14 Jan 2026
What to look for in recruitment – in the age of AI – Guest Blog by Graham Turnbull, Keystone Recruitment Partners for Albany HR
Introduction
I have over 15 years of commercial recruitment experience working across start-ups, scaleups, SMEs to global FTSE 100 businesses. Throughout my career I have focused on filling niche, specialist roles and on working with candidates who do not have “cookie cutter” CVs, i.e. ones that don’t “Fit” the spec. I now work with a range of international growing businesses (start-up right through to corporate) and in the age of AI – our approach is more in demand than ever.
The Context
There are very few industries as vilified, criticised by and at the same time, important to businesses as the recruitment industry. The recruitment industry (including all permanent, contract and executive search placements) has grown to being worth an estimated $650 billion annually but at the same time has become one of the most fragmented sectors on earth – there are over 160,000 recruitment agencies on the planet!
As with any sector it has grown in the pursuit of efficiency and most importantly: profit. This has created business models driving short-termism, quantity-over-quality and the stereotype “salesy recruiter”. These recruiters working in the archaic agencies are targeted to within an inch of their lives, daily, weekly and monthly “Key Performance Indicators” – things like 50 cold-calls a day, 30 “spec” CVs a week etc. These behaviours are inevitably going to lead these consultants (the title is a misnomer in most recruitment agencies) to cut corners.
At 4pm on a Friday and you’ve only done 45 calls and sent 10 CVs – what do you think the consultant is going to do?! They are going to lower their standards to hit the numbers. This isn’t the consultant’s fault, it is human nature. The sector is to blame and it measures the wrong behaviours.
As a result, companies become infuriated with CVs being sent to them with limited or even zero relevance to the roles they are hiring, candidates have “screening calls” that last 2 minutes or don’t happen at all, compliance shortcuts are made and people everywhere become sick of cold calls and “outreach” messages on LinkedIn.
Why do I tell you all this?
Well because in the world of AI – it is going to magnify these behaviours, and it will get worse before it gets better.
The KPI-driven archaic recruiter I described above: has no future.
Let me tell you why.
It has been happening for years, but the CV, the measure by which we write down our entire professional life, is a simple, easily-read document – it is the passport or currency for the recruitment industries “product” – human beings, candidates. It is a history book. For ATS systems, database systems, CRMs and now AI they are incredibly easy to scrape data from – same too for job specs. Now your CV can be “matched” to a job spec in a billionth of a second, it could be sent speculatively to a billion companies in a matter of seconds – but crucially it would only match what is written down. If your CV says “leadership” and the job spec says “leadership” – AI will get you sorted. It matches your history with the spec. If that is all you require, don’t pay a recruitment agency to do it for you.
But that is not how businesses work. That is not how human potential (which is what we are looking for) works and this is not how you should select a recruiter to work with, either as a candidate or as a hirer.
How to select a recruitment partner
This requires a two-pronged approach: playing the game with AI and focusing on human interaction and a valuing of human potential.
Here is an example that ticks both:
I recently had a candidate, a former CEO of a major multinational organisation: who hadn’t received any job interviews after multiple applications and asked me for advice. After ongoing discussions, we tweaked his CV to include his hobbies and interests (mountain climbing) and in his key skills the words, strategy, leadership, management. These are words that you would expect any good recruiter to not NEED to read, they are implicit in the fact that this candidate used to run a major business and should be obvious in a proper screening interview with the candidate; but because of an ATS system and no detailed questioning by recruiters, he was quite simply not passing the computer’s test to even be screened.
The result: the companies with those ATS systems were not getting a 1st class candidate and the candidate was remaining unemployed despite being perfect for their roles.
In the end this candidate got an interview with one of my clients; one who I know is into hillwalking. Their interview lasted 3 hours, with 2 hours spent discussing mountaineering and hillwalking and the other hour spent discussing his strategic leadership and man-management abilities. He got the job and is thriving in that company.
This example shows the future of quality recruiter as a guide for candidates and clients throughout the process. They should help them to stamp the passport (the CV) to get through the AI systems and they should provide human context and intangible detail on both client and candidate to build human-focused teams for the future. The intangible things that make us human and can’t be written down on a CV, a job spec or a business website are what makes good teams and successful businesses.
Conclusion
The recruitment industry in its current KPI-driven, quantity-focused model is dead. It must work hand-in-hand with AI systems but it must add extra value. That value lies in the human being. The intangible points that make someone who they are, what they are and why they are good for the role, team or business.
So how do you as a candidate or as a hirer pick a good recruitment partner?
It comes down to trust and relationships, referrals are key.
When you find one, ask them these questions:
1) Do you physically/virtually meet all of your candidates?
2) How much time do you spend screening your candidates?
3) What are your KPIs? (daily, weekly, monthly) – and what happens if you miss/achieve them?
4) Tell me about a time when you have placed a candidate in a role where they did not, on paper, match the job. How did you go about doing this?
If they can’t answer any of the above questions satisfactorily – don’t use them.
Find recruitment consultancies who actually consult, who get to know their clients, candidates and the sector and who guide you through the process end-to-end without cutting corners. And who don’t just word-match a CV to a job-spec… if that is what you want, use AI!
