AI can reduce manual work when its output becomes part of the records your team already uses. Vacancy capture, CV parsing, call review and timesheet extraction should support the placement workflow. Assess the quality of those outputs and the work they save.
"Agent" is a loose term, and it is easy to be distracted by it. The practical question is narrower: which task does the tool take on, what does it produce, and who checks the result before it affects a candidate, a client or an invoice?
Start with a specific job
Vacancy capture turns supported client emails into structured requirements. CV parsing creates the candidate profiles that matching then ranks for the vacancy. Call review suggests record changes for approval. Give each function a clear role in removing preparation or progressing the opportunity.
Choose the task where volume and repetition are highest. On a locum desk that may be registering doctors whose CVs run to several pages. On a care desk it may be the steady flow of shift requests arriving by email. In payroll it may be timesheets submitted as scans or photographs. Decide what success means for that task before you start, such as fewer minutes per CV or fewer timesheet queries.
Not every step needs AI. In RecSphere, candidate matching is a weighted score the agency controls rather than AI, and it uses no credits. It does depend on the profiles that parsing produces being accurate, which is one more reason to check parsed records carefully.
Keep the output connected
Prepared information should reach the relevant candidate, vacancy or timesheet record. Copying results between separate tools reduces the value of the automation and creates another chance for error.
A captured vacancy should arrive with the grade, speciality, dates, location and the client's job reference already in place, ready to shortlist. Extracted timesheet hours should sit against the right placement, ready to check against the booking. If the output is a block of text that someone pastes into another system, the saving is small and the risk of a typing error remains.
Define the human decision
Keep candidate qualification, conversations and suitability decisions with consultants. Retain the required evidence and financial approvals, including recruiter approval of proposed call updates. Review flagged gaps and exceptions before progressing the work.
- The tool prepares: structured vacancies, candidate profiles, proposed record updates and extracted timesheet lines.
- Consultants decide: who to call, who to submit and what to tell the client.
- Compliance decides: whether the evidence meets the agency's and the client's requirements.
- Payroll and finance decide: whether hours and expenses are approved for pay and billing.
Take an extracted timesheet showing a twelve-hour night shift where the booking says ten. The tool can surface the difference. A person decides whether the extra hours were authorised and whether they are charged to the client. Writing these responsibilities down prevents a common failure, where everyone assumes someone else checked the output, and it gives new starters a clear view of where their part begins.
Distinguish available features from plans
Ask a provider to demonstrate the functions available in your proposed plan. A planned compliance or screening agent is different from functionality your team can use today.
Ask to see each function run on your own examples, in the plan you are being quoted. Find out how usage is charged and who on your team will review each output. A feature that is promised for later may arrive in a different form, or not at all, so base the decision on what you have seen working.
Measure the result
Compare entry time, correction work and progress through the placement workflow. Check whether the time released goes into useful qualification, follow-up and client development. Review costs and adoption alongside conversion and placement outcomes before extending the use case.
Run one task for a month before adding another, so you can see clearly what changed and why. Keep a note of the corrections your team makes. Patterns in them, such as one client's email layout that always loses the shift times, show where to adjust the inputs or the review step.