Step 1 · Vacancy intelligence
Turn a vacancy into a precise sourcing brief
Vacancy intelligence is the first step of the AIcruiters workflow. The agent reads the vacancy, separates hard requirements from preferences, and maps the job titles, industries, skills and career paths where suitable candidates are likely to be found. The result is a search strategy your recruiter can check and adjust before the market search starts.
Why does sourcing go wrong before the first search?
Most weak shortlists start with a weak brief. A vacancy text is written to attract applicants, not to guide a search. It mixes knock-out criteria with wishes, uses the employer's internal job title, and leaves out things that matter in practice, such as a work permit, a language, travel distance or shift pattern.
Recruiters fix this in their heads. An experienced sourcer knows that a 'Medior Java Developer' at a bank might call herself a 'Software Engineer' at a scale-up, or that a maintenance engineer in food production can move to pharma. That knowledge is valuable, but it is not written down, differs per recruiter and disappears when someone leaves. Vacancy intelligence makes that translation explicit and repeatable.
What does the agent extract from a vacancy?
The agent structures the vacancy into groups of search signals. Each group is visible, so a recruiter can see exactly what the search will be based on.
- Hard requirements: criteria a candidate must meet, such as years in a stack, a registration or a permit
- Preferences: things that strengthen a match but should not exclude anyone
- Titles: the official title plus the variants people actually use on their profiles
- Industries: sectors where the same work is done under a different name
- Career paths: the roles people typically hold before this one
Senior Backend Engineer
You build payment services in Java and Spring Boot, with 6+ years of backend experience.
Experience with Kubernetes or fintech is a plus.
How does it separate must-haves from nice-to-haves?
The agent looks at how requirements are phrased and where they sit. 'You have at least five years of experience with' reads differently from 'experience with X is a plus'. Because the split is written down, internal contradictions, such as a junior salary band combined with a senior list of requirements, become visible for the recruiter to resolve instead of being guessed away.
This split matters because it drives two later steps. Hard requirements shape which profiles enter the long list during AI candidate sourcing. Preferences shape the order during candidate ranking, without silently shrinking the market. A vacancy with ten must-haves usually has three real ones; the other seven belong in the ranking, not in the filter.
Patterns a structured brief makes visible
These are the issues recruiters often catch in an intake call. With the requirements split out before the search, they are easier to spot, so the conversation with the hiring manager starts from specifics.
- Wish lists: more hard requirements than the market can plausibly meet
- Missing practical criteria: location, hybrid days, language, permit or driving licence
- Title inflation: a 'lead' title with no leadership tasks in the description
- Tool lock-in: a specific tool demanded where equivalent experience would do
What changes compared with a manual intake?
A good recruiter does all of this. Here the result is written down and consistent across the team.
What does the recruiter review, and when?
The output of this step is a search strategy, not a list of people. That makes it the cheapest moment to correct course. A sensible setup is an approval rule here for new clients or unusual roles: the recruiter checks the requirement split, removes a title that leads to the wrong audience or adds an industry the agent did not consider. For recurring profiles the strategy can run without approval once it has proven itself.
When a search returns too few relevant profiles, the recruiter usually does not need to rewrite the vacancy. They move a requirement from hard to preference, widen a career path or accept a longer commute. How approval points are set is explained on the human-in-the-loop page.
Where does vacancy intelligence stop?
It does not decide what the job should be. If a hiring manager insists on a requirement, it stays a requirement. The agent does not rewrite your published vacancy text, set a salary or judge whether a role is realistic to fill; it makes assumptions visible so people can decide.
It also does not replace your knowledge of the client or team. Culture, the manager's style and the real reason a previous hire left are things a recruiter adds. If you still build searches by hand, our Boolean search guide shows how the same signals translate into search strings.
Questions about vacancy intelligence
Does it work for niche or senior roles?
Yes, and that is where a structured brief helps most, because the number of suitable titles and paths is small and easy to miss. For executive and niche roles it makes sense to keep an approval step on the search strategy.
What input does the agent need?
A vacancy text is enough to start. Intake notes, the hiring manager's must-haves or examples of good past hires make the strategy sharper.
Does it work for Dutch vacancies?
AIcruiters works in English and Dutch, so a Dutch vacancy is analysed in Dutch and the titles include the variants people use in the Dutch market.
What if the strategy is wrong?
Then you correct it before anything is searched. Move a requirement, remove a title or add an industry. An approval point on this step makes sense for new roles.
Does the agent change our vacancy text?
No. It reads the vacancy to build a search strategy. The published text stays as it is.
Next steps in the workflow
- 01AI candidate sourcingHow the AIcruiters agent searches for passive candidates through parallel search routes and turns results into a focused long list.
- 02Candidate rankingHow AIcruiters scores candidates against the complete vacancy with visible evidence, and where the recruiter's judgement takes over.
- 03Human in the loopHow recruiters control the AIcruiters agent: approval rules per action, uncertain cases to a person, and a clean handover.
- 04Boolean searchBoolean search for recruiters: operators, LinkedIn rules, X-ray and example strings per role.
- 05PlatformThe sourcing platform that does the work: from vacancy to interested candidate, with the recruiter in control.
See how your own vacancy breaks down
Bring a live vacancy to the demo. You see the search strategy the agent builds from it, and which requirements are worth checking with your hiring manager.