Keep Hiring Human: Nick Livingston on AI-Assisted Interviewing and the Future of Recruiter Intelligence

Recruiting teams are gaining back real time — but the more significant shift is what happens to the conversation once the note-taking disappears. According to RPOA's 2026 RPO Buyer Trends Study, 44% of employers are capturing two to five hours of time savings per recruiter per week, with 32% saving more than five hours. Research from LinkedIn's Global Talent Trends report reinforces this: organizations investing in structured interview intelligence consistently improve both hiring speed and quality. The implication for RPO providers is clear — time savings are only the entry point. The deeper opportunity lies in what recruiters can do when they're free to actually listen.

How can talent leaders use AI to elevate the quality of human conversations rather than simply eliminate steps around them? What should RPO providers understand about the shift from transactional screening to skills-based interview delivery — and how do you manage recruiter adoption without losing what makes great recruiting human? In this episode of Time to Hire, host Lamees Abourahma sits down with Nick Livingston, CEO and Co-Founder of Honeit, to explore interview intelligence, the Recruiter Plus AI model, change management, and why the future of talent acquisition depends on keeping hiring human.

About the Podcast

Time to Hire is produced by the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA), the leading authority on recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) foresight and innovation, and the trusted convener for the global RPO community. Through conversations with industry leaders, the podcast explores the trends, insights, and innovations shaping the future of talent acquisition.

Learn more about RPOA and join the community at: https://www.rpoassociation.org.

Follow the host, Lamees Abourahma, on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Time to Hire | Episode 59 Guest: Nick Livingston, CEO and Co-Founder, Honeit

Introduction and Context

Lamees Abourahma: [00:08] Here's something worth sitting with. 76% of recruiting teams are now saving at least two hours per recruiter per week because of AI. That's real time back. But the most interesting thing about that number isn't in the hours — it's what happens to the conversation when the note-taking disappears. When the recruiter isn't scribbling, they can actually listen. They can notice the pause before an answer. They can follow the thread that would have slipped by. And according to practitioners who are living this right now, that shift changes not just how fast you hire, but how well you hire. That's what we're getting into today.

Welcome to Time to Hire, the podcast from the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association, where we bring talent leaders, RPO practitioners, and the people building the future of recruiting together for honest, real conversations about what's actually working in talent acquisition right now. I'm your host, Lamees Abourahma.

Today's conversation sits at an intersection I find genuinely fascinating: human conversation and artificial intelligence — not AI at the administrative edge of recruiting, but AI applied to the conversation at the very center of it. The interview.

My guest is Nick Livingston, CEO and co-founder of Honeit. Nick has built his company at exactly that intersection where the human voice, the hiring decision, and intelligent technology meet. Before we get into it, I want to mention that Honeit is a proud silver partner of the RPOA. RPOA technology partners are screened and vetted by RPOA members and practitioners who know this industry, so that designation carries real weight. We're glad to have Honeit in this community, and we're glad to have Nick here today. Welcome, Nick.

Nick Livingston: [02:22] Thank you, Lamees. Appreciate it, and we're really excited about the partnership as well. Thank you.

Lamees Abourahma: [02:26] Wonderful. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Before we get started, I'd love for our audience to get to meet you. Tell us about yourself and why you started Honeit.

Nick's Background and the Origin of Honeit

Nick Livingston: [02:41] I've been in talent acquisition and recruiting for about 20 years. I fell into it in New York City, starting as a technical recruiter. I moved in-house and worked for big brands like MTV Networks and Viacom — which was fun to recruit for. I also worked at a VMS company, which gave me exposure to the underbelly of VMS, staffing, and MSPs. Then I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area to get closer to technology. I worked at an ATS company, then went in-house at early-stage startups as head of talent, helping build and scale recruiting teams from the ground up. I went through an IPO with one company, and I've been working on building Honeit for the past 10 years. That's the short story.

Lamees Abourahma: [03:31] Fantastic. Let's get into Honeit and why you started it. I'll also share that I'm an early adopter of AI technology — I've been following and adopting AI since ChatGPT launched in 2022. One of the early applications I started using is a note-taker, and it's one of my favorite tools. The use cases in association management have been remarkable. You're doing something relevant to that. Tell us about what technology you found missing, or where you saw a gap in the marketplace.

Nick Livingston: [04:30] Whether you're an internal or external recruiter, most people have an ATS to track and manage candidates. But I found — even having worked at an ATS company — that some of the most important parts of the recruiting process were missing from the ATS entirely. Your kickoff and intake calls with clients, your screening calls with candidates, your interviews — all of those meaningful conversations were typically happening offline, over the telephone or a video call. And then each component before, during, and after those calls was being pieced together individually by recruiters.

Over the last 10 years, there's been a lot of attention and investment in sourcing technologies to find great candidates, and ATS systems have incrementally improved to manage candidates through the pipeline. But there was this big gap in the middle: you have an interested candidate — a recruiter is on the phone with them — but what are they actually talking about? What data is captured? What is that recruiter sending to the hiring team? How are decisions being made? All of that was a black box.

Even 10 years later, new recruiters are still discovering tools like Calendly for scheduling or a basic note-taker. These things can make a recruiter's life so much easier and more productive, but change is challenging. Some firms are more innovative and quicker to adopt — and the ones that do have a tremendous advantage. Now we're asking: not only how do you automate the tedious work, but how do you use new technology to genuinely improve the meaningful, high-value work that recruiters do every day?

The State of AI in Talent Acquisition

Lamees Abourahma: [06:24] I'm going to zoom out for a minute and look at the big picture. You mentioned that you host a podcast at Honeit and have conversations with other experts in the field. What are your thoughts on where we currently are in terms of the state of hiring and talent acquisition from an AI perspective?

Nick Livingston: [07:07] AI — and more broadly, automation — has done a lot at the top of the funnel. It's made it really easy to find candidates. But it's also created challenges: candidates are applying at scale, and companies are overwhelmed trying to figure out who's real and who isn't. So it's done both good and bad at that top-of-funnel level.

We're also seeing a lot of innovation with AI pre-screening tools that help sort through a stack of resumes to identify who you actually want to talk to. And what's most exciting to me is that we're starting to see technology help recruiters genuinely level up those initial human conversations. In some cases, recruiters who used to conduct basic phone screens are now conducting really high-quality, req-specific, skills-based interviews — ones that deliver significantly more value to the line of business or to the client. That basic phone screen of "how much are you looking for, and are you authorized to work?" probably doesn't make much sense anymore. Shift that to a form, an AI pre-screening tool, or another intake method — and then let's focus on elevating that first human conversation.

Lamees Abourahma: [09:03] What you're describing resonates, because it aligns with conversations we're having at the RPOA. There's a shift happening from theory into actual implementation and measured results. Our data supports that. The 2026 RPO Buyer Trends Study shows that 44% of employers are capturing time savings of two to five hours per week, and 32% are seeing savings of more than five hours. Given those savings, how do you actually realize value from time savings?

Nick Livingston: [10:51] We've heard about this from a few different angles. A larger RPO we recently had on our own podcast talked about using AI to automate the tasks that bots handle well, so that humans can focus on what they do best — authenticity, building relationships, rapport. They don't see AI as a mechanism to reduce their recruiting team by 10%. They see it as a way to empower people to do more human things: talk to more clients, engage more candidates.

From a capacity standpoint, we're seeing recruiters manage more requisitions than they used to, because scheduling, note-taking, and the tedious write-ups after interviews are now automated. That gives them time to talk to more candidates, do more sourcing, or invest more in client and hiring manager relationship management.

We also have a client right now that places automotive technicians at scale. They've literally doubled their close rates on a monthly basis over the last few months. And it's not just time savings to the recruiter. When you start to deliver more value and interview intelligence to hiring managers, you actually fill more jobs faster at scale. With RPO specifically, that balance matters — you want consistency, you want quality, you're delivering a service to your client. The question becomes: how do we stitch all of that together to hire the right people faster?

The Evolving Role of the Recruiter

Lamees Abourahma: [12:43] I want to circle back to what that means for recruiting teams and how their role can evolve. In our Technology and Innovation Forum, the evolving recruiter role was described as encompassing three areas: technology, business acumen, and the people aspect — connecting with candidates, empathy, the things you can't automate or replace.

Nick Livingston: [13:47] That's a great way to describe the strategic value of talent acquisition — from internal TA teams to external recruiting partners to RPOs. We have an example of a recruiter who spent 15 to 20 years in accounting and finance recruiting. She knows that world deeply. But as things changed, she found a role at an aerospace company — and now she's literally talking to rocket scientists. How do you have meaningful conversations with people in an industry you don't know well?

That's where technology can actually help keep the process human. We're still talking to candidates, still asking great questions on those calls — but the data we share with clients becomes less biased and less subject to misinterpretation, because we can share actual answers and insights rather than scribbled notes filtered through one person's lens. Understanding the client and industry better, digging deeper on human conversations, and then passing along structured data to help the hiring team make decisions — those three things can all work together.

Lamees Abourahma: [15:32] Exactly. And I want to tie in something else. One of our members described the value of intelligent interviewing as giving the recruiter a "superpower" — and a big part of that superpower is the ability to truly listen. You gave a great example of how technology enables recruiters to acquire skills they might not otherwise have, particularly in conducting more technically demanding interviews.

Nick Livingston: [16:16] Just freeing a recruiter up to actually talk to someone without worrying about remembering everything — that's a huge weight off every recruiter's shoulder. When you have back-to-back calls with a scientist, an engineer, a marketer, and a finance professional, all those conversations blur together by end of day. You can't remember why you liked candidate A.

The data capture piece is remarkable. It lets recruiters focus entirely on listening, asking better questions, digging deeper, asking the follow-up questions — all the things that make you a better interviewer.

This draws from best practices in other departments. Sales teams have been recording their conversations for 10 to 15 years. Customer support organizations have been capturing call data for 30 to 40 years. It's time for recruiting to do the same. Recording your calls and capturing data from conversations with hiring managers, candidates, and references is a remarkable dataset. If recruiters review their own interviews, they learn a lot just by listening to themselves. And for TA leaders who have never actually listened to how their recruiters conduct themselves on a call with a candidate — it's an eye-opening experience.

Interview Intelligence as a Searchable Data Asset

Lamees Abourahma: [18:26] You got my wheels spinning, Nick. As someone who self-attests to note-taking being a weakness, this technology has been incredible — including the ability to go back to a conversation from a year ago and find accurate, searchable notes, or ask questions of that data without reading through an entire transcript.

Nick Livingston: [19:27] At scale, the RPOs and recruiting teams we work with might have five to ten recruiters on a client account with 7,000 captured interviews. Some of our clients have 10,000 to 20,000 interviews — all now searchable, structured, and documented. You can search your interviews just like you can search resumes.

Resumes are historically focused: what did someone do in the past? Interviews are forward-looking: what do you want to be doing? What are your aspirations? What are your career goals? None of that is on a resume. But if it's structured data, you can search the answers, the questions, the transcripts, the summaries, the notes, the skill tags. Sourcers and recruiters can start asking: who have we spoken with in the last few years who said they want to become a marketing director? They're not there yet, but you know who's ready. Think of interview intelligence as another searchable database of people you've already spoken with.

Before and After: The Integrated Talent Delivery Workflow

Lamees Abourahma: [20:52] I want to zoom in. I love stories and examples. Would you share a before-and-after scenario for organizations currently using bolted-on or disconnected solutions rather than an integrated platform?

Nick Livingston: [21:35] There's the sourcing stack for finding candidates, and the ATS for processing them — and then there's this big middle part we call "talent delivery." It's all the steps a recruiter takes to ensure only the right candidates get through to the hiring manager. And that middle has largely been overlooked.

When you're using five to ten disconnected tools outside your ATS — for scheduling, note-taking, interview guides, data capture, candidate presentations, submissions, and feedback — and recruiters are piecing that together inconsistently — recruiting leaders can't measure any of it. And if you can't measure it, you can't optimize it.

When you pull all of that into one purpose-built solution, you can start measuring time to source, time to schedule, time to screen, time to interview, time to submit, time to feedback. That builds a quantitative, measurable approach to delivery. RPOs can start informing clients with real SLA data — they know how long it takes to fill a Java engineering role versus a marketing coordinator role, and they have the analytics to back that up.

The other transformation is in the interview process itself. For decades we've had a very linear model: screening, then a series of redundant interviews with multiple stakeholders, and the last candidate standing gets the job. What we're seeing shift is toward a more collaborative model driven by talent partners. We have a large legal firm that has been using Honeit for several years. They shifted from a linear, back-to-back interview process that consumed huge amounts of time from senior attorneys and managing partners — having the same conversations with candidates repeatedly — to a model where talent partners conduct high-quality, skills-based interviews on the front end. They share that interview intelligence with the click of a button to five or six stakeholders, who can then invest five to ten minutes reviewing and scoring answers rather than each spending 45 minutes in a redundant interview. That's one example of how recruiters are evolving — and by evolving, actually improving and streamlining the experience for the candidate, the hiring manager, and everyone involved.

ROI and Metrics: What the Data Shows

Lamees Abourahma: [25:01] Was there data you wanted to share in terms of the metrics that a technology like Honeit can deliver?

Nick Livingston: [25:09] We just had a client on our podcast who cited 10 hours per week per recruiter in time savings — from scheduling, note-taking, and particularly from candidate write-ups and submissions. When you talk to a wonderful candidate and they share remarkable things, putting together a compelling summary to share with the hiring manager is one of the most time-consuming parts of the recruiter's job. What if instead, a busy hiring manager could hear a few highlights directly in the candidate's own voice? That fast-tracks the process and reduces redundant steps.

To be clear on the RPOA data — 44% of employers are saving two to five hours per week, and 32% are saving more than five hours, so that client likely falls in that second group.

The other dimension is the hiring manager side. With RPOs especially, you're not just delivering a resume — you're delivering a person who has to work with other people. Looking at the automotive technician case study, being able to nearly double your placement rate per month is reachable when you start optimizing what used to be a disconnected delivery workflow.

Change Management and the Skeptical Recruiter

Lamees Abourahma: [27:43] Let's talk about the skeptical recruiter. AI may be championed at the leadership level, but it needs to trickle down to recruiting teams. What are you seeing in terms of change management? Are recruiting teams welcoming these changes, or is it more of a push?

Nick Livingston: [28:37] There's no question — there's anxiety, fear, and confusion in our industry right now. There's real fear about AI replacing recruiters and taking jobs. I think recruiters have a reasonable right to be skeptical, especially since this is fundamentally a people business. Innovation in HR and recruiting technology typically lags behind sales or marketing technology. I'm not seeing enterprise sales teams ceding their work entirely to AI. So why would we apply AI to one of the most important functions in an organization — where 85% of budget goes to the people you hire?

But I don't think recruiters can be complacent right now. There is significant change happening, and you need to test and try new things. Many recruiters believe they're personally great at what they do — yet they've never listened to how other recruiters interview, and many managers have never listened to their own recruiters on a candidate call. If you do, there is almost always room for improvement.

For individual recruiters: it's never been easier to experiment. We call it the "Honeit one-rec challenge" — pick a requisition, talk to three candidates, share a couple of links with your hiring manager, and ask: did this help you make a better decision faster? Low stakes, high signal.

At the leadership level, the RPO organizations leaning into this and seeing delivery gains are realizing: if you find something that works and you want consistency at scale, you have to implement. The competition is becoming very fierce — RPO, recruiting, executive search — in terms of demonstrating real, tangible value for the fees being charged.

The Recruiter Plus AI Model

Lamees Abourahma: [31:40] Something we're actively discussing through our AI Impact and Innovation Task Force is what we're calling the "Recruiter Plus AI" model — where you're not removing the recruiter, but you are requiring them to evolve into using more technology. The ones who do will deliver better results for clients and for their RPO organizations. We're hoping that message resonates across the industry.

Nick Livingston: [32:54] AI-assisted, AI-augmented — we're very aligned on that. It's not about removing recruiters; it's about improving and enabling them. That said, there is a distinct line within HR tech that's different from sales or accounting. We've seen lawsuits historically around AI making decisions in HR — AI ranking, scoring, comparing candidates without a human in the loop. That's still a slippery slope.

We still have clients who use the Honeit platform with AI capabilities turned off and see tremendous value. Many are now starting to turn those capabilities on, because they're recognizing it's less scary than it seemed. AI is not making decisions or scoring candidates — it's automating everything around the human conversations, which remain human. If you draw a clear line: we can use AI to do incredible things, but we're not going to use it to auto-score, auto-rank, or auto-decline candidates — that's a safer, more defensible place to be right now.

I would much rather be on the side of: let's be cautious, let's treat AI output as data, but keep the decision-making with the recruiter and the hiring manager.

Lamees Abourahma: [35:00] A few things you said I really want to call out. First, the terminology — not everything is AI. People are attaching "AI" to everything, but there's automation that doesn't include AI, and "technology" is often the more accurate term. Second, I appreciate the point about being able to turn capabilities on or off incrementally. You don't have to change everything at once. You can start small, at your own pace — and a lot of organizations are more comfortable framing it as a pilot.

Nick Livingston: [36:30] Pilots are a great approach. For some organizations, they also serve a practical function: they help you build the business case to communicate value to leadership, IT, security, and compliance. And when introduced as a pilot, it doesn't feel like a full commitment. The best way we've seen it work is to start with a couple of volunteers — people who don't like typing notes and like talking to people. Measure recruiter productivity, hiring manager time savings, and the ROI of a consolidated stack in that small pilot. Then you can make the broader business case.

Closing Thoughts: Keeping Hiring Human

Lamees Abourahma: [37:41] I want to close with a question for any talent leader or RPO provider listening who wants to bring AI into their process without losing what makes great recruiting great. What do you wish more people understood before they started?

Nick Livingston: [38:08] We're already seeing a shift past the early framing of AI as purely a time-saving or cost-cutting tool. People are now asking: where can we use it where it actually matters? How do we use it to raise the bar — not just move faster? Faster is better, until you go overboard and quality suffers, or the candidate experience or client experience is impacted.

The good technology disappears into the background. You want it helping you — you don't want it in your face. That's where the integrated stack has an advantage over point solutions: when it all flows together and you can ensure your team of 10, 50, or 150 recruiters is executing each step optimally, that's where technology quietly behind the scenes makes a real difference.

Lamees Abourahma: [40:06] That reminds me of something Jordan Morrow said in his keynote at the 2025 RPOA Annual Conference — describing companies being AI-native versus treating AI as a bolted-on feature. It's a journey, and not every organization will be at the same point. But it's been a fantastic conversation. Anything you'd like to add before we close, Nick?

Nick Livingston: [41:00] I appreciate the time. It's a fascinating moment in recruiting. For any recruiter, it's worth looking inward — there are real things we can do to level up our daily workflow and our function. I'm genuinely excited to see recruiting and talent acquisition become more involved in the hiring process, not less. Shifting to conducting high-quality, technically rigorous first and second round interviews — that's an exciting opportunity. AI might take some of the tedious screening work off our plate, but those human conversations? I still believe that's the most important part of a fundamentally human process. Keep hiring human.

Lamees Abourahma: [41:54] Fantastic. Thank you so much, Nick. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Time to Hire podcast from the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association. Give us a review wherever you listen, and always stay connected, stay engaged, and stay informed about what's happening in the talent and recruiting world by tuning into the RPOA — the place to go for RPO.