When our AI consultants sat down with us for their first assignment, the question wasn’t: “Where can we use AI?” But something simpler, and yet far more important: “Where does all our time actually go?
Before we built anything, we first took a step back. How exactly does the team work? What happens every day, where are we wasting valuable time, and which tasks are frustratingly repetitive?
Based on this process analysis, we identified three areas where automation or AI could help us. For each of these three options, we very deliberately – and critically – asked the same question: “”Is AI really necessary here, or is automation enough?”
AI can do a lot, but it costs more, the output is sometimes less predictable, and it isn’t always the best solution to the problem. Our philosophy: not to cram AI into everything, but to look at where automation is already sufficient and only implement AI if it genuinely delivers added value.
Three clear points emerged during this analysis. One of them stood out, due to the convenience and time-saving benefits it offered. When it comes to recruitment and secondment, it’s all about knowing your client well. Knowing when a vacancy has been open for a long time, seeing when a client posts a new vacancy online, so that you can be there straight away when they need you. That’s part of providing a good service, especially with a large client portfolio.
But what actually happened? Endless, manual refreshing of dozens of ‘careers’ pages. You were literally looking for a needle in a haystack, without even knowing whether the needle was there in the first place.
What we built was a desktop app, developed specifically for this purpose.
- Where confidence is ‘high’: The tool reads the job vacancies directly and with a high degree of reliability through fully automated processes.
- For ‘low’ or ‘medium’: This is where our AI safety net (an LLM) comes in to help with the more challenging sites where the data is structured in a less predictable way. Because we use this safety net in such a targeted way, API costs remain minimal.
- Every hour: The app automatically checks the database in the background to see if the number of vacancies at the client’s has changed.
- ~10%: Some of the sites require the AI safety net, or a quick manual check. The rest is seamless automation.
- 1 email: As soon as a new vacancy is posted, the recruiter receives an automatic email and the list is updated immediately in the app.
- Time saved: If you had a large client portfolio, would you check all the job sites yourself every day? That would take you about 25 minutes a day, 100 hours a year….
We no longer have to spend day in, day out, searching for new vacancies with our clients ourselves. The app does the thinking for us and brings the vacancies to us.
06 41 90 56 14 · jesse.van.den.dikkenberg@sourcemonks.nl
06 38 62 68 91 · hidde.koedoot@sourcemonks.nl
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