5 Automations Recruiters Should Tick Off This January

January is very much the month of inbox explosion. Post-Christmas, candidates are back from their festive break and clients are finalising their headcounts. In the middle of it all, your consultants are juggling calls and interviews, along with a CRM that’s groaning under the weight of historic data.

But this is the perfect time to sort out your automations. Free teams from repetitive admin so they can focus on relationship-building activities instead – the stuff that actually makes you money.

If there’s only a handful of automations you implement at the start of the year, make sure they’re these.

1. Reactivate Dormant Candidates

Most agencies are sitting on a goldmine of candidates who haven’t heard from you in months (or sometimes even years). Instead of manually crawling through your Bullhorn ATS, build an automation to re-engage these people at scale.

Dedicated candidate re-engagement workflows can segment candidates by status, last activity, skills, or specialism, and then trigger tailored email journeys. This can give you “open to work” signals inside your own database.

A simple flow might do the following:

• Enrol candidates who haven’t had a submission or call in 90+ days

• Send a “Happy New Year - are you still open to opportunities?” check-in

• Use one-click buttons to capture preferences (actively looking / open to hearing about roles / not looking)

• Update fields, statuses, or tags automatically based on their responses

• Notify the consultant when someone is “hot” again

2. Put Data Hygiene on Autopilot

New year, new database. If your Bullhorn database is full of half-completed profiles, duplicates, and bounced emails, everything else you automate will be much less effective.

Recruitment marketing automation best practice includes regularly refreshing your database and maintaining a healthy, well-structured set of records. The good news? Data clean-up workflows help clean up your data without a whole lot of manual effort.

Here are some data hygiene automations to set up:

• Chase missing data. Identify candidates missing key fields (location, right to work, salary expectations) and send them a quick form or preference centre to update their details.

• Handle bounces and unsubscribes. Automatically flag and clean invalid email addresses, remove from lists, and log consent.

• Detect duplicates. Flag potential duplicates for review or route them into an ops queue.

• GDPR/retention rules. Schedule tasks or automated anonymisation for records that have reached your retention limit (but consult with your legal team before you turn this on).

Once you get your data clean, everything downstream, from reporting to AI matching, works better – and as it should.

3. Always-on Nurture for Warm Talent Pools

Instead of scrambling for candidates every time a job lands, use automation to build and nurture talent pools around your core markets.

Recruitment CRMs and marketing automation tools are built for this: they let you create segmented talent communities and run personalised, multi-touch campaigns that educate, add value, and keep you top of mind.

This nurture could include:

• Enrolling candidates who match certain skills/locations but aren’t in an active process

• Sending a monthly email with:

  • 1–2 relevant roles

  • A quick market update

• A short tip (CV, interview, IR35, salary benchmarking, etc.)

• Using engagement (opens, clicks, replies) as a score to highlight who to call first

Sustainable talent acquisition is all about nurturing even before candidates are ready to apply. This same logic applies to recruitment agencies building their own talent communities.

4. Status Updates, Interview Reminders and Feedback

The last process any consultant should be doing is sending out manual thank-yous for applications received or interviews booked in. This is a big red flag.

Automating submittal status updates, interview reminders, and feedback capture keeps candidates informed and reduces the chance of no-shows. It’s also good practice to layer-in automated first-day and first-week check-ins as part of candidate re-engagement.

Your 2026 version of this could:

• Trigger an email/SMS when a candidate is submitted, shortlisted, or rejected

• Automatically send interview details, directions, and any pre-reading

• Fire an SMS reminder 24 hours before and a “Good luck” note on the morning

• Follow up after the interview with a quick feedback form or text

Done well, this improves candidate experience and frees up time because consultants aren’t rewriting the same messages 20 times a day.

5. Onboarding and Retention Journeys for Placed Candidates

The candidate journey doesn’t end just because they accepted a job. Automated onboarding and post-placement journeys dramatically improve your redeployment rates and contractor retention.

Automate placed-candidate onboarding and engagement – from forms and compliance, right through to regular check-ins. This can include first day/week/month check-ins so candidates always know you’re still in their corner.

And when it comes time for them to find somewhere new to go, you’ll be front of mind.

A simple post-placement workflow could incorporate:

• Welcome/onboarding information as soon as a placement is marked as “confirmed”

• Automated e-signature and document collection, where possible (or at least sending reminders)

• Triggers for check-ins at day 1, end of week 1, month 1 and month 3

• Satisfaction scores and flags any low scores to the consultant

• Enrolling contractors into a separate “next assignment” nurture stream as they approach their end date

The benefit here is that you’ll spot flight risks earlier, helping to protect client relationships. And lining up your next placement before the current one finishes will start to become second nature.

Where to Start

Don’t try to build everything at once. It’s easy to get overwhelmed here.

Our best advice is to pick one candidate-facing journey and get that one live first.

Then, once you’ve done that, start to work in data hygiene automations.

If you’ve already completed these basics, move on to nurture and post-placement journeys.

Measure the impact (opens, clicks, replies, redeployments, time saved) and use that as internal proof when you’re making the case for further automation work.