Robotic Process Automation (or RPA) is an emerging form of business process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers.

In traditional workflow automation tools, a software developer produces a list of actions to automate a task and interface to the back-end system using internal application programming interfaces (APIs) or dedicated scripting language. In contrast, RPA systems develop the action list by watching the user perform that task in the application's graphical user interface (GUI), and then perform the automation by repeating those tasks directly in the GUI. This can lower the barrier to use of automation in products that might not otherwise feature APIs for this purpose.

RPA tools for recruitment differ from the common CV aggregators including features that allow data to be handled in and between multiple applications, for instance, searching across platforms for candidates, automatically responding to potential candidates, and sending out customized requests to candidates. The data manipulation aspect is not something one would normally find in a regular recruitment tool.