Remember 2020? Yes, the year when Covid was devastating everything we knew, and there wasn’t a vaccine yet.

Last year, I started working with a new client. Mike owns a small engineering recruitment business with 18 employees. In early 2025, Mike noticed that job orders were down.

I think the rush to use AI has allowed recruiters of all shapes and sizes to forget what makes a good ad – so here it is, in the context of the mistakes I keep seeing.

“I’ve never received an AI-generated CV from a candidate”, said a recruitment business owner to me last month. My response? “How would you know?”