AI is making it easier to apply for jobs, easier to find candidates and easier to automate recruitment. But is it actually helping us hire better people?
Last month, Jack & Jill announced a $40 million Series A investment to develop AI agents that connect candidates with employers, potentially bypassing the traditional job application altogether.
It follows some significant investment in AI recruitment technology. Juicebox raised $80 million earlier this year, while Metaview announced a $60 million Series C at the end of September.
There’s clearly a lot of money betting on a fundamental change in how organisations find and hire people.
Having spent more than 20 years recruiting across climate, clean energy and sustainable business, I’ve been thinking about what this means for recruitment, both agency and in-house.
I’ve also been experimenting with a fair few of these tools myself. Like everything in AI, they’re developing quickly and are already driving productivity. Some are impressive, others less so, but I suspect we’re still relatively early in what’s possible.
My view is that AI will significantly reduce the number of people required to deliver certain recruitment activities, particularly in-house, while presenting a substantial productivity opportunity for specialist recruitment consultants.
But I also think it could make relationships, reputation and good judgement more important than ever.
Here’s why.
1. Are we approaching the end of the job advert?
Job adverts aren’t dead, but I wonder whether we’re approaching a point where they become considerably less effective, particularly for specialist and senior roles.
The traditional model is straightforward. An employer advertises a vacancy, candidates apply, recruiters review applications and a shortlist emerges.
AI is changing both sides of that equation.
Candidates can now use AI to write CVs, tailor applications, generate covering letters and prepare for interviews. Platforms such as Simplify and LazyApply can automate significant parts of the application process, including submitting applications on someone’s behalf.
And with the arrival of more capable personal AI agents, such as OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse, it’s not difficult to imagine this becoming considerably more widespread.
Application volumes are already increasing. Greenhouse’s 2026 European recruitment benchmarks, covering more than 17 million applications, found an 85% increase in applications per job between 2022 and 2025.
AI isn’t the only explanation. Economic conditions and changing candidate behaviour are contributing too.
But what happens when applying for a job becomes almost effortless?
Employers potentially receive hundreds or thousands of applications, many professionally written, carefully tailored and increasingly difficult to distinguish.
The irony is that employers may then need AI to review the applications candidates have used AI to generate.
AI applying to AI. Bot versus bot.
I’ve already seen talent teams trying different approaches, including asking candidates to submit a short video explaining why they want to work for the business.
But there’s another problem with relying on advertisements.
When I’m pitching a search to a client, one of my favourite reference points is that only a proportion of the market is actively looking for work, and even those people have to be lucky enough to see the advertisement.
If you want to access more of the market and build a comprehensive shortlist, you need to be proactive.
I’m also seeing a growing sense of application fatigue. Candidates see hundreds of applications against a vacancy within hours of it being advertised and wonder whether it’s worth bothering.
Some of the strongest people in the market are employed, performing well and potentially open to the right opportunity. But they’re unlikely to be spending their evenings submitting applications, particularly if they think their CV will disappear into an automated screening process.
Which brings me to the next point.
2. The smart money is betting on proactive recruitment
This is where the investment flowing into AI recruitment becomes particularly interesting.
Juicebox has raised $116 million in total, developing AI-powered talent search, sourcing agents and outreach. Metaview, originally focused on interview intelligence, has now raised $110 million in total and expanded into agentic recruitment.
Jack & Jill takes a slightly different approach, with AI agents representing candidates and employers, making introductions when there’s a potential match.
Rather than simply improving the traditional recruitment process, these businesses are challenging how recruitment happens in the first place.
For recruiters, the productivity opportunity is enormous.
Think about the hours spent searching LinkedIn, building Boolean strings, reviewing profiles, researching companies and identifying potential candidates.
I’ve tested a fair few of these tools. The results vary and they’re certainly not perfect, but they’re already incredibly useful.
Activities that historically took hours could increasingly take minutes.
I don’t think we’re particularly far away from a recruiter coming into work on Monday morning to find their diary populated with relevant candidate conversations, potentially even client meetings, arranged by AI agents working in the background.
Imagine the productivity gains.
But there’s a distinction between identifying someone who looks right on paper and understanding whether they’re genuinely right for an opportunity.
AI can identify relevant experience, career progression, employers and potentially transferable skills.
What it doesn’t always understand is the context.
Why did someone make a particular career move? What motivates them? What environments do they thrive in? Are they capable of stepping into a more senior position? Would they actually consider leaving their current employer?
And perhaps most importantly, what does good look like for this particular business, team and role?
I’ve seen AI produce candidate lists that look impressive initially but don’t hold up particularly well when you start digging into the detail.
Of course, these systems will improve, particularly as they gain access to better information and more context.
But identifying talent and understanding talent aren’t necessarily the same thing.
3. Are we about to create another problem: too much noise?
This is the part I keep coming back to.
AI is making it dramatically easier to find and contact people.
But if every recruiter and employer has access to similar technology, what happens next?
Imagine being a highly sought-after candidate and waking up to hundreds of inbound messages. All carefully personalised. All apparently relevant. And quite a few sounding strangely similar.
Which ones do you respond to?
We’re already seeing something similar in sales and marketing.
I’ve been experimenting with AI in our own business development activity, using tools to identify market signals, research organisations and help craft more relevant outreach.
It’s incredibly useful, but I was speaking to someone recently about the potential to send tens of thousands of automated messages into the market.
Great in theory, perhaps. But if everyone starts doing it, what happens to our inboxes?
Will email become so noisy that people increasingly stop paying attention?
And how do you cut through?
For me, it comes back to trust, relationships and reputation.
In specialist recruitment, we might be targeting five or six genuinely exceptional people for a particular opportunity.
Would I let an AI agent automatically approach those individuals without reviewing the messaging?
Not currently.
First impressions count. An incorrect assumption, poorly judged message or obviously automated approach could undermine an opportunity before you’ve even started a conversation.
Put it another way. Would you let AI deliver an important sales pitch on your behalf?
Perhaps one day. But if the relationship really matters, why would you?
I actually think the telephone call could become increasingly valuable again, although AI is already making inroads there too.
Someone told me recently that postal services are seeing something of a revival. At this rate, perhaps we’ll end up going back to carrier pigeons.
Joking aside, I think there’s a serious point here.
The internet is already struggling with an increasing volume of AI-generated content. Recruitment could face a similar challenge, where everyone is contacting everyone, but fewer people are actually listening.
If AI makes finding candidates easy, the competitive advantage shifts towards getting them to engage.
And that comes back to credibility, relationships, market knowledge and trust.
4. Can AI help us make better hiring decisions?
There’s another area where I think AI has considerable potential, and that’s interviewing.
Not necessarily replacing interviewers, but helping them become better at it.
Let’s face it, humans aren’t particularly objective.
We’ve all encountered interviews where the questions aren’t especially relevant, notes are incomplete, candidates are assessed inconsistently or hiring decisions are influenced by personal bias.
I’ve been exploring AI note-taking and interview intelligence tools, and I think there’s a genuine opportunity here.
Platforms such as Metaview, BrightHire and Ashby can help capture conversations, structure notes and organise feedback against predefined criteria.
One statistic caught my attention.
Metaview analysed around 5.2 million candidate interviews and found that only 31.2% had an associated scorecard.
In a separate comparison, scorecards drafted by AI were submitted 50.3% of the time, compared with 28.6% for those started manually.
That’s interesting, although it doesn’t necessarily mean the hiring decisions were better.
The opportunity, as I see it, is to help interviewers focus on the conversation rather than scribbling notes, capture more consistent evidence and challenge assumptions.
Did we actually test the competencies we said were important?
Are we judging someone against the requirements of the role, or simply because we liked them?
Have we overlooked something important?
I’d like to see AI increasingly helping hiring managers become better interviewers, perhaps even identifying gaps in their questioning and suggesting areas to explore.
But there’s a critical distinction between supporting a hiring decision and making it.
AI can misinterpret conversations and reproduce bias too. A completed scorecard doesn’t automatically mean a fair or accurate assessment.
Someone still needs to define what good looks like, ask the right questions, challenge assumptions and make the decision.
And those are skills worth developing, not automating away entirely.
5. What happens to recruitment teams?
Through the embedded talent acquisition work we’ve been developing at Lewis Davey, I’ve been keeping a close eye on how businesses are recruiting their own talent teams.
It’s a fascinating and sometimes contrasting picture.
Some organisations are going all in on AI. They’re less interested in hiring traditional recruiters and more interested in people who can build the infrastructure, connect the tools and automate the recruitment process.
Others seem barely to have started.
My expectation is that recruitment teams will become significantly smaller in many organisations.
Could a team of 20 eventually become a team of four or five? Quite possibly. I don’t know the ratio, and it will vary considerably depending on the business and the type of recruitment.
But I do think the direction of travel is towards smaller teams capable of delivering considerably more.
The skills required will change too.
Less time administering processes and manually researching candidates. More time understanding business requirements, advising hiring managers, building relationships, assessing capability and making decisions.
For specialist recruitment businesses, I think there’s a considerable opportunity to use AI to become more productive without losing the human expertise that makes the service valuable.
But there’s another issue that concerns me.
If AI removes much of the work traditionally undertaken by junior recruiters, how do we develop the next generation of experienced recruitment professionals?
How do people learn to assess talent, build relationships and understand markets if they never develop those foundations?
The same question applies beyond recruitment, particularly in professional services and other knowledge-based industries.
We might become much more productive in the short term, but we need to think carefully about how we develop the expertise we’ll need in the future.
6. What does this mean for candidates and employers?
For candidates, I think simply submitting more applications is unlikely to be the answer.
If applying becomes increasingly automated, finding ways to stand out will matter more.
That could mean developing stronger professional networks, building a reputation for what you do, demonstrating genuine expertise and engaging directly with organisations you’d like to work for.
That doesn’t mean everyone needs to become a LinkedIn influencer.
But being known for what you do, and by the right people, could become increasingly valuable.
For employers, I’d be thinking carefully about whether traditional recruitment processes are still delivering the best outcomes.
Are you finding the best people, or simply selecting from those who applied?
Are you using AI to improve decision-making, or just to process more applications?
Do your hiring managers genuinely know what they’re looking for?
And are you building relationships with future talent before you need to recruit?
Final thoughts
I don’t think AI will eliminate recruitment, but I do think it will fundamentally change the economics of the industry.
A significant amount of administrative and research-heavy work will become automated. Some roles and recruitment businesses will disappear or need to reinvent themselves.
But I suspect the strongest recruiters, whether agency or in-house, will become more valuable in a different way.
They’ll be the people who understand their markets, know what good looks like, build trusted relationships, challenge hiring decisions and can persuade exceptional people to consider opportunities they might otherwise have overlooked.
Technology will help them do this faster and potentially better.
The irony is that as AI makes recruitment more automated, the human element could become its biggest differentiator.
Perhaps the future of recruitment isn’t about who can find the most candidates or generate the most applications. It’s about who can cut through the noise, recognise genuine talent and build the relationships that turn an introduction into a great hire.
Interested to hear what others are seeing. Are job adverts becoming less effective? Is AI making hiring better, or are we simply creating more noise?