-year-olds were ghosted in more than half their applications, the highest ghosting rate of any generation in the study. Twenty percent reported a negative overall experience, also the highest. 

At the same time, this generation is the most conflicted about AI in recruitment. Fifty-nine percent used AI in their job search—consistent with higher digital fluency and lower barriers to adoption—but 33% of non-users avoided it because it felt dishonest or like cheating, the highest ethical concern rate of any generation and more than double the rate for Gen X (9%). This is a generation entering the workforce during the most significant shift in hiring technology in decades, and what’s consistent across its split perspective is their experience of what employers are not doing: 42% of Gen Z candidates heard nothing from employers about AI. 

Gen Z (18–24)

The most ghosted, the most vocal

0%
were ghosted in more than half their applications — the highest of any generation
0%
shared their bad experience with their network

Source: PeopleScout, Inside the Candidate Experience 2026

The commercial consequence of this silence is worth noting. After a bad experience, 24% of Gen Z candidates shared it with their network—the highest sharing rate of any generation. Young candidates are the most likely to make bad experiences public, at scale, through channels that reach their peers. For any organization with an early careers pipeline, the candidate experience is a talent brand investment with a long return horizon.  

👉  Navigating the Gen Z Era: Insights for Effective Early Careers Recruitment 

Millennials: Commercially Consequential, Increasingly in the Dark

Millennials span two career stages in our data, and each comes with its own risk. 

Younger millennials (25-34) are the largest cohort in our study and, by one measure, the most commercially consequential after a bad experience. Among 25–34-year-olds who rated their experience negatively, 55% say they would tell others not to apply to that company, more than double the rate for Gen Z (21%) and significantly above the global average (36%). This group also has the highest AI adoption (61%) and sits at the peak of career mobility—large professional networks, active on LinkedIn, likely to influence hiring decisions both as candidates and as future hiring managers.  

Millennials (25–44)

Commercially consequential, increasingly in the dark

0%
of younger millennials (25–34) would tell others not to apply after a bad experience
0%
of older millennials (35–44) heard nothing from employers about AI

Source: PeopleScout, Inside the Candidate Experience 2026

Older millennials (35-44) occupy a specific and uncomfortable position in the data. This is the age group receiving the most employer silence about AI. Over three-quarters (77%) heard nothing from employers about AI, the highest of any generation. It's also the group with the lowest confidence that a human reviewed their application. Just 19% were very confident their application was looked at by a person, the lowest of any generation. These are professionals who entered the workforce before AI-mediated hiring existed at scale. They're navigating a significantly changed process with less guidance than any other group, and with the longest established expectation that hiring involves human judgment at its core.  

Gen X and Baby Boomers: Lowest Adoption, Not Lowest Impact

Older candidates have the lowest AI adoption in the study—just 24% of 45–64-year-olds used AI in their job search—and tend to generate less attention in hiring technology conversations.  

While they’re less vocal with their network—just a quarter (26%) would tell others not to apply, below the group averages—they had the lowest positive experience rate (34%) of any age group in the study.  

Gen X & Baby Boomers (45–64)

Lowest adoption, not lowest impact

0%
used AI in their job search — the lowest of any generation
0%
reported a positive overall experience — the lowest of any generation

Source: PeopleScout, Inside the Candidate Experience 2026

For organizations competing for experienced talent in senior roles, this matters. This cohort is often applying for roles with higher influence, higher compensation, and higher stakes on both sides. A poor candidate experience here is costly in ways that volume metrics do not capture. 

What Generational Variation Means for Your Candidate Experience 

The practical implication of this data isn't that organizations need separate hiring processes for different generations. It's that the communication failures driving poor experiences across them are felt differently and have varying impact. 

Gen Z candidates amplify bad experiences publicly. Millennials are the most commercially reactive after a bad experience. Gen X and Baby Boomer candidates are having a quietly poor experience that employers don’t seem to notice.  

All of these problems share the same underlying cause regardless of the generation: employers not communicating clearly about what their process involves, how AI fits in, and what candidates can expect to hear.  

To explore key findings from this research and get more actionable insights, download the  Inside the Candidate Experience 2026  report.  

What 1,000+ Candidates Told Us About AI in Hiring [Infographic] 

Posted on by akessler

Employers are investing more than ever in AI-enabled hiring. Candidates are using AI more than ever to apply. But there’s not much talk about it on either side. 

That’s the headline finding from PeopleScout’s new global research report, Inside the Candidate Experience 2026—a study of over 1,000 job seekers across 10 markets and 20 sectors. The data tells a clear story: the biggest opportunity to improve the candidate experience isn’t primarily about technology. It’s about communication. 

The infographic below highlights key findings from our research to help talent acquisition professionals evaluate their candidate experience in today’s AI-influenced landscape. 

candidate experience 2026

The Opportunity Isn’t More AI. It’s More Communication. 

Of course, employers should keep investing in new hiring technology. But those investments only pay off on top of a solid foundation—clear, consistent communication. The research points to a mismatch in candidate expectation and experience, and highlights where the real opportunity lies – in the human moments jobseekers value most. That means telling people where they stand, being transparent about how they’re assessed, and closing the loop instead of leaving candidates in it indefinitely. 

Get the full picture. The full report breaks down the data by market and hiring stage, with practical guidance for closing the gap. Download Inside the Candidate Experience 2026.