Using the Workable agent

The Workable agent is an intelligent hiring assistant that helps you create jobs, define structured matching criteria and automate sourcing, screening and candidate engagement. It is designed to reduce manual work, improve consistency in evaluation and help you identify strong candidates faster. The Workable agent add-on includes:

• AI-Powered Sourcing & Outreach: Agent finds and communicates with qualified candidates.
• Candidate Evaluation: Agent instantly screens and enriches candidates.
• Smart Pipeline Management: Agent advances candidates automatically.
• Seamless Handover: Get instant notifications when they’re ready.

The job brief agent for creating agentic jobs is available for free. The screening, sourcing, and engagement agents are included in the paid add-on and can be purchased via the Plan page, where all available add-ons are presented, via the AI Agent tab on the job editor, or via the job publish flows.

Creating a job with the Workable agent

To use the full Workable agent capabilities, you must create an agentic job using the job brief agent.

1. Click Create job from the homepage or the Jobs page and create the job with the agent.
2. Follow the guided conversation to describe your hiring needs. It's advised not to copy/paste ready job descriptions during this process. You should provide the needed details gradually to generate the ideal candidate profile.

Creating an agentic job is only available when using the AI-powered job creation flow. This option is not available when creating a job from a new requisition.

The agent will guide you through a structured chat to:

• Define the role and team context
• Capture required skills, qualifications and legal requirements
• Suggest relevant details based on your account’s historical data and similar roles
• Populate standard job editor fields such as location and workplace type
• Build a structured ideal candidate profile
• Generate a job description
• Generate targeted application form questions

Defining the ideal candidate profile

After collecting all necessary information (see example below), the agent will shape its strategy to define the ideal candidate profile.

The ideal candidate profile is defined by the user during the job creation process as a set of matching criteria organised in 14 categories.

The agent marks criteria as must-have based on its understanding, but users can manually modify them, change visibility, or set disqualifying status. Candidates matching disqualifying criteria are marked differently, with automations possible on them. Each criterion can be configured as:

• Must have: If the candidate does not meet it, it will have a greater impact on the score calculation of not met criteria.
• Disqualifier: If the candidate does not meet a criterion marked as Disqualifier, it will be marked as disqualifying. The candidate will be disqualified only if this action is enabled in the Agent actions settings.
• Show in job post

Adding entirely new criteria or deleting existing ones is not supported after creation to ensure consistent and fair scoring across candidates.

Once you are satisfied with the list of matching criteria, the agent will:

• Generate the job description and fill in any known job editor fields. You can freely modify the job description. Any changes to the job editor will not impact the matching criteria, and the agent will not re-engage.

• Generate application form questions for must-have, public, and not easily evaluated by the CV matching criteria. You can freely modify the questions and mark any of them as disqualifying.

Jobs created with the Job brief agent are tagged on the Jobs page with a relevant indication on the bottom right.

Using the Workable agent tab

Each agentic job includes a Workable agent tab in the job editor. This tab centralizes all AI-related settings and insights. From this tab, you can:

• View the agent’s current status
• Start or stop agent actions
• Review and manage the ideal candidate profile
• Configure sourcing, screening and engagement settings
• View performance insights

If the agent is stopped, no new automated actions will be executed. Candidates already in progress (meaning they have already started the chat with the agent) will not be interrupted, and scoring continues using the defined criteria.

Agent insights and performance metrics

The Insights section provides a summary of the agent’s activity and key performance indicators. You can monitor metrics such as:

• Sourced: Passive candidates added by the agent to the Sourced stage; their source will be set as "Workable agent"

• Interested: Sourced candidates who successfully completed the chat

• Evaluated: Candidates evaluated against the ideal candidate profile

• Updated profile: Applicants who completed the chat and enriched their profile

• Disqualified: Candidates disqualified due to unmet disqualifying criteria or lack of interest

• Handovers: Candidates fully processed and handed over to a user

• Advanced: Candidates moved to a later stage based on score thresholds

Clicking a metric redirects you to the Candidates page with the relevant filters applied. 

Stop Agent

Agent’s status is displayed and you can stop the agent if needed from the relevant action button. Stopping implies that the below agent automated operations are halted and no further actions are taken by the agent on new and existing candidates:

• Auto candidate sourcing of passive candidate
• Communication with candidates
• Auto advance and auto disqualify

However the Screening agent remains active and new candidates will be evaluated against the matching criteria with the currently available information. To disable the Screening agent you will need to disable AI features from your Workflow settings.

Also, to maintain a proper candidate experience, candidates that are in flight of agent’s actions will not be impacted. For example, a candidate receives an email to join the chat session. At 10.00 the candidate enters the chat. At 10.01 you stop the agent. This candidate is already in the chat (in-flight) and thus will not be impacted.

Ideal candidate profile

The Screening agent evaluates every candidate against the ideal candidate profile and assigns a normalized score out of 100. Must-have criteria are weighted more heavily. The evaluation framework considers:

• Completeness of the candidate profile, including CV and application answers

• Validity and consistency of provided information

• Complexity of defined criteria

• Alignment between candidate data and defined requirements

• Subjective elements such as transferable skills

Editing or creating a new matching criterion is not possible during this release, as it would lead to inconsistent and possibly unfair rating between new and existing candidates. However, you can modify whether a criterion:

• is Must have: Upon change the scores of all candidates is reevaluated
• Is Disqualifying: Upon change impacted candidates are denoted

After a change new and in-flight candidates are evaluated based on the new settings.

Agent actions settings

With the paid add-on of Workable agent, you can enable the following actions: 

Any manual user activity on a candidate immediately stops the agent from taking further action. For example, if you leave a comment, the agent will no longer move, disqualify, or request additional information, as it assumes a human has taken over. Agent actions will be initiated for applied and sourced candidates via the Agent or via Search with AI (manually by the user but not past candidates) or via the Workable extension, or referred candidates.

The agent also does not reprocess candidates it has already completed. If the criteria are later updated and a previously reviewed candidate now qualifies, the agent will not automatically move them. Instead, users will be notified about affected candidates and can manually take bulk actions.

Stop agent actions

You can stop agent actions on a candidate basis from the following locations:

• Under Communication > Messages tab.
  
• From the toolbar actions under the three dots menu.
  

Screening agent - Matching against ideal candidate profile

The agent’s evaluation framework considers the following: 

• The completeness of candidate input (CV, ATS profile, application form questions and candidate custom fields)
• The validity of data (incomplete parsing,  conflicting information, etc.)
• The complexity of the user defined matching criteria (criterion A and criterion B or criterion C, where A, B, C are all different types of data, such as numeric, categorical, hierarchical, etc.)
• The misalignment of data formats between candidate-provided and user-provided text data
• The subjectiveness of the evaluation process (e.g. transferable skills, knowledge domain mappings, synonyms etc.) 

The agent's output comprises two core sections: an evaluation summary and a detailed match against the ideal candidate profile. 

Evaluation summary

This section provides:

• The candidate score: The score as provided by the agent normalized to 100. The scoring algorithm scores must haves with twice the marks as non-must-haves. 
• Missing must-haves: The number of missing must haves (if any).
• Summary: A high level text summary of the candidate’s evaluation. 
• Status: Candidates that are still under evaluation by the agent will be notated as “Reviewing..”.

Detailed evaluation

This section provides the candidate’s fit to the ideal candidate profile as evaluated by the screening agent. 
The matching criteria are grouped as Must-have and Nice-to-have. Each criterion has one of the following states:

Status	Description
Met	The candidate fully matches the requirement based on available evidence.
Partially met	The candidate partially satisfies the requirement.
Not met	Evidence exists but does not meet the requirement.
Disqualifying	A requirement marked as disqualifying that was not met.
Unknown	There is insufficient information to evaluate the requirement.
Reviewing	The agent is still processing and evaluating the candidate.

All matching outcomes are also supported by relevant reasoning supporting the agent’s claims. 

If needed, you can manually modify any matches and update their states by selecting "Edit candidate's fit". 

Note that updating a candidate's matches will stop the agent from further engaging with this candidate, i.e., send any message or advance them to the next stage.
 

Sourcing agent - Sourcing matching passive candidates

The Sourcing agent aims to identify and source qualified, interested candidates for a job. Using Search with AI suggestions, it targets passive candidates who match the role.

First, it retrieves the top candidates suggested by Search with AI. The Screening agent then reviews them and filters out anyone who clearly does not meet disqualifying criteria. The remaining candidates are added to the Sourced stage. If some are disqualified, the Sourcing agent will automatically source additional candidates until the target is reached.

For jobs with multiple locations, the best profiles are selected across all locations.

For candidates added to the Sourced stage either by the AI agent or via Search with AI, any message templates, video interviews, assessments, or self-schedule automations set on that stage will be skipped. Automations in the applied stages will be triggered normally. Note that the "thank you" automation will not stop the agent from contacting the candidate, but you might want to reconsider them, as the candidate will get three emails upon application (the workable email with their application info, the thank you automation and the agent email.)
All other automations (in the applied or following stages) will be triggered as configured, but those will result in stoping the agent from taking any other action and invalidating the chat links.

Engagement agent - Reach out to candidates

The engagement agent is responsible for: 

• Communicating with the candidates, inviting them to a chat session in order to gather interest and/or enrich their profiles
• Autonomously chatting with candidates
• Acting on the candidates (move, disqualify, revert, comment etc.) as an outcome of the chat

Candidate communication

If the "Contact sourced candidates" is enabled on agent actions settings, the agent will send personalized emails to sourced candidates via the agent or via Search with AI (manually by the user but not past candidates) or via the Workable extension, or referred candidates to invite them to a chat session in order to check their interest and complete their profile.

Other sourced candidates, for example, those manually uploaded or via RSC, will not be contacted, as prior communication external to the system may already exist.

Similarly, the agent will email candidates who applied to clarify any unknown matching criteria as specified in the agent settings. 

In both cases, emails are sent from a system-generated no-reply address and are signed by the selected job collaborator in the agent settings. The tone of voice, included information and number of follow-ups are defined in the AI agent settings as well.

Chat with candidates

The chat is a guided conversation between the candidate and the AI agent. Its purpose is to:

• Confirm interest in the role 
• Request a CV if missing 
• Clarify unknown or incomplete matching criteria 
• Enrich the candidate profile

At the bottom of the chat window candidates can access your Privacy notice (if one is uploaded under Settings > Compliance).

If a candidate uploads a CV during the chat, the agent parses the document and updates the evaluation against the ideal candidate profile. The agent may continue asking follow-up questions until all required information is collected.

Before the conversation ends, the agent prompts the candidate to share any questions they would like passed to the hiring team.

Chat termination/expiration and completion statuses

The chat link is valid for 30 days. Once the chat is opened and initiated, the candidate will have 7 days to complete the conversation. The remaining time will be displayed on the footer. 

Candidates can continue the chat any time within those 7 days. The conversation will continue from the point it was previously stopped.

The chat is completed for one of the following reasons:

• completed_successfully: the candidate answered all agent questions
• not_interested: the candidate mentioned that they are not interested
• expired: The candidate started the chat, but never completed it and the link has expired.
• irrelevant_responses: The candidate did not provide relevant responses to questions. The agent may terminate the chat early if need be.
• human_handover: the candidate asked for a human to step in
• other: any other situation

Once the chat is terminated (for any reason) the agent will leave a comment to the candidate’s profile and include any relevant information as well as the complete chat conversation log. 

Enabling or disabling AI features

Admin users can control AI functionality for the entire account from the Workflow settings. Disabling AI features turns off all AI-powered features, such as the Workable agent and Screening Assistant, used for job creation, sourcing, screening, and ranking across all jobs.

FAQs

Will Workable agent run for all my agentic jobs once purchased? 

Once you purchase the Workable AI agent add-on, it applies to all your agentic jobs.

However, for agentic jobs created before upgrading, existing candidates will not be rescored, and no automated agent actions will run for them. The agent will only evaluate and take actions on new candidates moving forward.

Which criteria categories will be evaluated before and after the add-on purchase?

The following categories will be evaluated even before you purchase the agent add-on:

• Work Experience
• Educational Qualifications
• Tools & Technology proficiency
• Domain Knowledge
• Methodologies & Frameworks
• Language proficiency
• Certifications & Licenses

When you purchase the agent, the following categories will also be evaluated:

• Physical requirements
• Legal & Regulatory requirements
• Location & Mobility
• Availability
• Compensation & Budget constraints
• Stakeholder & Customer Interfaces
• Equipment & Infrastructure needs

Will Workable agent engage with candidates in all stages?

No, Workable agent will engage with candidates only during the Applied and Sourced stages.

How can I see which candidates the agent disqualified?

Candidates disqualified by the agent will have relevant items added to their profile timeline reasoning the disqualification action based on the candidate profile information.

If you use disqualification reasons the note will also be included in the Candidate details report if you select the "Candidate disqualification note" column.

Can a recruiter oversee the agent’s actions?

Yes. A recruiter can review, edit, and override actions, decisions, or recommendations made by the agent at any point. More specifically:

• The recruiter can manually modify any matches and update their states by selecting "Edit candidate's fit".
  
• If needed, you can revert any disqualified candidates.
• If the email asking the candidate to chat with the agent has already sent, a recruiter cannot take it back, but can "stop the agent" making this link invalid, and then manually follow up.