October 2025

There’s no doubt that AI and Recruitment will be married for the foreseeable future. If leveraged correctly and with balance, it will only serve to optimize the service and address more needs. While the benefits are clear and lucrative, I worry about placing an AI band-aid over a broken system and mindset. Let’s dive deeper… ​Ghosting for instance has been commonly associated with recruitment for years now, and while I don’t know when it became a thing, ghosting has become a predictable outcome when dealing with recruiters. What is Ghosting? In my own words, it is the complete disregard of basic human decency – the prioritization of profit over ethics. A practical example of ghosting is calling a candidate about a position that you’ve received from a client, qualifying them, submitting their resume, coordinating the interview(s), and not getting back to them with the results. Most are familiar with this… There are an assortment of other questionable practices that recruiters engage in that has created a negative impression of the industry… Ghosting is really a mirror of deeper issues within our own ranks. Poor leaders have produced poor recruiters. The pressure of meeting quotas has removed quality and integrity from the equation… Fast forward to 2023 – cue the rise of AI… Like any prior great discovery or invention, AI serves to enhance the human experience or expose our flaws… Without dealing with the core issues in recruitment, I worry that we will only make negative experiences more prevalent… Automating your service does not address the trust and credibility concerns that decision makers and candidates have about recruitment… Your tech stack might be great, but your people lack resilience and character to weather the turbulence that is coming their way… We are attempting to cover up our “people problems” with automation, and that’s a recipe for disaster… Until we address the elephant in the room, I’m afraid that AI/technology will never complement the human experience in the way it was designed to… You’re simply automating ghosting. Personal story: ​Just yesterday, I had a candidate reject an offer from my customer. I prefaced the formal offer with a pre-acceptance letter outlining the terms of the offer as a way of addressing any concerns beforehand; normal practice for me. I was confident that it would come back signed. The following day, the candidate called me to say that his Wife had concerns that could not be overcome with more money. Completely understandable; take care of home. I asked whether he had discussed the opportunity with her during the process. He said yes, and her remarks were: “you get calls like this all the time, and they never go anywhere.” In other words, recruiters call you all the time and never follow through so I thought this was one of those cases about to repeat itself. Deal lost because of a failure to take the outreach seriously. Let’s get back to providing a memorable experience to everyone involved. AI is the cherry on top!