The Big Bad Ugly of AI in Recruitment - not.
Every week there's a new post telling us AI is going to strip the humanity out of hiring. Bias baked into algorithms, candidates flattened into keywords, recruiters replaced by a chatbot with a nice font. I understand why people feel that way. All change is hard, and change that touches people's livelihoods is harder still.
But I've spent a long time on both sides of the briefing table, and I think the fear is drowning out something important. Done properly, this tech doesn't just make hiring faster or cheaper. It makes it better.
Here's what the noise is missing:
The fear is fair (it's just pointed at the wrong thing).
Bad AI in recruitment looks exactly like bad recruitment without AI - keyword filters, lazy screens, nobody reading past the first page of a resume. The problem was never the tool. It was a shallow process being called a valuable service.
Matching was always a synthesis problem (and we were solving it with half the information).
A good placement depends on dozens of things. Skills and competencies, yes, but also how a business actually runs, the pace of the team, what the last person in the seat struggled with, and what the candidate wants and needs from the next three years. No recruiter, however experienced, holds all of that in their head for 300 applicants. So we matched on job titles and other key words, and hoped. Now the tech can synthesise everything we know about the candidate and everything we know about the role, side by side, including all the prompts we didn't even know to ask, before a human ever makes the call.
Better matching shows up later (in who's still there).
We've measured it where it counts. Satisfaction sits at 87%. And more than 90% of our placements are still in the role at the 18 month mark. Yes, it's early days (we only went live in 2024) but the numbers sit well against the spray+pray norms. And this is also a particularly useful stat for roles with a checkered history. This isn't a quicker process (although it often is that too). That's fewer people starting a job that was never right for them, and fewer businesses paying for it twice.
Progress is quiet (fear is loud).
A bad AI hiring story travels a thousand times further than a good placement. Nobody posts "started a job that suits me, still happy two years on." But that's the story playing out, again and again, for the businesses and candidates willing to try it.
The bigger picture matters: the tech doesn't replace the judgement, it feeds it. It takes the pile of information we used to skim and turns it into something a person can properly weigh up. The conversation is still the signal. It's just a far better-informed conversation.
