AI’s changing the way every team at every organization works — from engineering to marketing to product and customer success — and with hiring assistant AI, it’s reshaping the way companies find, engage with, and hire talent.

AI is capable of sourcing, screening, and scheduling far faster than people can, improving candidate engagement so you can spend more time focusing on the more “human” aspects of hiring. This is why so many teams are turning to hiring assistant AI.

But like all other software, not all hiring assistant AI tools are created equal. Some promise automation but deliver a clunky, impersonal experience. Others move fast but leave hiring teams blind to critical insights. The right AI can elevate your entire hiring strategy. The wrong one can erode trust, slow down your team, and turn candidates away. You need a hiring assistant AI that’s accountable, adaptable, candidate-centered, fast, and — ultimately — results-driven.

These five criteria are the ones talent acquisition teams should prioritize as they evaluate the next generation of hiring assistant AI so they find the one that’s best suited for their current and future needs.

Top 5 Criteria to Evaluate Your Next AI Hiring Assistant

1. Accountability

Hiring isn’t just about filling seats. You want to find the right people to drive your business forward, so any hiring assistant AI you bring on needs to operate with accountability baked in.

Look for tools that provide transparency into their processes and offer detailed reporting so it can be held to clear KPIs. You should be able to ask if it can track where candidates are coming from, how those candidates are progressing throughout the hiring funnel, and how the AI is specifically helping your team meet its hiring goals.

Don’t be fooled: Accountability means you’re not just trusting the tech blindly — it means you have visibility into how it's performing so you have the ability to course-correct when needed.

2. Ability to Provide Input

AI should support your hiring strategy, not replace it. And like all good AI, it’s made better by human input and prompting.

The best hiring assistant AI platforms let you input key details that matter such as your ideal candidate profiles, brand values or culture ideals, diversity hiring priorities, and role-specific nuances.

You should be able to customize prompts, refine searches, and adjust scoring criteria. Most importantly, you can and should influence how the AI learns and improves over time.

If you can’t easily fine-tune the tool to reflect your hiring needs and employer brand, then it’s not assisting you, it’s dictating you — and that’s a major red flag around the ethics of AI you don’t want to see waving.

3. Candidate Experience

It’s easy to forget that while AI can speed up internal processes, the candidate experience has to feel human. You want to wow your potential hires, not weird them out. They don’t want to feel like they’re talking to a bot. Instead, they want to feel respected, informed, and excited about the opportunity.

Good hiring assistant AI should:

• Personalize communication based on the candidate’s background
• Offer timely updates without feeling robotic
• Reflect your company’s tone of voice and brand personality

The candidate experience is ultimately your brand experience. If your AI assistant doesn’t help you build trust, excitement, and belonging from the very first touchpoint, it could be doing more harm than good to your employer brand.

💡 The candidate experience says everything about how you treat you’ll treat team members once they come onboard. Great candidate experience tools can help make the experience frictionless, forward-thinking, and — dare we say — fun?

4. Speed

In recruiting, speed is everything. Slow hiring kills your chances with top candidates, so you have to move fast if you want to secure your most sought-after talent. 

That’s why a hiring assistant AI can be so useful in significantly accelerating tedious, repetitive tasks so you can focus on important things like drawing up offers, responding to your candidate’s specific questions, or having more quality face-time with potential hires.

In fact, companies like Unilever noted a 75% reduction in hiring time while increasing candidate throughput and diversity with the implementation of AI tools into their hiring process.

Some of the tasks a hiring assistant AI can take on might be:

• Sourcing and surfacing qualified candidates faster
• Screening applications efficiently without losing nuance
• Scheduling interviews without endless email tag

Look for platforms that offer real-time responsiveness and can keep candidates engaged throughout the process. Because when you’re hiring top talent, you want to move in matters of hours and days, not weeks or months.

5. Results

At the end of the day, flashy features mean nothing if the hiring assistant AI doesn’t deliver real results.

After 30, 60, 90, and even 365 days, make sure you're evaluating its effectiveness based on KPIs like:

• Quality of hires
• Time-to-fill metrics
• Candidate satisfaction
• Offer acceptance rates
• Attrition and turnover rates
• Diversity hiring goals

A great hiring assistant should be a strategic partner that helps you make better hiring decisions. While it can help you move faster, it should also help you be smarter and more human-centered in your approach.

Hiring Assistant AI Is Just the Start — Puck Powers the Full Experience

With the right AI assistant, you’ll move faster, connect more authentically with candidates, and make more informed hiring decisions — but only if you evaluate them against the criteria that matter most: accountability, your ability to guide it, the candidate experience, speed, and measurable results.

If you’re looking to deliver an unforgettable candidate experience powered by technology and storytelling, learn how Puck can help.

→ Ready to book a personalized demo of the platform for your organization? Click here.