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AI can betray you, and I just watched it happen live, costing someone a job, mid-interview.

A candidate with a strong CV, solid experience, and a commendable educational background was shortlisted from hundreds of applicants. She didn’t need shortcuts; she was qualified enough.

From the first answer, something felt off. Her responses seemed overly scripted and monotone...My Recruiter instinct radar was pinging away. Then, suddenly, her AI prompt began speaking out loud mid-interview. She panicked, and I genuinely felt for her.

Let me clarify: this is not an anti-AI post. Far from it. Every role I hire for requires candidates who already use AI in their workflows and some form of AI expertise is now essential in almost every role, but for the right reasons...not to replace personal competence.

I use AI daily, but I monitor it closely. I use notetakers to stay fully present with candidates during my interviews. I use AI to shape content for better flow. I frequently see AI-generated CVs, and when used well, they can look well organised and sharp. This is the reality we operate in now. However, your experience should be authentic. Your voice in these conversations should be your own.

An interview is not a speech, it’s a conversation about what/how/why you’ve done, you’re doing, you can do. I love it when mid interview candidates feel empowered to pause and say, "Tam, can I take a moment to gather my thoughts?" That’s confidence, self-awareness and leadership potential. If you need a moment, take it.

If you’re worried about forgetting key points, go back to basics. Use Post-its as prompts; many leave interviews thinking, "I wish I’d mentioned that!". Just remember that there will be no such thing as a perfect interview, you will always leave feeling like you missed something.

However In this case, the candidate felt she found the solution, for a perfect interview, but her AI prompt exposed her. Even if your AI remains silent, your interviewer will notice. Recruiters are scanning for red flags because our clients trust our instincts. If something feels off or misaligned, most won’t dig deeper; they’ll simply move on to the next applicant.

The bigger question is: if you secure a role based on answers that aren’t yours, what happens when you’re expected to deliver day-to-day? Use an earpiece?

Embrace AI (I do), it's amazing...but don’t let it be your voice in an interview or conversation.

Good luck to all those interviewing this week 🤞
Tam Dost at Talent Hunters

I just got a phone call from an AI recruiter bot.

As someone who uses AI daily, I was shocked!

I love tech. I use AI to help source candidates. I use it to write client screens. I even use it to transcribe virtual calls with candidate approval. (I even created this image with AI).

But talking to a bot on the phone felt wrong. It felt like a data-harvesting scam. It lacked any shred of security. Most of all, it lacked humanity.

Call me old-fashioned, but finding a job requires a human touch.
Hiring is built on trust. You cannot build a relationship with an algorithm. I want real partnerships with my clients, recruiters, and candidates.

Automation should enhance our work, not replace our relationships.
Am I alone here?

Should recruiters use AI? Yes (with caveats).

But all the AI and tooling in the world doesn't change the fundamentals. AI doesn't make a bad process good. It makes it fast. And a bad process at scale is the worst version of hiring there is. Point it at a structured, consistent one, and it helps run that process for every candidate. Not speed. Not cleverness. Consistency.

A few things I believe after building this into a real talent function:

▪️ The recruiter stays at the centre. AI can make you faster and better informed. The human still makes the call and owns the outcome.

▪️ The constraint isn't which model is smartest. It's whether it can see the whole hiring story. Scatter it across email, Slack, and half-filled ATS notes, and your AI only ever reasons about the easy half.

▪️ Hiring is two kinds of work. Predictable work you automate. Judgment work AI assists with, but never decides.

▪️ The resume is an even weaker signal now. Both sides have the same tools. That's not a crisis, it's a forcing function for skills-based hiring. It strips away the lazy proxies and rewards the teams who already knew what "good" looks like and built a process to test for it.

I just hosted the first episode of the Pinpoint How-To Series on exactly this.

I walk through the five areas where this changed how I work: intake and role design, candidate management, recruiting content, reporting and insights, and interview prep.

It's 20 minutes, practical, and I share the three red lines I won't cross. Link in the comments.

I'm willing to bet a real person is reading your resume not an algorithm.

A constant narrative I hear is that AI has taken over hiring and that an algorithm scans your application, scores you, and rejects you before any human is involved.

At companies like Google or Microsoft? Sometimes, yes. But here's what the truth: those tools are expensive. Enterprise companies can absorb the cost. The small and mid-sized businesses that drive most net new hiring and employ nearly half the U.S. workforce usually can't.

AI is talked about far more than it's actually implemented especially in recruitment. In my role, we run a Human-First approach. I'm the person reading your resume and your LinkedIn, deciding initial fit. Do I use AI for the busywork? Reminder emails, scheduling? Absolutely. But AI is not touching our decision-making processes yet.

I'm curious, recruiters are you reading the resume yourself, or are you letting an agent do it for you?

I experienced my first fully automated, one-way video interview last week.
Frankly? It was a bizarre experience. Answering complex, behavioral-based questions while watching an aggressive digital clock count down on a screen is not exactly what I’d call a "premium candidate experience."

As a Talent Acquisition leader, I love technology. I champion automation. If a tool can shave hours off scheduling, build airtight Boolean strings, or keep candidates engaged with instant updates, I am the first person in line to pilot it.

But having sat on the other side of the screen, my conviction has only grown stronger: AI should optimize the workflow, not replace human judgment.
When you automate the actual evaluation of a human being, you introduce a massive risk of scaling bias at lightning speed. True equity in hiring doesn't come from an algorithm guessing who a "good fit" is based on facial cues or keyword density. It comes from a human recruiter utilizing a highly structured, data-driven interviewing framework.

Use tech to clear the administrative plate. Use humans to build the relationship.

Fellow TA leaders, where are you drawing the line with AI in your current tech stack? Are we leaning too far into automation at the expense of candidate equity? Let’s talk in the comments.

AI is part of my process. But, so is actually caring about people.

Those two things have never been in conflict for me.

I use AI to move faster on the administrative stuff — so I can slow down when it matters. The screening questions. The follow-up. The conversation where someone tells me what they actually want from their next move.

That part doesn’t get automated. Ever.

I think the fear around AI in recruiting is real — but it’s not about the tool. It’s about what some people are choosing to do with it.

Use it to disappear? Candidates feel that.

Use it to show up better? They feel that too.

My job has always been to connect the right person to the right opportunity. AI just helps me do more of that — without losing sight of the human being on the other side of the process.

That part’s non-negotiable for me.

#Recruiting #TalentAcquisition #CandidateExperience #AIinHR #HumanFirst #hiring

I’m a recruiter and I use AI. But not for what you think.

I use AI for:

→ Creating automations in my ATS that send calendar invites to candidates I want to interview
→ Taking notes during meetings so I can go back, reread what the client really wants, and better articulate what I’m looking for
→ Linking my website to my CRM and email

I could go on and on, but essentially, I use AI to automate and streamline parts of my admin workload.

🙅🏻‍♀️ But I DON’T use AI for:

→ Talking to clients and really understanding what they want
→ Identifying gaps in their team and helping them figure out what they should actually be hiring for
→ Reviewing candidate profiles and applications (yes, I, a human, go through each and every application)
→ Headhunting strong candidates who aren’t actively looking for a job
→ Negotiating offers with candidates
→ Being a caring recruiter who genuinely wants to help people

I know there’s a massive debate about whether AI is here to take our jobs.

In recruitment, it’ll probably replace the admin load and *hopefully* make it a better experience for everyone. But it’ll never replace the human side.

Recruitment will (and should) always be fundamentally human.

What do you use AI for in your job? And what would you never use it for?


👋 Hey! I’m Laura, Head of Up Talent
🙌 I help startups hire brilliant marketers
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It's Monday. Stop letting manual administrative tasks slow down your search. ⚙️🤖

As a Recruiter with an engineering background, my obsession is always efficiency. In a fast-moving market, the recruiters who win are the ones who automate the noise so they can focus on the human connection.

If you are looking to accelerate your workflow this week, here are the top 3 ways I am leveraging AI right now - without compromising compliance or executive quality:

1. Building Executive Market Reports with Claude 📊 When I’m working on Director, VP, or SVP roles with leadership, they don’t want a list of names; they want market intelligence. I use Claude as a "thinking partner" to help structure talent maps, organize salary benchmarking data, and build polished executive-level reports. It turns hours of data-crunching into a strategic overview in minutes.

2. Polishing Interview Notes with Gemini (Compliance-Safe) ✍️ Like many of you in regulated industries like banking or tech, I cannot use AI transcription bots during live interviews due to strict data privacy and compliance. My workaround? I take my raw, messy, bulleted notes from the call, feed them into Gemini, and ask it to structure, clean, and format them into a highly professional summary. It saves my hands from typing, keeps my data secure, and delivers flawless notes to Hiring Managers.

3. Next-Gen Sourcing with LinkedIn’s "Hiring Assistant" 🔍 Sourcing for niche tech roles can be a black hole. Using LinkedIn’s built-in AI assistant helps pipeline building by identifying overlapping skills and "passive" talent patterns that traditional Boolean strings might miss. It doesn't replace the recruiter's eye, but it speeds up the initial calibration.

💡 Bonus Recruiter AI Tip: If you haven't looked into autonomous AI agents like Manus, keep an eye on them. We are moving from "chatbots" to "agents" that can execute multi-step research workflows in the background while you are on the phone interviewing.

The goal of AI in TA isn't to replace the human element - it’s to buy us the time to actually be human.

Recruiters: How are you using AI to "debug" your workflow this Monday? What’s your favorite prompt right now? Let’s share notes below! 👇

#TalentAcquisition #TechRecruiting #AInTA #ExecutiveSearch #RecruitmentEfficiency

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