AI in Recruitment: The Promise vs. The Reality

There's a lot of chat right now about AI transforming recruitment. And at the same time, there's a similar amount of noise about how people are having genuinely terrible experiences in the job search process.

So if AI is supposed to make life better - how are both of these things true simultaneously?

I think its this: AI is being overused, and in some cases abused, and that's directly contributing to the negative experience candidates are having.

It's showing up at the application stage in ways that discourages strong people from even trying. And when they do apply, the process often fails to recognise their actual skills. The pipeline gets narrower - not smarter.

Here's what's really happening beneath the surface:

AI is being used to reduce, not to refine. When screening tools are trained on historical hiring data, they replicate whoever got hired before. Systematically filtering out candidates who don't pattern-match to the past — however strong they might be.

Speed is being confused with quality. AI can process hundreds of CVs in seconds. But that speed is only valuable if the criteria being applied are the right ones. Garbage in, garbage out — just faster. Equally if you are recruiting in a space where volume isn’t an issue you are further reducing your pool of applicants.

The candidate experience has become a black box. Applications go in. Silence comes back. That's not a new problem — but AI at scale has made it far worse. The volume efficiency on the employer side has created a very real human cost on the candidate side.

It's a clash of desires and culture. We want the efficiency AI can bring, but we don't yet know how to use it in a way that doesn't compromise the human. And right now, the human is losing.

I want to be upfront at The Hasson Partnership, we are using AI - but carefully, cautiously and deliberately. We use it to support the process, to handle the administrative weight, so that we can apply real judgment where it actually matters: reading between the lines of someone's story, sensing potential, understanding fit beyond keywords.

Because recruitment is fundamentally a relationship business. The magic doesn't live in the algorithm. It lives in the conversation, the instinct, the human connection that makes a great placement.

The firms that get this right will be the ones who treat AI as a capability multiplier for their people - not a replacement for the judgment that defines great recruitment.

The market will correct. It always does. But there will be real casualties in the meantime -candidates filtered out unfairly, and organisations making worse hires because they outsourced their judgment too early.

We're still learning how to use these tools well. The ones who figure it out fastest - without losing sight of what makes recruitment human - will have a real and lasting edge.