Finding the right talent is critical for early-stage startups, but the recruitment process can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Enter Notion AI, a game-changing tool that’s revolutionizing how startups approach hiring. By combining the organizational power of Notion with cutting-edge AI capabilities, you can streamline your recruitment workflows and make better hiring decisions with less effort.
In this post, we’ll explore how Notion AI can transform your recruitment processes, based on our real-world experience building recruitment systems for early-stage startups.
What is Notion AI?
Notion AI is an artificial intelligence assistant integrated directly into Notion’s workspace platform. It uses OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude) as its based large language model (LLM).
It functions as your collaborative partner, helping you create content, summarize information, extract key points, and answer questions about your Notion database. That’s really its value! It’s like having your own LLM based on the notes you already have.
Unlike standalone AI tools, Notion AI works within your existing Notion workspace, accessing and understanding the context of your documents, databases, and workflows. This contextual awareness makes it particularly powerful for complex processes like recruitment.
Notion AI is an extra feature you must activate on your current Notion subscription. I’m paying $10 per month.
I’ve been using Notion AI since its beta. And it has improved a lot since then!
Key features of Notion AI include:
- Content generation – draft job descriptions, emails to candidates, and interview questions.
- Summarization – condense lengthy resumes or interview notes into key points.
- Information extraction – pull relevant skills and experience from applications.
- Natural language queries – ask questions about your candidate database using plain English.
- Workflow automation – streamline repetitive recruitment tasks.
For startups with limited HR resources, Notion AI effectively serves as a recruitment assistant that’s available 24/7.
Why Notion AI is Great for Recruitment Workflows
Recruitment involves numerous repetitive tasks that can drain your team’s time and energy.
Here’s why Notion AI excels at transforming these workflows:
- Centralized candidate information: Notion AI helps you create a comprehensive candidate database where all information—resumes, portfolios, interview notes, assessments—lives in one searchable place.
- Faster candidate screening: Instead of manually reviewing each application, ask Notion AI to highlight candidates with specific skills or experience, significantly reducing screening time.
- Improved communication: Generate personalized emails to candidates at each stage of the recruitment process, maintaining consistent communication without writing each message from scratch.
- Enhanced collaboration: Your entire team can access the same candidate information and contribute their insights, with AI helping to organize and summarize feedback.
- Data-driven decisions: Over time, Notion AI can help you analyze your hiring patterns and outcomes, enabling more objective and effective hiring decisions.
For early-stage startups where team members often wear multiple hats, these efficiencies are invaluable. Notion AI essentially gives you the recruitment capabilities of a much larger organization without the corresponding headcount.
For our talent agency, we have a Recruitment Manager who uses Notion and documents everything.
How We Use Notion AI for Recruitment
At Irene Chan Co., we’ve developed a comprehensive Notion AI-powered recruitment system that has transformed how we connect talented professionals from the Philippines with early-stage startups worldwide. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at our approach:
Candidate Database Management: Each applicant has their card in our Notion database, containing their name, contact information, uploaded resume, and other essential details. When we need specific talent, we can simply ask Notion AI targeted questions like, “Who is a social media manager who specializes in Canva?” and instantly get relevant matches.
Talent Profile Generation: Once we’ve vetted and interviewed promising candidates, we create detailed talent profiles to share with our clients. Notion AI dramatically accelerates this process by:
- Mimicking our established writing style
- Copying our entire formatting structure
- Pulling key information from candidate materials
- Generating consistent, professional summaries
You can view the live Talent Profile here. That’s another bonus of using Notion. You can create neat landing pages without having to host them on WordPress. We initially wanted to put the talent profiles on WordPress, but it took so many resources to create a pag,e and it’s not as beautiful. With this process, our Recruitment Manager can recreate beautiful pages in seconds.
Knowledge Base Utilization: We maintain detailed documentation of our recruitment processes within Notion. When team members have questions, they can ask Notion AI chat, which references these pages to provide accurate, contextual answers, eliminating the need to search numerous documents.
Interview Preparation: Notion AI helps us prepare tailored interview questions based on job requirements and candidate backgrounds, ensuring we collect relevant information during every conversation.
This system has allowed us to scale our recruitment operations efficiently while maintaining high-quality standards for the freelancers we recommend to our clients.
How to Build Your Notion AI Recruitment Workflows
Ready to leverage Notion AI for your own recruitment needs? Here’s a step-by-step approach to building effective workflows:
- Create your candidate database structure.
- Build a database with properties for essential candidate information.
- Include properties for skills, experience level, availability, etc.
- Add status properties to track where candidates are in your pipeline.
- Set up AI-enhanced templates.
- Create templates for job descriptions, candidate assessments, and interview questions
- Use Notion AI to help draft these templates based on your requirements
- Develop a talent profile template that AI can populate with candidate information
- Establish your evaluation framework
- Define clear evaluation criteria for different roles
- Create standardized assessment forms that team members can easily complete
- Use AI to summarize assessment results across multiple interviewers
- Implement communication workflows
- Design templates for candidate communications at each recruitment stage
- Leverage Notion AI to personalize messages while maintaining consistent tone
- Create automated reminders for follow-ups and next steps
- Develop knowledge base documentation
- Document your recruitment processes comprehensively
- Enable AI chat to reference these documents when team members have questions
- Continuously update based on lessons learned and process improvements
Here, you can see how detailed our documentation is for building a talent profile page. The main thing is to copy the original page and change it with the details of the new talent.
Start with these basic workflows, then refine them as you gain experience with the platform.
Want to hire freelancers in the Philippines who are using AI tools? We can help.
FAQs About Notion AI for Recruitment
What can I use Notion AI for in the recruitment process?
Notion AI can help write job descriptions, screen resumes, summarize candidate information, and generate interview questions. It can host a database of all the resumes you’ve collected for different roles. The more data you have, the better!
How much does Notion AI cost?
Notion AI costs $8 per month (when billed annually) and $10 per month (when billed per month) per user.
Can Notion AI help with sourcing candidates or just managing them?
While Notion AI doesn’t directly source candidates from external platforms, it can help you create compelling job descriptions and outreach messages that improve your sourcing efforts. It’s most powerful for managing candidates once they’re in your pipeline.
How secure is candidate data in a Notion AI system?
Notion has enterprise-grade security features including encryption at rest and in transit. However, you should establish clear data retention policies and ensure proper permission settings to protect sensitive candidate information.
Conclusion: The Future of Recruitment is AI-Enhanced
As early-stage startups compete for top talent in an increasingly competitive market, those who leverage AI tools like Notion AI gain a significant advantage. By automating routine aspects of the recruitment process, you free up valuable time to focus on what matters most—building meaningful connections with candidates and making thoughtful hiring decisions.
The future of recruitment isn’t about replacing human judgment with AI, but rather enhancing human capabilities through intelligent tools that handle repetitive tasks and surface key insights.
By bringing together talented professionals who understand both recruitment best practices and cutting-edge AI tools, you can build a hiring system that gives your startup a competitive edge in attracting and selecting the best talent.
