Our CEO and Co-Founder, Nick Livingston, joined host Lamees Abourahma on the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association’s (RPOA) Time to Hire Podcast to talk about interview intelligence, the Recruiter Plus AI model, and why the future of recruiting and talent acquisition, and especially RPO, depends on keeping hiring human.
🎧 Listen to the podcast here – https://rpoassociation.org/Time-to-Hire-Podcast
Why RPO must optimize talent delivery at scale
RPO is its own discipline. It isn’t high-volume staffing, where speed and throughput win the day, and it isn’t executive search, where a single placement can take months of white-glove attention. RPO sits in the middle, and that middle is the hardest place to operate. RPO teams are embedded inside their clients’ hiring processes, accountable for quality and consistency across dozens or hundreds of reqs at once, often with nearshore and distributed recruiters carrying the load.
For an RPO provider, every req is a promise to a client. The challenge is keeping that promise consistent across a large, often distributed team. One recruiter’s great intake call and sharp follow-up questions can’t be the exception. It has to be the standard. That’s where the model has to shift from transactional screening to structured, repeatable talent delivery.
In practice, that comes down to a few things RPO teams can standardize across the whole desk:
- High-quality intake calls. The kickoff with a hiring manager or client sets the ceiling for every submission that follows. Capturing that conversation as structured intelligence means every recruiter on the req is working from the same definition of a great candidate.
- Req-specific, skills-based interviews. A generic phone screen tells a client almost nothing. Interviews built around the actual role, asking skills-based and competency-based questions, surface the signal that helps a hiring manager make a real decision.
- Data-driven candidate submissions. When a submission includes scorecards and interview soundbites, the client hears the candidate in their own words. That reduces interview levels, cuts back-and-forth, and helps teams hire and retain the best talent faster.
This is the blend RPO leaders are after: high-touch, high-tech, and high-quality, delivered at scale. It’s a model that respects the recruiter’s judgment while giving them the tools to repeat their best work across an entire pipeline.
Interview data is an asset, not a transcript
The basic phone screen is no longer a sufficient use of recruiter capacity. When interviews are captured and archived as structured, searchable intelligence, an RPO team builds something the resume can’t give them: a talent database that grows more valuable with every conversation. The right candidate for today’s req may already be a soundbite in last quarter’s pipeline. That’s an advantage that compounds across a desk, a client, and an entire book of business.
What the RPOA podcast covered
Nick and Lamees dug into the questions RPO leaders are wrestling with right now:
- How talent leaders can use AI to elevate the quality of human conversations rather than eliminate the levels around them.
- What the move from transactional screening to skills-based interview delivery means for RPO providers.
- How to manage recruiter adoption and change without losing what makes recruiting human in the first place.
Keeping humans in the decision loop is both a legal and a strategic imperative. AI should support hiring decisions, not automate them.
“Technology can actually help keep the process human. We are still going to be talking to candidates, asking great questions, and then the data we share with clients is going to be less biased and less subject to misinterpretation, because we can share answers and insights rather than scribbled notes and one person’s opinion.” Nick Livingston, CEO and Co-Founder, Honeit
The throughline: AI should make recruiters better, not replace them. That’s the Recruiter Plus AI model, and it’s the foundation of how Honeit helps recruiters conduct high-quality interviews and deliver data-driven candidate submissions with scorecards and interview soundbites.
Listen to the full podcast
Listen to the full episode here – https://rpoassociation.org/Time-to-Hire-Podcast
Time to Hire is produced by the RPOA, the leading authority on RPO foresight and innovation and the trusted convener for the global RPO community. The podcast features conversations with industry leaders on the trends and innovations shaping talent acquisition.
Episode: “Keep Hiring Human: Nick Livingston on AI-Assisted Interviewing and the Future of Recruiter Intelligence” (Season 4, Episode 59). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you stream.
Honeit is a proud Silver Member of the RPOA. Learn more and join the community at rpoassociation.org.
Follow host Lamees Abourahma on LinkedIn.
