I arrived in London this morning at 6am after spending 4 days in Hong Kong. I always love visiting Hong Kong. Even in 2025, if you can see past the cavernous Gucci, Tiffany, and Prada stores, Kowloon still manages to retain a certain 70s Bruce Lee aesthetic. Like many Asian cities, and perhaps cultures, it melds the traditional and the future in a way that us lot don’t seem to manage. Neither tradition nor technology is age specific. No one in Hong Kong goes round their Nan’s on Saturday to “fix” their phone. Which is lucky as they seem to live forever.
Unlike a Cantonese octogenarian, I am not always the first to embrace technology or look to the future. When it comes to recruitment, my specific skills have always been somewhat “old school”. However, recent developments have forced me to change my opinion on what the future of recruitment will look like. I’ve spoken to too many people who know too much to believe that being a good recruiter is enough to keep us in employment in ten years. Actually, make that five. Here’s a few things I see on the horizon.
- I do not believe that we will ever see Government recruitment returning to what it once was. There has been too bright a spotlight shone here and abroad to return to those halcyon days of Wellington recruitment. By the time we have forgotten about D.O.G.E and election promises, AI will be sufficiently sophisticated to do most of the leg work. Building a big team of junior recruiters and candidate managers to fill roles on low margins will never be sustainable again. I hope you all had fun.
- AI will also change all recruitment agencies as we know them. Currently most recruiters are using AI as gadgets, and not to fundamentally change how they operate. And gadgets will never turn you into James Bond (although they may make you Roger Moore). What I’m talking about is the next wave of AI which turns our profession on its head. Can AI write a Linkedin approach as good as a good writer? Probably not. Are most of us good writers? Also probably not. What we need to come to terms with, is that 1000 average emails/Inmails beats 15 hand-written missives. And that’s what AI can already do really well. Soon (if not already), it will write better, source better, and screen better.
- Recruitment is largely an administrative job (but we don’t admit this). Admin will be done by machines. Sourcing will largely be done by machines. Booking interviews will be done by machines. So what does this mean? Smaller recruitment businesses. I think we’ll see successful specialist firms having offices of no more than 10 people in any location. Generalist, double it, maybe triple if you want to recruit everything. And very few firms have ever managed to recruit everything well.
- Internal recruiters might be the worst hit (if you can call progress “hit”). We are still seeing internal teams making redundancies, and we’ve been in the economic doldrums since Milli Vanilli got busted. Any CEO who worked through Covid will never fancy a large TA function again. Variable costs will always trump fixed costs. With AI powered ATS’s hitting the scene, managers will be able to be semi-decent recruiters. And that’s the problem we all face. Average “recruiters” who can hit 1000 AI qualified candidates with one click will beat quality recruiters who take the morning to call 3 of their old mates.
There is a future for recruiters of course. We will survive the pending atomic blast. I’m confident there will be relatively less of us however. And those who are still practicing the craft in a decade’s time will be in smaller teams, managing an increasingly large suite of AI tools (or worryingly, just one), and there will be an expectation to bill even more money. That’s always a certainty.
^SW
