I have a warning. And I have a non-negotiable recommendation. The world of AI is still full of hype and dominated by charlatans selling digital snake oil. Much of it isn't even real! There is a self-appointed army of AI experts, evangelists and so-called 'thought leaders'. They have never implemented AI in a recruitment environment. All they are doing is amplifying the claims of the snake-oil AI vendors. Beware! Many products on sale now actually automate dysfunction. Furthermore, many legacy traditional HR tools, CRM, and ATS products have increasingly flawed platforms. They sprinkle AI terminology and the occasional AI enhancement on top of what is, in reality, a dinosaur system.

This blog challenges the hype around “totally automated recruitment” pushed by tech founders who have never recruited or implemented recruitment tech. It urges recruiters to think critically about AI claims and separate reality from noise. By imagining a world where recruiters lose their laptops, we can clarify which tasks must remain human-driven and which can be supported by technology. Recruitment is unique: unlike products or tickets, talent is not a commodity and can say “no.” True recruitment success lies in balancing technology with human judgment, empathy, and influence — something automation alone cannot replace.

Before you claim the ‘market is tough’ or decide ‘clients are being unreasonable’, check your management of the power of incremental leverage. Assess too if you have a total grasp of its ugly twin, ‘negative leverage’ Too much ‘jargon’? Fair enough. Let’s dive into an example Many recruiters tell me their temp business is declining. […]

The real ‘ghosting’ problem in recruitment is recruiters ghosting candidates. Here is the news. Agency recruiters are not the worst offenders. Talent Acquisition and corporate recruiters have generally perfected candidate ghosting on an industrial scale. In all cases, it’s a disgrace. It is one of the dysfunctions of our profession. And AI is making it […]

I have seen it with my clients. The market is tough for them all, but some are doing much better than others. Why is this so? Same with recruiters. Some are competing in the same market. Same discipline. Same tenure. And yet some are excelling, and others are struggling to survive. What are those successful […]

Don’t get me wrong, being emotional about placing people in jobs is normal. In fact, it’s essential. We care about what we do, and it’s all about people. I love the passion of a recruiter on a mission to fill a role or place a candidate. I am relaxed about screams of joy or moans […]

I have never seen recruiters and recruitment leaders as bewildered as they are right now. Sure, in the past we have dealt with technological changes, recessions, and a ‘minor‘ pandemic, and they were disruptive and disconcerting. But we always believed that the market would return. Even the pandemic always had an end in sight, and […]

I had a fascinating meeting with Kris Cleland, the CEO of RecruitmentX, recently Kris explained to me that when he first joined RecruitmentX, he stress-tested their AI assistant by feeding it 1,000 resumes. In under 10 minutes, it had classified, ranked, and even written personalised summaries for every single candidate, ready for client submissions. By […]

This is one of the most significant dysfunctions in agency recruitment. And has been for years. Here it is; Where a recruitment agency fills a job order, and the successful candidate is sourced from a job board or LinkedIn, in at least 50% of cases, that candidate was already in that recruitment agency’s database.  Do […]