There’s no getting away from it: AI is changingrecruitment.

For candidates, it has made it easier than ever to update a CV, write a cover letter, prepare for an interview and apply for jobs. For employers and recruiters, it can speed up admin, help with research and take some of the more repetitive work off our desks.

There is a lot to be positive about. But we’re also starting to see some unintended consequences. AI has made it much easier to tailor a CV to a job description and apply quickly, sometimes to many jobs.

For recruiters and hiring managers, that can mean hundreds of applications to work through, many from people who don’t have the experience required.

We’re also seeing increasingly polished CVs. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing. But when every CV uses the same language, the same phrases and perfectly mirrors the job description, it can actually become harder to understand who the person behind it really is.

We’re seeing the same thing creeping into interviews.

Preparation is obviously important, we actively encourage it and AI can be brilliant for researching a company, thinking about potential questions and helping you structure examples.

But there’s a difference between being prepared and beingscripted.

So where does this leave recruiters?

Interestingly, we think all this technology is making the human touch of recruitment more important. It’s absolutely essential that your Talent Acquisition or external recruiter is capable of asking the right questions to weed out the candidates who may try to muscle their way into the interview room.

The value is in understanding who totarget, determining what someone has actually achieved, probing them on why they want to move, recognising potential and being able to influence a stakeholder to meet someone that they may have otherwise overlooked.

Technology can help us do our jobs faster and we’re embracing it. However, recruitment is still ultimately about people making decisions about people.

We feel it is more important now than ever before, to get in front of people to avoid the noise of job applications (which hardly everwork anyway).

Bringing our community together

Events have become a huge part of what we do at Inspire Selection.

Over the past year, we’ve brought together senior professionals, both clients and candidates, for events including roundtables, practical training workshops, panel discussions and networking breakfasts.

• Our Career Connections events have given seniorjob seekers the opportunity to talk openly about positioning themselves in themarket, networking, interviewing and working effectively with recruiters.
• We’ve brought CEOs together to discuss leadershipand what businesses really need from their senior management teams.
• We’ve continued to grow our Senior Women in Financecommunity

With our selected partners - CompassPoint Consulting, TaxStar ASP, Oraculi - we now regularly run:

• Practical workshops around AI and Claude
• ‍Introduction to e-invoicing seminars
• ‍Winning work and sales coaching for Fractional professionals.

For us, these events are about creating useful conversations, connecting good people and sharing knowledge with the communities we work with every day.

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