Whenever someone tells me that AI is saving their recruiters five hours a week, my next question is always: What happened to those five hours? Did they generate more client conversations, placements and net fee income?

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?”