AI at Your Fingertips: The AI-Empowered Recruiter

BY Stephanie Reed | May 28, 2025

What is needed to give companies the most accurate data to make better informed hiring decisions? How can they incorporate more holistic approaches to finding and guiding talent now and in the future?

Cecil Plummer, CEO of Fastr.ai, is a passionate advocate for the continuous integration of AI with modern software. He finds that AI-assisted recruiting helps streamline hiring practices and allows more space for creating holistic talent pipelines. “It’s about working with hiring managers and recapturing their time by getting through that ever-growing haystack,” he said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s NYC talent acquisition conference.

Plummer provided insights for TA leaders and recruiters on the strategic use of AI with existing company data to refine hiring processes. “There’s no loss of productivity from toggling back and forth between applications,” he said. “So because you’re in your own ATS, you don’t lose that productivity, and you don’t have to experience a lot of the adoption issues that we hear TA leaders telling us about.”

Cecil Plummer, CEO of Fastr.ai, led the discussion

Fastr.ai provides organizations with a potent AI agent, designed to work with their current ATS and other data software to further refine their recruiting and hiring processes.The AI recruiting partner quickly delivers data through a web browser extension; the AI reads through candidate profiles and individually matches them to specified job criteria, he says. 

Fastr.ai captures the nuances of talent profiles and job requirements, while companies still leverage talent curation to match strict criteria: specific skills, keywords, and qualifications of top employees, says Plummer. 

Furthermore, automated talent insights help TA leaders and recruiters make informed hiring decisions through candidate development updates. The insights show who is fit for specific positions and track their progress over time. 

The results speak volumes. Fastr.ai has reported that 92% of clients achieve quicker surfacing of qualified candidates. Additionally, 62% of clients also save time from reviewing unqualified candidates. “AI has specifically been designed to enable and empower you and your teams, not to replace them,” Plummer said.

AI, along with data-driven tools and software, pinpoints specific criteria, but people must identify other immeasurable qualities to recruit the right people to the right jobs. This is the foundation of today’s most successful organizations. “We believe that recruiters need the time to do what only humans can do: and that's about the candidate experience,” he said.

What Current Talent Acquisition Patterns Reveal

According to Fastr.ai’s survey of 50 TA leaders, a consensus view is that technology is integral in improving their current recruiting processes. Most TA leaders and recruiters also share similar perspectives that the best results harness an ecosystem of best-of-breed ATS, CRMs, and schedulers. 

A notable shared pattern among those TA leaders and recruiters is that their processes are based on concerns of unfit hires costing their organizations more money long-term. Yet, many still use LinkedIn as a popular repository of data, which also gets costly. 

Working with internal data and integrating AI recruiting is a solution to getting the right people and minimizing costs, says Plummer. Thus, companies can save money on LinkedIn licenses and staffing fees because they’re using all of their data.

More importantly, the combination of AI-recruiting and internal data helps curate a more holistic and solution-oriented approach to the candidate experience, quelling unfit-hire fears. 

“I believe in the human spirit, I believe that any one of us here who might suddenly find ourselves in the job market is not going out there to try to trick an employer into hiring us,” he said. “We want to go somewhere where we can be appreciated, where we can make a contribution, and where we can make that organization better.”

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Fastr.ai, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. 

Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses.

(Photos by Hason Castell for From Day One)