Starter kit: How to create an AI recruiter

The Tavus Team

August 8, 2025

Table of Contents

Imagine a recruiter who never gets tired, remembers every candidate’s history, adapts instantly to each hiring manager’s style, and can pull in real-world examples or your own job descriptions on the fly.

This isn’t a far-off vision—it’s what you can create today with Tavus Conversational Video Interface (CVI).

With a lifelike AI persona, your recruiter can greet candidates by name, remember what they discussed in the last interview, explain complex role requirements through friendly video chats, screen candidates in real time, and even adapt interview questions based on their answers. And thanks to new built-in capabilities like Memories, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), Objectives and Guardrails, and the Persona Builder, building one is no longer a developer-only project.

Technical prerequisites

You’ll need:

A Tavus account with API access and your API key from the dashboard
Access to a large language model (LLM) such as GPT, Gemini, Claude, or Llama
Your recruiting content—either public sources, your proprietary job libraries, or fine-tuned models
A web or mobile platform where you’ll embed your recruiter

No deep technical background is required, but familiarity with APIs will help. Tavus handles the heavy lifting for real-time video, conversation management, and persona creation.

Phase 1: Define your recruiter’s role and goals

Start by deciding who your recruiter is for and what success looks like:

Audience: Entry-level applicants, experienced hires, executive search, or internal mobility
Goals: Improve quality of hire, shorten time-to-fill, or scale access to initial screening
Style: Warm and approachable, efficient and concise, detail-oriented expert

Your choices here will shape:

Persona behavior (tone, personality, language)
Objectives and Guardrails (interview milestones, branching question paths)
Content integration (job descriptions, screening questions, candidate resources)

Phase 2: Build your persona with ease

The Persona Builder makes it simple—no coding required. In a conversational setup flow, you’ll:

Choose a persona type (e.g., technical recruiter, campus recruiter)
Set voice, appearance, and communication style
Add system prompts to guide tone and questions
Automatically create default Objectives and Guardrails so the recruiter knows what to achieve each session

Behind the scenes, Tavus provisions everything you need: a Persona ID, default Replica settings, and a working conversational flow.

Phase 3: Give your recruiter memory

A great recruiter doesn’t just interview in the moment—it remembers the candidate’s journey. With Memories, your AI recruiter can:

Recall which roles each candidate has already applied for
Keep track of strengths, skills, and experience details
Pick up exactly where the last interview ended, no reintroduction required

Enabling Memories is simple:

Memories are on by default. You can also add a memory_stores identifier in your Create Conversation call via API:

{
  "replica_id": "rb17cf590e15",
  "conversation_name": "Follow-up Interview",
  "memory_stores": ["candidate_123"]
}

Use a unique ID for each candidate to ensure their history stays accurate and separate from others.

Memories turn your AI recruiter into a long-term hiring partner, capable of building on past interactions instead of starting from scratch.

Learn more about Memories →

Phase 4: Make it knowledgeable with RAG

With RAG, your recruiter can pull facts from your documents—role PDFs, CSVs with candidate data, image-based org charts, or even a scraped careers site. Just upload them in the Tavus dashboard or via the Documents API:

{
  "document_url": "https://example.com/software_engineer.pdf",
  "document_name": "Software Engineer Role",
  "tags": ["engineering", "recruiting"]
}

Assign these documents to your conversation, and your recruiter will weave that information naturally into responses.

Phase 5: Map hiring paths with objectives and guardrails

An effective recruiter doesn’t just ask questions—it guides the candidate toward clear milestones and adapts along the way. With Objectives and Guardrails, you can set measurable goals for each session and define the paths candidates can take to reach them.

Here’s how to put it into practice:

Break interviews into steps such as Introduction → Experience discussion → Skills assessment → Next steps.
Branch based on answers so strong responses move the candidate forward, while gaps trigger follow-up questions or role clarifications.
Mark objectives as complete automatically once the candidate has demonstrated the required skill or experience.
Apply guardrails to keep the conversation focused on relevant role requirements, preventing tangents or off-topic responses.

When combined with other Tavus capabilities, the experience becomes even more powerful:

Memories let the recruiter remember which objectives a candidate has already met in past interviews, so it can skip what’s confirmed and focus on what’s next.
RAG allows the recruiter to pull in precise, role-specific examples and qualification criteria from your uploaded documents at each step of the process.

You can design these flows visually in the Tavus dashboard—perfect for quickly testing new interview structures—or edit the JSON directly for complex, conditional branching. Either way, Objectives and Guardrails ensure the recruiter stays focused, responsive, and always moving the candidate toward the right outcome.

Phase 6: Connect content and assessments

Once your recruiter can talk and remember, it’s time to make sure it uses the right material and adapts as candidate conversations progress. With Tavus CVI, you can connect it to:

Public APIs for trusted labor market or skills data
Your own role documentation uploaded through RAG, so the recruiter always references accurate, up-to-date information
Dynamic skills tests and scenario-based questions generated in real time
Define content-specific goals so each assessment maps directly to a required competency
Use guardrails to ensure assessments stick to approved job requirements and align with your hiring process

Here’s where the new features make a big difference:

Memories let your recruiter recall what a candidate has already shared and how they performed on past assessments, so future evaluations build on that history.
RAG ensures every question, scenario, or clarification is grounded in your specific role documentation—not just general hiring advice.

For example, after discussing a technical skill, your recruiter might say:

“Want to walk through a quick coding challenge based on the role we discussed last time?”

If the candidate says yes, the recruiter delivers the task, reviews the response, and uses Objectives and Guardrails to decide the next step—moving forward if they’ve demonstrated the skill, or revisiting it with additional questions if not.

This creates a continuous loop of asking → checking → adapting, powered by long-term memory and your own content library, so every interaction feels personal, relevant, and ready for whatever comes next.

Best practices

Keep prompts simple so questions are clear and jargon-free
Use Memories + RAG together for a truly personalized, informed recruiter
Review analytics to see where candidates tend to struggle and refine your flows
Support multiple languages for broader reach
Ensure accessibility with captions and alternative formats

Building with Tavus CVI

Most AI recruiters today still feel flat—chat bubbles on a screen or avatars with canned responses. With Tavus CVI, you can start building toward something more:

Real-time, lifelike video personas that feel present in every interaction
Persistent memory to carry context forward and retrieval-augmented knowledge to ground answers in your own content
Guided conversation flows that help candidates reach clear, measurable outcomes
A no-code builder for quick starts and full API control when you’re ready to customize deeply
Enterprise-grade privacy and compliance so you can serve even the most sensitive audiences confidently

These capabilities don’t just help you launch an AI recruiter quickly—they open the door to evolving it over time. As your content, candidates, and hiring goals change, Tavus CVI gives you the flexibility to adapt, expand, and keep creating recruitment experiences that feel more human, more personal, and more effective.

Start building today

Define your persona, turn on Memories, upload your role documentation with RAG, set your hiring objectives, and integrate your recruiter where candidates already are.

With Tavus CVI, anyone—recruiters, talent teams, organizations—can create a recruiter that feels real, screens effectively, and scales effortlessly.