Your AI hiring companion
Meet Winston

AI recruitment software uses artificial intelligence to enhance and automate hiring processes, from sourcing candidates to making data-driven hiring decisions. At SmartRecruiters, Winston, our AI-powered hiring companion, brings this concept to life by automating repetitive tasks, anticipating recruiter needs, and offering insights to make hiring smarter, faster, and more human-centric.

An AI sourcing tool leverages artificial intelligence to identify and engage with potential candidates efficiently. For example, SmartRecruiters’ platform includes AI-driven capabilities like intelligent scheduling and multi-layer screening to simplify candidate discovery and engagement while reducing manual effort.

Not all Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) incorporate AI, but modern solutions like SmartRecruiters’ ATS do. By integrating AI, features such as predictive analytics and candidate matching, our ATS transforms traditional workflows into adaptive, intelligent processes that improve hiring outcomes.

Companies use AI in recruitment to automate tasks like resume screening, candidate engagement, and scheduling. With Winston, SmartRecruiters’ AI recruiting tool, businesses gain tools for multi-layered screening, conversational engagement, and actionable insights, ensuring a seamless and efficient hiring process while maintaining a human touch.

Many modern ATS solutions, including SmartRecruiters, incorporate AI to enhance functionality. Our AI-powered applicant tracking system goes beyond tracking applicants by integrating features like Winston, which provides adaptive interfaces, predictive analytics, and proactive support to elevate the entire recruitment experience.

Winston is an AI-powered recruiting companion that serves as both the face and intelligence behind SmartRecruiters AI. He anticipates needs, automates tasks, and brings joy to the hiring process, allowing hiring teams to focus on connecting with and hiring great talent. Unlike a co-pilot that relies heavily on human direction or focuses on a narrow set of tasks, Winston works proactively across the entire hiring process, offering insights and automation that go beyond just assisting—he elevates the entire experience. Winston should be thought of as the friendly, charming face of SmartRecruiters

With Winston as your AI recruiting tool, you can expect significant productivity gains across the entire hiring process. Early projections estimate a 75% reduction in manual screening tasks, 95% reduction in manual tasks required to schedule candidate interviews, and 99% candidate satisfaction ratings. Winston’s proactive recommendations and nudges help hiring teams stay ahead, ensuring they focus on the most important tasks. Time-saving automation reduces the burden of repetitive work, freeing up hours for higher-value activities. Improved candidate matching and sentiment analysis ensure you connect with the right talent faster, leading to better hiring decisions – accelerating time-to-hire and improving the quality of candidates, boosting overall business performance.

Winston stands apart as an AI applicant tracking system (ATS) because it offers a truly end-to-end experience rather than focusing on a narrow set of AI-based features like many others. As the underlying ATS, SmartRecruiters has access to superior data that allows us to drive powerful, contextual insights and intelligent, agentic actions across the entire hiring process. SmartRecruiters can better understand and anticipate the needs of our users compared to other point solutions who do not have access to such a rich data set. Additionally, we are doubling down on our commitment to a user-centric experience. SmartRecruiters prioritizes a user-centric design, leveraging Winston to create a more intuitive and streamlined experience for recruiters and hiring managers alike.

Winston is designed with safety and compliance as top priorities, guided by a newly formed Trust and Safety Committee — which includes our legal team, Data Protection Officer, and external experts. We take a “compliance by design” approach, involving our customers in the development process to ensure we’re building AI responsibly. Winston is transparent and trustworthy, with measures to mitigate risks and align with regulatory standards, particularly in regions like the European Union. Our commitment is to deliver AI that is not only powerful but also clear, ethical (i.e. we don’t leverage sex or ethnicity in candidate rating models), and fully aligned with what our customers need.

Winston is powered by multiple AI models. SmartRecruiters uses a combination of specialized models and LLMs depending on the task. We are currently using models deployed within our AWS infrastructure that are fine-tuned to provide tailored experiences to our customers. For the most complex tasks that require LLMs, we leverage the AWS Bedrock, which hosts many powerful LLMs like Mistral or Anthropic models.

At this point in time, SmartRecruiters is not connected with the APIs of any of the popular LLM providers (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini). We will always follow privacy-by-design and subprocessor evaluation processes if we choose to leverage these solutions.

At SmartRecruiters, we are committed to complying with the EU AI Act and ensuring that our AI systems are not biased and will not reproduce any form of discrimination. To that end, we have put the following technical elements in place:

• Risk Management System: Processes to identify, evaluate, and manage risks throughout the AI lifecycle.
• Data Governance Strategy: To ensure high-quality, balanced training data that avoids bias.
• Technical Documentation: Explains safeguards in the data path.
• Human Oversight: Users maintain full control over decisions.
• Conversation Logs: Tracks AI outputs and their calculation processes.

Please note that while algorithmic bias audits can be a helpful asset, they are not strictly required by the EU AI Act. For context, the US AI Bill focuses on discrimination, whereas the EU AI Act focuses on social risk. Read this guide to understand how to safely leverage AI in recruitment.