Recruiter 2.0 is a hiring concierge
How recruiting should change and how recruiters can adapt.
For the past few months I’ve had the privilege of speaking with dozens of recruiters. I’ve learned a ton from these conversations—like, fun fact, most recruiters apparently really do look at every resume!
I’ve also learned that many are fed up with certain hiring managers. For example, here’s a quote from Jennifer, a seasoned hospitality recruiter on the challenge she regularly faces.
"Hiring managers are often unresponsive or poor communicators. As a recruiter, I can't read their minds, so I make every effort to ask comprehensive questions upfront to understand their needs and identify any obstacles they might be facing. However, if a hiring manager fails to communicate effectively with me, the entire hiring process is doomed to fail."
What’s become clear from my discussions is that recruiters aren’t set up for success. They’re swamped with AI applications, tethered to poor technology, and often struggle to decipher the nuances of the roles (and/or teams) they’re hiring for.
As I reflected on these conversations as well as my own experience as a hiring manager working with an internal recruiting team, the concept of 'Recruiter 2.0' crystallized: Recruiter as talent concierge, guiding both sides through a more thoughtful and effective hiring experience.
Back in the day in startup land, I wore every hat. I sifted through resumes, screened candidates, and led first-round interviews. In essence, I was both recruiter and hiring manager. Later, when I moved into the realm of dedicated internal recruiters, requisition forms, intake meetings, and applicant tracking systems, I was relieved. Finally, I thought, one less thing to juggle!
The problem? The world of talent acquisition didn’t lighten my load—it piled on more work. Intake calls ate up time. Reviewing recruiters' notes and shortlists took even more. Sitting on interviews with candidates I would’ve dismissed after a quick phone screen was an absolute waste of time.
The issue wasn’t the recruiters—they were competent, engaged, and took meticulous notes. They asked good questions, stayed responsive, and clearly wanted to help.
The issue was trying to transfer the untransferable.
No matter how good the intake call was, my recruiting team couldn’t tell when someone was bluffing about a skill or experience I required (of course not! because they don’t have 20 years experience in my field like I do!). Nor could they quite grasp the subtleties of specific temperament needed in my department nor the best type of personality to play well with my specific quirks as a manager nor the Spidey-sense to know what attributes are needed to complement my existing team. Without deeper insight, they relied on checking boxes—and often pretty generic ones at that—to determine if someone was a good fit.
Candidates aren’t happy with the arrangement either. Here’s a quote from Rennet, a tech recruiter, explaining one of the challenges she runs into with initial phone interviews.
"The call is usually a quick five to ten-minute phone conversation where I ask candidates about their experience and whether they have the specific skill set the hiring manager is looking for. One of the challenges with these calls is that many people don't fully understand the recruiter's role. They often expect recruiters to have a technical background or hands-on experience with the team, but that’s not typically the case. In most organizations, if you’re on the hiring side, your focus is solely on recruiting, not on what the team is working on day-to-day."
If you believe that first call is about ticking boxes, there happens to be a new solution for that no individual can compete with.
Yep. AI enters the chat.
Jason Radisson, CEO of Movo on the Breakthrough Hiring Podcast hinted at AI’s potential ability to go deeper and wider and faster:
“AI trained on 10 different companies' career progressions, or the entire nursing industry, can make more balanced, data-driven decisions than the combined experience of a human panel.”
Before AI, hiring managers with modest hiring volumes couldn’t thoroughly review resumes and screen candidates while juggling their day-to-day responsibilities. In the olden days, it made sense to have someone scanning for keywords or weeding out candidates based on basic eligibility or motivation or what university they went to as an imperfect but necessary filter.
But now that AI tools can automate these tasks, hiring managers have the opportunity to be more involved in the human part of the hiring process—reducing friction for candidates and improving time-to-hire and making hiring managers lives easier.
So, what does this mean for recruiters? We’ve written before that they won’t go the way of the Dodo. Someone still needs to take ownership of the process.
In the end, hiring managers care about one thing: getting great talent for their team fast. They don’t care about compliance, cost, source of hire, or fuzzy concepts like candidate experience. But someone has to! Because all that stuff is really important! And by pulling away from the mundane, recruiters have an opportunity to supercharge the entire hiring experience.
This line of thinking often met with skepticism. Many of the recruiters I spoke with voiced concern about AI replacing resume reviews and screening calls.
The most common rallying cry against AI is that removing humans from a very human endeavor will be disastrous. And? Of course it would be. If you remove the human stuff. But first pass scanning and filtering is back office admin stuff, not the value-add human stuff.
From a candidate experience viewpoint, imagine an account executive getting on a screening call. She wants to spend less time confirming legality to work in the US and her hobbies and more time understanding team dynamics and comp structures and sales philosophies and management styles.
As Mark Twain said, “history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.” And we’ve seen this cycle play out before.
About a decade ago, much was written about the death of the secretary role. (About 33,000 secretarial roles disappeared between 2001 and 2013, a drop of 44%.) The PC revolution and the rise of the internet and mobile phones and search made simple the things that were time-consuming in a prior era.
But the heartening news is that secretarial roles did not just vanish. They simply changed shape. Executives started to answer their own phones, write correspondence, and make and collate copies because technology made it more cost-effective for them to do so. As a result, the secretarial role became an operational one, which included value-add tasks such as budgeting and project management.
This cycle is not new. For another example, here’s what happened when the role of telephone operator was automated.
“Even though a job that once employed 2 percent of all working women was automated away, new workers entering the labor market were not significantly worse off.”
And now? We circle back to recruiter 2.0, the talent concierge—less a gatekeeper, more a trusted guide. Recruiters can elevate the hiring process from transactional to thoughtful.
Like a hotel concierge who anticipates needs before guests even ask, this recruiter bridges the gap between hiring managers and candidates, smoothing out miscommunications and ensuring everyone feels understood.
This role is proactive. Instead of waiting for problems to arise, the concierge recruiter foresees roadblocks—whether it’s unclear job specs or mismatched expectations—and addresses them before they become issues. They facilitate communication, offering hiring managers clear, actionable insights while keeping candidates engaged with timely feedback.
This role runs the AI tools to spot potential mismatches or bottlenecks before they disrupt the process. Where AI automates the grunt work, the recruiter is freed up to deliver tailored insights and build the employer brand.
In a world where AI can handle resume scanning, scheduling, and initial interviews, the concierge recruiters do the hardest and most important work—orchestrating the delicate dance of efficiency with humanity.