Recruiters are under pressure to deliver faster, better results with fewer resources. We asked industry experts what’s actually working—and where teams need to think differently.
Every year, recruiting brings a new round of approaches (skills-based hiring) “silver bullet” AI promises (think video interviewing that claims to predict culture fit) and a steady churn in what’s expected from talent acquisition teams (are you a prompt engineer yet?). So when JobSync sat down with Shay Johnson, VP of Strategic HR Partnerships at Compass Group USA, and Tim Sackett, President HRU Technical Resources, for a roundtable on scaling your recruiting impact, the questions were big, current and practical:
- How can talent teams master new technology and stretch recruiting capacity, even as budgets are shrinking?
- What’s the process for evaluating tech in context, especially if your existing stack and workflows look like patchwork?
- Where do you even start with large-scale change?
The first takeaway landed hard: technology alone won’t fix a broken TA process; you have to fix the process first if you want long-term results. Whether you hire thousands or run a lean team, a process-centered strategy delivers better outcomes than simply bolting on more tools.
This roundtable roundup breaks down what’s actually working right now. It includes lessons Compass Group has stress-tested at scale, and a candid discussion about where measured, targeted AI investment can really move the needle. You can watch the full roundtable here.
Beware the Technology-First Trap
For most organizations, the biggest barrier to scaling is they approach the challenge backward. They see mounting recruiting demands and think: “What technology can fix this?” Johnson says this mindset creates more problems than it solves: “A lot of organizations, especially those that are really into new technology, constantly want to solve problems with the newest and the best and the brightest. They’re always thinking about technology first, instead of going back and really revisiting their processes.”
This upside-down approach creates what we might call “process pollution,” where broken workflows get automated, making them faster but not better. In reality, layering tech onto poor processes amplifies the dysfunction, and all you end up with is high-speed inefficiency.
The answer is to put your processes under the microscope long before shopping for software. It’s really common for businesses to change their workflows around some tech limitation, and most organizations don’t even realize that a process only exists because some old piece of technology created it. So before anything else, map out what your team actually does versus what you think they do.
Johnson recommends breaking teams into focus groups and asking:
- What things are taking up a huge chunk of your day?
- What would you rather spend that time doing?
- Is this process even necessary—would we still need to do it even if the electricity got turned off?
- What do we actually need to get from point A to B to C to D in order to get someone hired?
- Is this process actually serving our goals, or has it just calcified around past tech decisions?
Choose Configurability over Customization
Another obstacle to scaling comes from what Sackett calls the “unique butterfly syndrome”—the belief that your organization is so special that it needs completely custom technology solutions. Reality check: we can count on one hand the number of enterprises that actually need costly custom builds. For everyone else, forcing vendors to “break their software” to accommodate your own idiosyncratic processes will leave both parties frustrated and set up the partnership to fail. Highly customized solutions are expensive to maintain, and ultimately push organizations to rip and replace entire systems when new tech comes along.
Instead, Sackett advocates for leveraging what’s already proven in the market: “There’s already great technology that people spent years building. Just use that.” Choose flexible, configurable platforms that let you rename fields to match your terminology, but don’t force vendors to rebuild their core processes around your (unoptimized) workflows.
Johnson recommends to stack rank your workflow pain points first. Then, look for tools that solve your biggest challenge and knock 6, 10 or even 20 other headaches off your Agile board as well. It takes time to get new tech up and running and even longer to see results, so choose solutions that not only solve the challenge right in front of you but can keep helping as your priorities shift down the line.
If you find something that helps now, and is set up to make life easier in the next year or two as well, that’s a win worth chasing.
Scaling Doesn’t Mean Adding Heads
Too often, when the pressure’s on to deliver more, companies default to throwing people at the problem—hire more recruiters, bring in temps, just keep adding bodies. Compass Group, where margins are tight and volume is high, faced the same temptation. Johnson says the easy move would have been to keep growing the team to keep up with demand. Instead, they put a razor-sharp focus on process clean-up and brought in the right tech to support them, so their deliberately small, centralized team could handle exponentially more volume without ballooning headcount.
As an example, the team needed better control over job postings across multiple brands and locations. “We had a huge amount of our business, recruiters included, doing a lot of rogue direct posting on big boards like Indeed and Zip Recruiter,” Johnson says. “We needed a better direct management of our jobs on Indeed.” To solve that challenge, the team enabled JobSync’s platform to streamline how jobs were posted and managed. The bonus was it fundamentally changed what the recruiting team spent their time doing.
Suddenly, people who had been bogged down posting and managing job ads were freed up to focus on strategic work, like supporting mass hiring events and candidate relationship building. Team members went from “highly administrative behind the scenes… to people that are embedded in the business, people that are proactively on openings calls, people that are involved with the new business team three months before acquiring a piece of business,” Johnson says.
Over time, natural attrition helped the team find its right size even as hiring demand grew. That’s the real win—technology as a way to create opportunity, not just to cut costs or swap one type of busywork for another.
Do You Need AI Or Automation?
While everyone and their dog is talking about AI, both Johnson and Sackett emphasize that most organizations need better automation before they need artificial intelligence. “So many TA leaders are getting pushed to test, buy, and use AI, when, in reality… they probably just need some automation,” Sackett says. “Let’s go back to blocking and tackling. Let’s go back to making sure we have the basic automation turned on and in use, because it could have just giant, low-hanging fruit ROI.”
AI is not the same as automation, and the distinction matters. AI is sexy right now, and vendors are riding the wave by slapping an AI label on tools that are little more than classic process automation, such as nudging candidates who missed onboarding steps or sending interview reminders. This isn’t a negative—‘true’ AI is risky in recruiting. It throws up bias and compliance challenges, and compliance isn’t the vendor’s job, it’s yours.
Right now, when organizations implement AI, the biggest wins are coming from simple, low-risk layers like scheduling. Here, a conversational AI sits on top of regular scheduling software, chatting with candidates to pick a time in a natural way, and delivering instant ROI without the compliance headaches.
In terms of evaluating vendors based on AI capabilities, Johnson urges talent leaders to look at it like you would any other technology or automation—is this actually solving a problem or is it just cool and flashy? But you also need to include legal, cybersecurity, and data-privacy teams in vendor evaluations. Johnson’s team works with vendors that provide “pre-validation synthetic data” to test how AI tools would perform against different candidate pools and identify potential biases before deployment. More and more tools are coming out that have an ethical framework around them, where you can validate outcomes before going live, so teams can actually prove and quantify fairness before roll out.
AI and the New Frontiers of Screening
Where AI has untapped promise, Sackett says, is candidate screening. In most organizations, just 3–5% of applications are ever touched by a recruiter; the rest are ignored because there simply isn’t enough bandwidth to read every resume. AI can change that equation. In Sackett’s experience, shortlists consistently improve when every candidate gets a fair shake.
The irony here is that candidates are wary of AI. Many believe they’re already being screened out by algorithms (they’re not, in most cases), while organizations hesitate to be clear about where AI actually fits in hiring. Sackett argues for radical transparency—“Be transparent about it. Be right with it.” That means telling candidates directly that AI is being used to screen them in, leveling the playing field so more applicants get a genuine shot, instead of quietly filtering people out. Framing it this way clears up the misconceptions.
JobSync’s 2025 Candidate Perception Report shows that younger candidates are especially sensitive to poor experiences and ghosting. AI and AI-like automation, when explained as tools that create faster responses and fairer consideration, can help repair trust.
Making Tech Adoption Actually Stick
Tech investments mean nothing if the team doesn’t use the tool. That’s money down the drain. Sackett says the only way to make adoption stick is to build measurement and accountability into the way people work every day. Everything has to run through the platform, and the numbers it produces are the numbers that count. If the report says someone screened 22 candidates but they claim it was 30, the rule is harsh but simple: if it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen.
Of course, getting people on board never feels smooth at first. Teams almost always grumble that the new tool makes life harder, not easier, and honestly? They’re right. It will slow them down for a while. But after a few months of steady use and reinforcement, most can’t imagine going back. The only way to see ROI on a tech investment is to be relentless about making sure it’s actually used the way it was designed.
Planning for Role Evolution
If optimization works as it should, recruiters will suddenly have a lot more time on their hands. But just because time is freed up doesn’t mean it gets used well—Parkinson’s law says work expands to fill the space unless there’s a real shift in strategy. As Johnson says, you could hand everyone on the team 20 extra hours a week, and they’d still feel slammed. So plan ahead for how you’ll redeploy the team.
Sackett tells the story of a company that, after automating much of their recruiting process, deployed former recruiters out into the business as true talent advisors. “Their entire job was talent attraction, talent development, talent retention. The hiring leaders lost their minds—they thought, this is the best thing ever that’s happened in my career because I don’t have to worry about whether Shay is getting the development he needs, or Leah seems disengaged, is she going to leave us? I have a person doing that, that’s truly a talent advisor in a role with that title.”
This is the end point of your optimization efforts, and it represents a fundamental change in what recruiting success looks like. Instead of measuring activities (calls made, emails sent), teams can focus on outcomes (candidate experiences, relationships built, business problems solved).
Let Go of Your Sacred Cows
The pressure to do more with less isn’t going away, and the answer is very clearly found in the intelligent alignment of people, process, and tools. But as a final word on this topic, Sackett urges talent teams to not treat any workflow like it’s sacred. “There’s a million processes that can get into the same end result—be open to a lot of those.”
The same principle applies on the tech side. Johnson says it’s tempting to push vendors to recreate every feature you’re familiar with, like a custom email builder. But if a platform’s analytics show far better response rates for text-based messages for the type of hiring you do, maybe it’s time to let go of your attachment to fancy formatting.
“Vendors are building things a certain way because they know from the collective feedback of their customers what’s working best,” Johnson says. “Listen to their consultative feedback. Don’t just say, no, you’re going to build me this, because we’ve always had this and I want it.” The teams that win are the ones who let go of “but we’ve always done it this way.” Look at any new technology implementation as an opportunity to change your model, and don’t make decisions on habit or nostalgia.
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