AI Is the Most Overhyped Thing in Recruitment Right Now

Go and ask any recruiter out there how they would add an extra $1 million a year, $2 million, even $5 million a year to their business, and then listen to what they have to say. Because almost nobody, no one is going to say use AI. They'll probably say get more clients, more candidates, bigger fees, better contracts, maybe even a new desk. They will say all of the unglamorous, unsexy stuff that actually moves the money forward into the business. And yet At the moment, AI is the only thing in this entire industry that anybody wants to talk about right now. So I'm gonna say everything about AI that nobody will say. AI is a little bit overhyped. It's not useless, overhyped. And I'm gonna prove it to you with just one simple question. Now, I run my own recruitment business, been running it for over a decade. We do six figures a month. I'm still in it today. And I use AI and automation in every place that I possibly can in the business. So I'm not somebody who is scared of technology. I'm not somebody who hasn't embraced it. I'm not somebody who is still telling everyone to just cold call endlessly because that's how you're going to win your clients. It's like, look, we use everything from an AI perspective. But if you hear this, you're probably going to stop chasing the hype. And to help that, I want to give you an example. Just think back to when websites were like the big news thing. Okay, every business on earth was told literally the same sentence. You need a website. Now imagine a recruiter back then asking the exact same question that we just asked. 'How do I add a million a year?' And someone answers, 'Build a website.' The person would laugh at that. Of course you would have a website eventually. Everybody would. But nobody seriously ever thought that the website was the lever that added the million a year to the business. The website just became part of the game. It was just something that allowed you to sit at the table. It was never the game itself. And the million that you're aiming for came from the same place it always came from. Conversations, relationships, clients who trust you, and candidates who are worth representing. The website just made you look credible while you went in and did the real work yourself. And AI is sitting in exactly the same seat right now. It's this decade's website trend. You will need it. You probably already use it, but it is not the lever. Anyone telling you that AI is the thing that adds a million a year to your business is selling you a website in 2004 and calling it a strategy. Unnecessary is not the same thing as decisive. AI is necessary. It's not decisive. So let's be a little bit more positive. I'm going to explain what AI actually does. It multiplies whatever is already there. So if you're a good recruiter, AI makes it faster. You source quicker, you draft quicker, you would reach more people in a day than what you would do if you did it by hand manually one at a time. So it's a multiplier. It's brilliant. It really is. But keep in mind, I called it a multiplier. What happens when you multiply zero? You still get zero. So if you don't know your market, if your offer is weak, if you can't hold a conversation with a hiring manager, AI fixes none of that. It just helps you do the wrong things a little bit quicker and faster and at a bigger scale. So you just fail more efficiently. And this is the uncomfortable version I was talking about at the start. AI is the the best thing that ever happened to good recruiters, and it's the worst thing that ever happened to lazy ones, because it takes away every single last excuse. When sourcing was slow and admin was heavy, a weak recruiter could hide behind it. I didn't have time to do it. That excuse is now gone, because the work that is left once AI clears out the busy work is literally the human work— the judgment, the trust, the relationships. And that is exactly the work Most people are using AI to avoid. AI does not make an average recruiter great. It makes a great recruiter faster and an average recruiter obsolete. So if it's not AI, let's be specific about what it actually is. If I had to add an extra million, two, or even five to my recruitment business this year, someone put a gun to my head and said, you have to do this by the end of this year, I would not touch a new tool. I would pull 4 different levers. None of them are exciting and every single one of them works. It wouldn't be a vague thing, just do more activity. It would be more conversations with people who actually say yes. The entire business is literally downstream from there of how many real conversations you have with your clients and candidates. AI can help you start them. It can't have them for you. And the second thing is charging properly. Most recruiters just compete on price and sometimes they don't even realize it. The standard fee is 20% of a first year salary and then moving a client from 15 to 20 or from contingent to retained or even to a completely different model. Yeah, all of these things can add a little bit more money, but the pricing conversation is not a prompt. That said, we did go through a phase where we sent out a price increase email to all of our clients and then raised all of our fees in one go. And since then we've been doing it every single year. Now, the third thing that I would look at is repeat and existing clients. This is like the cheapest revenue you will ever earn from clients that you already have. Like a huge share of my agency's revenue every single year just comes from people that I have already placed, already worked with, already done business with. All because what? The candidates that you place today, they eventually become hiring managers who call you a few years down the line. You can't automate that. You earn it. And the fourth thing is go deep into your specialism. The recruiter who owns literally one niche beats the generalist with the best tech stack every single time because depth is what lets you charge more. It helps you fill faster. It becomes the obvious call. No AI will hand you that. Literally the reps that you do in one market, that is what hands you that kind of skill. More conversations, higher fees, repeat clients, deeper niche. And then, well, notice it. Just what's missing from the list? By the way, if you're watching this and you're thinking, you know what, if you were in a room full of other people who are having the exact same conversation, because this is from a conversation that I was actually having internally with a coaching group that I run, and you feel like sitting in those rooms where making sure that you're actually a good recruiter first and then amplifying it would be something that you find valuable, then I'll leave some details below along with examples of people who were probably in a similar situation to you and they went through the same process, had all the lightbulb moments, and I've shared all of their stories. So all of that detail is below for you. Now here's the part that actually costs people the most amount of money and time, and it's actually quite subtle. The danger is not that AI does not work. The danger is that chasing it feels like work. I watched recruiters spend 3 months building the perfect AI setup, connecting Clay to this, plugging that tool into Instantly, watching another tutorial on a new model that just dropped last week, and then building an AI artifact dashboard that looks absolutely incredible, and their pipeline is empty or drying up. Because building the entire system just feels productive. It is busy. Yes, it's modern. It has that little bit of, you know, I'm doing something clever, but it produces nothing until you point it at a market you understand and a message that already works. I use it. Not a big fan, not a huge fan of Klai. Always thought it was a little bit overcooked. But all of your automation tools on email, your CRMs, and I won't even go into the backend stuff like invoicing, contractor payroll, the management, all of that stuff. But all in, I can narrow it down and say £500, $500, or €500 per month per recruiter, and it's worth every single penny. But I built every one of those systems after the manual version was already making money. The automation amplified the result. It didn't create it from scratch. And when you lead with the tool instead of the work, the tool just becomes a very sophisticated place to hide and that hiding that you're doing is from the real work, except now you have a nicer dashboard. So if your AI stack is busier than your actual calendar, you do not have a tech problem. You have an avoidance problem. Now I'm not telling you to just ignore AI altogether. That would just be as stupid as the actual hype itself. So let me be fair about where it genuinely wins. Let me be clear because I don't want you to be walking away from this thinking I'm anti-AI. I am not. AI is brilliant at exactly one category of thing. The work that does not need you. Building lists, drafting first versions, cleaning data, summarizing calls, sending the first touch to those 1,000 people while you sleep. All the busy work that used to eat up maybe even a week's worth of your time. And that matters because every hour AI takes off your plate is an hour that you can put back into multiple levers look, the ones that I described earlier. And that is the way to think about it. AI does not add a million to your business. It buys back the time so you can go and add a million yourself. So if you just get good enough at it, not perfect, good enough, a simple stack that builds your list, sends outreach, handles your admin, then stop optimizing it and go and have the conversations because the recruiters who spend 2 or even 3 hours a day on AI and 6 hours or 7 hours talking to the market will beat the ones that spent 6 hours on AI AI and 2 hours talking to their clients and candidates every single time. Use AI to buy back your time and then spend that time on things AI can't do. That is the whole game. So here's what I would do, literally starting this week. Forget like the new tool for a second. Just do these few things this week. The first, count your conversations. How many real conversations with clients and candidates did you have last week? And if it's in single digits, that's a problem and no tool on earth will fix it for you. Number 2 is look at your fees. Are you charging 20% or more? Are you discounting to try and feel safe? Because one pricing conversation could be worth more than every single automation tool that you could possibly deploy over the next few months. And number 3, call one client you've already worked with. Not an email, a call. I'm just gonna say this straight. The cheapest addition, 1 million a year addition in your recruitment business is probably hiding in that relationship that you already have, but you just haven't rekindled in a long time. And do those 3 things, you will feel something shift because now you're finally pulling the things that actually move money instead of polishing the ones that don't. AI is this decade's website. Get it, get it working, and get back to work. Literally go and get it, get it working, and then get back to the work that actually pays you. Because in my view, the recruiters who actually win over the next decade won't be the ones with the best tools. They will be the ones who use the tools to do more of the timeless stuff. Not less. And the hype eventually, and it always does, it will move on to the next thing. It always does. And the fundamentals, they're never going to fail. So if you want to go deeper into some of the levers that I spoke about and actually see how to add conversations, fees, repeat clients without burning out yourself, then go and watch this video next. Because assuming you're an experienced recruiter, this is one way that you can just add half a million to a million a year in your recruitment business. And you can probably do it without even hiring anyone or a new tool. So I'll see you in that video.