AI didn't break hiring. It simply exposed what was already broken.
A recent report from ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions and Everest Group found something surprising.
Over 90% of organisations are now using AI in recruitment, yet fewer than 5% say they've achieved transformational results.
At first glance that feels like an AI problem, but I don't think it is.
After 30 years in recruitment and more than 10,000 interviews, I think AI is simply shining a spotlight on weaknesses that have existed for years.
The technology isn't the bottleneck. The hiring process is.
Most organisations have automated the wrong part of recruitment
When companies talk about AI in hiring, the conversation almost always centres around:
- sourcing candidates
- screening CVs
- writing job adverts
- scheduling interviews
- candidate engagement
These are of course, very useful efficiency gains. But they're administrative.
They don't improve the quality of hiring decisions.
The most important hiring decisions are still made during and after the interview, and that's where many organisations still rely on remarkably inconsistent processes.
Different interviewers ask different questions. Some take pages of notes. Some take none.
Important evidence gets buried inside notebooks, Word documents and the interviewers memory.
By the time the hiring meeting takes place, people are often comparing opinions rather than evidence, and no amount of AI sourcing fixes that.
Faster hiring isn't the same as better hiring
The HR Dive article makes an important observation.
Many organisations are seeing faster hiring processes but not smarter hiring decisions.
That distinction really matters.
Hiring quality has never depended on how quickly you can move a candidate through a workflow.
It depends on whether you can consistently answer questions like:
- What evidence supports this decision?
- Did every candidate have the same opportunity to demonstrate capability?
- What strengths and risks did we actually observe?
- Can we explain why Candidate A was selected over Candidate B?
Those questions still require structure. AI can't invent that if it isn't already part of the process.
We're creating an AI arms race
There's another trend the report highlights, which I wrote about in a previous post: The AI Interview Arms Race: Can You Detect When Candidates Are Using AI?
Candidates are now using AI to write CVs, applications and prepare interview answers, making it increasingly difficult for employers to assess genuine capability.
Many organisations have responded by adding even more AI. More screening, more automation, more filters.
Candidates respond with more sophisticated AI tools, employers respond with even more technology.
It's becoming an arms race.
Meanwhile, the actual interview - the point where employers should be gathering the richest evidence about capability often hasn't evolved at all.
The interview is becoming the most valuable source of hiring intelligence
Let’s be honest, CVs have always been imperfect.
They're becoming even less reliable as generative AI becomes mainstream.
That means interviews matter more than ever.
Because interviews generate evidence that cannot be captured through keyword matching alone:
- reasoning
- examples
- judgement
- communication
- technical depth
- decision making
- behavioural consistency
The challenge isn't collecting that information.
It's capturing it consistently and objectively enough to use it later.
That's where AI has the opportunity to make the biggest difference. Not by replacing interviewers, but by helping them document, structure and analyse the evidence they gather.
AI should strengthen human judgement, not replace it
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI in hiring is that its job is to make hiring decisions.
I’ve never believed that's where the real value lies.
The role of AI should be to:
- capture evidence consistently
- reduce administrative burden
- identify gaps in questioning
- surface patterns across candidates
- support better decision making
The hiring decision should always belong to people.
But those people deserve better evidence than handwritten notes and memory.
Research increasingly suggests that combining human judgement with AI support produces fairer and more effective outcomes than either humans or algorithms operating alone.
The next generation of hiring won't be about more AI
It will be about better hiring processes.
AI is simply becoming another tool in those processes.
The organisations that benefit most won't necessarily have the most advanced models.
They'll have:
- structured interviews
- clear evaluation criteria
- transparent decision making
- evidence-based discussions
- AI supporting people instead of replacing them
That's a fundamentally different approach.
And I suspect that's where the next wave of recruitment innovation will come from.
The conversation shouldn't be "How much AI are we using?"
It should be:
"Are we making better hiring decisions than we were before?"
Because if the answer is no, the problem probably isn't the AI. It's the process surrounding it.
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