AI in Recruitment: Separating Snake Oil from Solutions

Everyone is looking for the magical AI shortcut. 

I've lost count of how many recruitment businesses have told me they "need to do something with AI" without being able to articulate what problem they're trying to solve.

This is the AI trap. Vendors promise transformation. The conference circuit amplifies the hype. And recruitment businesses, terrified of being left behind, invest in tools that end up gathering digital dust.

Great expectations

The recruitment industry's AI journey has been muddied by unrealistic promises. Businesses expected immediate transformation — 50% time savings, bias elimination, perfect candidate matches. 

What they got was more complicated.

Take Amazon’s 2018 recruiting tool, designed to revolutionise hiring. Within a year, it had learned to downgrade any résumé containing the word “women’s” and to favour verbs like “executed” and “captured” — language more common on male engineers’ CVs. Amazon scrapped it, but not before the damage was done.

Or the UK Information Commissioner’s 2024 findings: AI hiring tools were inferring candidates’ gender and ethnicity from names alone, processing that data without consent. Some had scraped millions of profiles from job sites and social media.

Reactions split into two camps: cynics who now distrust everything AI-related, and serial adopters who jump to every new tool hoping this one will finally work.

As is so often the case, the truth sits somewhere between the hype and the backlash. There are real opportunities, but they demand clear expectations and strategic implementation.