I build automation for recruiting agencies, so I’ll give you the practical split: Automate: CV formatting, moving candidates through pipeline stages, routine follow-up emails, and summarizing daily inbox activity. These are repetitive and rule-based, so automation can handle them without losing much quality. Keep manual: Anything involving judgment about a candidate, or the first real conversation with a decision-maker. That’s where the human touch actually matters, and automating it can backfire. I think it’s worth paying for when it saves you real hours on repetitive work, not when you’re trying to automate the relationship itself.