I was fortunate enough to be invited to the TEAM conference last week. It was a great event with so many superb talks. The opening keynote was delivered by Vanessa Raath, and if there was one message that came through loud and clear from it was this:
Stop worrying about whether AI will replace recruiters and start thinking about what recruiters should be doing that AI can’t.
Vanessa has spent the last couple of years immersing herself in AI, testing over 100 recruitment tools and speaking to vendors across the globe. She’s probably seen more recruitment tech demos than most of us would care to sit through.
Her conclusion is that whilst AI is brilliant at handling tasks we are still responsible for trust – and this is where we need to focus.
One of the things I liked most about Vanessa’s talk was that it wasn’t another “AI is coming for your jobs” presentation. Instead, she broke recruitment down into its component parts and looked at where AI genuinely helps and where it doesn’t. The reality is that most recruiters didn’t join the industry because they love admin – we don’t wake up excited about updating our CRM, writing yet another candidate briefing email or manually screening hundreds of CVs. Those are exactly the kinds of tasks AI is getting very good at.
In a nutshell, Vanessa’s message was simple: let AI take care of the repetitive work so you can spend more time doing what actually creates value.
One phrase Vanessa kept returning to throughout the session was “Up your human.” I couldn’t agree more. Having spent the day with the TEAM network, I can honestly say they are a fantastic bunch of humans and getting the balance with AI right is so important.
While AI is becoming better at writing, searching, matching and automating, the skills that matter most are those we are best at. They are building relationships, understanding motivations, reading between the lines and giving a client a reality check when they’re looking for a unicorn candidate on a pony budget.
The more AI-generated content floods LinkedIn, inboxes and candidate outreach campaigns, the more valuable genuine human interaction becomes.
Vanessa highlighted sourcing and screening as two areas where AI is advancing particularly quickly.
After seeing so many recruitment tools, one thing became obvious: almost everyone building recruitment technology thinks they’ve solved sourcing. But the challenge is that many tools are still largely built around keyword matching, and recruiters know that’s only part of the picture. We’ve all spoken to candidates who don’t look right on paper but turn out to be perfect for the role, we’ve all had placements that came from conversations rather than databases, and this is where recruiter instinct still matters.
As candidates start using AI to apply for jobs at scale, recruiters are facing a flood of applications – and yes, good AI tools can help manage volume. But relying entirely on AI to decide who gets seen and who doesn’t is risky. The best recruiters still know how to spot potential that software misses.
Vanessa’s advice for broader AI use was to pick one AI platform and get really good at using it. Whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or something else almost doesn’t matter – but stop using them like Google. Start feeding them context, processes, transcripts and business information and asking them to help solve real problems (bearing in mind GDPR and data privacy!).
Vanessa estimates AI saves her somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours every day. The time she saves is spent working on her business rather than in it. This is how she builds human relationships, creates opportunities, has real conversations and attends events (like TEAM). AI can write emails, summarise meetings and generate content, but it can’t build your network and it certainly can’t earn trust that is essential in the relationships that sit at the heart of successful recruitment businesses.
AI handles tasks. Humans handle trust.
