Recruiters, remember templates?
You have one for rejections, one for recruiter screens, one for the day-7 "just checking in" nudge to candidates. Write it once, save it, and from then on a 4 minute email is 2 clicks.
A good recruiter with a template library was miles ahead of a good recruiter without one.
Most recruiters are using AI now. And most are re-typing the same prompt every single time.
Every candidate outreach starts from scratch. Paste the JD. Paste the profile. Re-explain the tone. Re-explain the role. Re-explain what good looks like. Tomorrow, do it again. Day after, do it again until the inevitable slow descent into madness that all recruiters eventually suffer.
So take that old habit of building templates, and apply it to context. Context is what templates were before AI.
The reusable unit has changed. You're not saving finished outputs anymore, you're saving the raw material the AI needs to generate them.
A template gave you one email. A context file gives you every email, in your voice, fitted to the situation. But only if you build the context files correctly.
How I run it
I have a digital twin. I called him Luke E-Tron (hehe) It's a highly contextual version of Claude that knows:
1️⃣ My writing style, fed from my newsletter back catalogue and LinkedIn posts
2️⃣ The people I talk to day in day out, who they are, what they do, how I speak to each of them
3️⃣ How my business runs. Cash flow, invoices, current priorities, live projects
4️⃣ MCP connections into Notion (to-do list), Granola (meeting notes), Slack, Gmail, Calendar
Each of those is a context file or a connection I set up once. I don't re-explain any of it in the morning.
The morning routine
Most mornings I have 15 to 25 small communications to send. Slack replies, email follow-ups, a kickoff to a hiring manager, a nudge to a candidate, a quick update. None of it needs my undeniable genius, but never the less, it still needs doing.
That's 20 tasks, 20 context switches, 20 micro-decisions about tone. An hour and a half gone before I've done any actual work.
So I built a context file called morning-routine.md. It says, roughly:
Go through my to-do list in Notion. For anything that's a communication from me to someone else, check if you have enough context to write it. If yes, draft it in Gmail or Slack. If no, list the ones you need more context on and ask me here in one batch. When the drafts are done, tell me.
My morning prompt is now three words. "Run morning routine."
20 tasks become 1. The hour and a half becomes 5 minutes of reviewing drafts and hitting send. The drafts Claude can't write, it asks about in a single batch, so the questions I actually answer are the ones that needed my brain.
What this looks like for recruiters
Here's the context file library I'd build if I was running a desk full time:
1️⃣ One context file per open req. JD, hiring manager preferences, screening criteria, interview panel, salary range, previous rejections and why
2️⃣ One per hiring manager. How they communicate. What they care about. What they've said yes and no to in the past. What "good" looks like to them
3️⃣ One for your tone of voice. Pulled from your best outreach, best rejections, best Slack updates. So every message sounds like you, not ChatGPT's idea of a recruiter
4️⃣ One for your weekly reporting. Metrics you pull, where they live, how you format the update, who it goes to
Build them once. Reference them forever.
The rule is, every time you give AI the same context twice, stop. That's a context file waiting to be written. Five minutes to save it. Next time, you reference the file instead of retyping 400 words of background.
This is the groundwork for something bigger I'll get into soon. The shift from doing things one at a time to doing them all at once. Serial to parallel. But you can't run parallel if every task still needs you to explain the setup from scratch.
With AI, context comesfirst. Everything else gets faster after that.
Well... that's issue seventy one! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.
I'll see you next week!