Why AI Tools Are Slowing Your Recruitment Business Down

This is not another video telling you to automate your recruitment business and use AI. It's actually the opposite. Because right now there are recruiters spending their entire week building clever AI workflows and automated processes that just don't make them any money. And they feel productive, they feel ahead. But 6 months later, they have this beautiful automated and AI-powered system and an empty bank account. I know this because I run my own recruitment business. We do 6 figures a month, and what I'm sharing with you is literally stuff from the inside. And I use AI every single day. And when I say that AI is not going to save your business and that there's a specific order you have to follow or it works against you, I'm not telling you that just to push you away. I love AI, and I use it in every moment that I possibly can, but there are moments where it's not appropriate. And for that, let me just describe to you the trap because it just doesn't feel like a trap when you're right in the middle of it. And I want to share with you what's to good recruiters right now. Every week there is a new tool. It used to be a new tool every year, then every few months, and now it feels like there's one every hour that does something slightly better than the last one. And you end up getting pulled into it. You start building, you connect this tool to that one, and then realize that you just add one more thing that will help you get a little bit better. So you just keep going. And that's scope creep. And developers, that's what they know. Software developers, this is what they fight against, which is scope creep. Before you know it, you've basically coded an entire platform and you look up and you think, I should have just made some more phone calls. And the dangerous part is it feels like work. It feels like progress and you're busy and you're learning and you're building, but none of it has put a candidate in front of a client and none of it has made a placement and none of it has generated any money. So none of it has actually helped you in any way possible. So I want you to hold this thought. You're not behind because you lack AI. You're behind because you're building instead of recruiting. So let me reframe AI for exactly for what it is, because the hype of it is just, I think, a little bit backwards. AI is the dumbest employee that you're going to hire. And once you understand that, you will use it properly. Think about the employees that you've had. If you've had a team before, or people that you've worked with, Some of them, you say something once, they get it, they go away, and they figure it out. They might even Google it, they'll go and watch a YouTube video, and they come back with the thing done. That is it. And AI does none of that. You have to spell out every single step. You do this, then this, then this, and it doesn't fill in the gaps for you. And then here's the other half of it. This dumb employee has a photographic memory. It never forgets, it never gets tired, it never has a day off. So if you are willing to train it properly, the way you would train a junior who needs everything explained in detail, who then never forgets a thing, it becomes one of the most valuable people in your team. And that is the trick. AI is not a magic founder who builds your business for you. It's brilliant. It's tireless. It's as good as an employee in some cases who has to be trained, but only once trained. It never forgets. But you will have to teach it and you cannot teach it something you have never done yourself. And this is the bit that catches everyone out because if it just feels like you're making the business a little bit more efficient, if you automate a broken process where you don't have a good recruiter, then you'll probably get this and it will probably hit home even more. You get your mistakes repeated at speed, at scale, all day without you even watching. That's what AI can do. If your outreach doesn't convert when you do it by hand, then automating it or using AI to do it Doesn't fix the problem. It just sends the thing that does not work and produce results to more people, and it does it faster while you sit back and assume that it's working. I can still remember it. There was this clip that went round of a guy talking to ChatGPT, and he says, build me a B2B software company tonight. And it starts, and then he interrupts it and says, no, make it easier. And then he's like, okay, we should do some market research. And then he goes, no, like, forget all of that. Just make the product. So We can just start making money tonight. And that is what automating a broken process actually looks like. You're asking the machine to skip the only part that actually matters, which is knowing what works. AI effectively learns from what you feed it. If you have 8 years of email campaign data that you've been running through your CRM and it contains details of the ones that worked and the ones that flopped, including what the response rates were, then you can build an AI skill around that. And that means that the skill that the AI produces, which is how to write good email copy, is better for you than you going out and learning how to write AI copy because you already have data on what works and what doesn't work. But the opposite is also true. If you don't have any data because you've never run a process by hand, maybe you're new into recruitment, there is nothing for AI to learn from. You are automating a guess. So keep in mind that speed does not fix what's wrong. It just multiplies it. So I want you to hear this in order. And this is basically the only way that you can make things work. There is one order that works and only one: manual first, automate second. If I was starting again today, knowing what I know, I would do the work by hand first, make the placements manually, send the emails manually, have the conversations literally manually, not because manual is better, but because manual is how you learn what actually works. And once you know what works, That is the thing that you automate. Think of it just like a really long drive. Imagine 2 people setting off from a journey, one from one end of the country and the other. And the first person gets in the car, starts driving, refuels, checks tires all along the way. And the second person says, you know what, let me just set up the sat nav. Let me check the tire pressure. Let me take it and just make sure the car's got a full service. Let me just make sure that the tank is completely full before I go. The first person is already halfway there. The second person hasn't even left and they're still going to have to refuel along the way anyway. That second person is the person who is building AI workflows before you've even made a placement. You are perfecting the car instead of driving it. So manual first, automate second. There is no shortcut around that order. By the way, if you're watching this and it's like hitting home, then you're probably the kind of person that I want to speak to or at least have some kind of working relationship with. So I am actually hiring for my own business. We are interested in acquiring new recruitment businesses. And I'll leave some other details about some of the other projects that I'm involved in below. So just check out the description for any details that I have there. But for the time being, let's get back to the video. So let me just make this completely concrete and put it in order. This is where AI actually earns its place. And it's, I'm going to say a little bit later than you think. The first is make placements by hand, go to your warmest market first, the people who already know you and basically make money that funds everything else. Step 2 is once you have a process that works and is making money, you write it down. You know what a good message looks like because you have sent one that actually landed really, really well. You know what a good candidate looks like because you place them. You know what's worth automating. That's how you gather the data. And the 3rd step is now you train the dumb employee, which is AI, one skill at a time. The skill of spotting the right prospect, the skill of writing the message that gets a reply. You stack those skills together and then it becomes a workflow. A workflow is just one or 2 skills stacked together in order of execution, simply put. And I want you to notice the order. You didn't start with the machine. You started with targeting money, basically, in recruitment. You worked backwards from your result that you already had produced. And that's the only way that the machine has anything to learn from and copy. The same applies if you were hiring a person instead. You wouldn't hand a brand new employee everything on day one and say, automate the entire business. You would get one thing working, train them on it, then add the next thing. AI is no different. It's just an employee made of software. So make the money by hand, then teach the machine, not the other way around. So AI is not your next founding director level employee. It is your dumbest, most loyal employee, and it can only amplify a process that already works. Make the placements by hand, learn what works, then and only then hand it over to the machine. And if you're thinking, you know what, AI is going to become my new advantage, I hate to say it, I think you're wrong. Because the same AI tools that you're using, your clients are using them too. It's no longer an advantage. This is eventually going to become the level playing field. Just like once upon a time, some people could have said that I have a website and that gives me a competitive advantage. Today, the website is the norm. It's not a competitive advantage. And AI is becoming available and accessible to absolutely everyone, including your clients. So if you want to learn how I would build everything literally from scratch, if I were to just completely switch or even add a completely different service offering to counter the fact that my clients are also using AI, then go and check out this video because it's a brand new course that I just released completely for free. Over to you.