How Recruiters Can Use LLMs to Personalize For Prospects
Key Takeaways
"Hey [Insert Candidate Name], just following up” emails in 2025 get totally ghosted by candidates and clients.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can personalize your outreach, automate the boring parts of recruitment sourcing, and make selling your service feel like less of a beige chore.
LLMs help you source talent at scale without giving up strong connections with your candidates.
Staffing agency recruiters: god bless you all. You are part headhunter, part salesperson, and part therapist. Between candidate sourcing, client pitching, and following up on seemingly dead leads, the prospect of cold outreach on a Monday morning is like a root canal in hell.
Yet you go to that dark place anyway, because personalization isn’t optional anymore. Manually customizing every email and LinkedIn message is destroying you, but what else can be done?
If you haven't started customizing LLMs to take this off your chest, this article may be your magic bullet.
Are Large Language Models A Recruitment Software?
An LLM is basically a recruiter who’s read every job post, LinkedIn profile, and company blog in existence without the 15 cups of coffee.
Modern AI models like Chat GPT can not only generate human-sounding language, but they can even interpret human behavior. Translation: they’re insanely useful as a recruitment software.
How many times have you needed to set the exact right tone in your email to a prospect? "I need them to see the urgency here, but also know that I've got their back."
And how many times has Jennifer from Alexandria had completely different needs and tonality than Dan from Cheviot?
Keeping those conversations separate through customization can help you isolate not just files and memory stored, but also tones and conversation structures that play such an intricate role in your agency's process.
The Secret to New Business: How Recruiters Are Using LLMs
Old-school cold emails like “I can help you find your next dream job” don’t cut it anymore.
By using an LLM, you can pull in unbelievably important attributes by scraping private and candidate-provided data. You can reference hundreds of job postings and analyze changes to team sizes, all in seconds.
All of that culminates in a VERY compelling message to your candidate: the time is NOW to make a career move, and it's based on the data.
This kind of marketing for recruiting firms increases open rates, and it opens doors.
But that's just the first step. You can also create tailored content for your own social media or website.
Create a custom GPT that uses a knowledge base of your past social media posts, and ask it to create another one in that same tone of voice. As a matter of fact, ask it to create a 365-day content calendar!
Lastly, adjust your follow up in a way that resonates with that person.
In very rare cases (like Ask-Dwight Pro), you can actually pair an account-level (or, in your case, a candidate-level) knowledge base with a general knowledge base that's specific to you.
That way, you can connect the dots between how you support candidates best with how that candidate best feels supported. It's a win-win for everyone, and your follow up emails are an absolute homerun every time.
Personalization at scale is the new power move. It's a business centered around humans, and to scale your actual HUMANITY??? Now that is a level up.
LLMs won’t replace your gut instinct or industry know-how. But they'll write faster than you and research better than you. Anyone pretending otherwise is going to get lost on the way up.
And the customization they're offering in 2025 will make you more effective at candidate sourcing, more creative with your recruitment, and allow you to convert prospects into placements on a scale you've never seen before.