Is AI Making Us Better Recruiters or Just Worse Humans?

A few days ago, I attended a Pitch Club session, where people get up and share ideas, problems, things they’re genuinely wrestling with. Most pitches are interesting. One of them stopped me in my tracks.

Luke Barry, a recruiter, presented a powerful session at Pitch Club that I couldn’t shake: “Is AI making me a better recruiter? Or a worse human?”

Luke and I jumped on a call to dig deeper, and what came out of it was so layered I had to write about it. So Luke, this one’s for you. Thank you for planting the seed.

---

The CV That Ticks Every Box

This scenario is becoming more and more common.

A recruiter opens a CV. It’s polished, the keywords are perfect and the experience reads exactly right. Every box gets ticked, and the candidate gets called in.

And then… nothing. The conversation is flat. No spark, no curiosity. The moment you take it off-script, the illusion shatters.

This isn’t the candidate’s fault. They did exactly what the system rewards: took the job spec, fed it into AI, and got back a CV built to beat the ATS. The problem is that what comes out is a document that represents an idea of a person rather than the actual person.

The Double-Edged Sword

This is where it gets uncomfortable.

Many of the same companies hiring for culture and curiosity are also using AI to screen the flood of applications. And you can’t blame them. When Oracle lays off 30,000 people while pouring money into AI infrastructure, the direction is clear: humans out, efficiency in.

Right now we’re in an employer-led market: more candidates than jobs, more applications than any human can process. Luke shared a real example: a Unity engineer role that received 600 applications. There is no person on earth who can give 600 people a fair read in the time available. So you use tools, keyword matching and filters.

And right there, in that perfectly rational system, the second victim appears.

The Person the Algorithm Never Sees

Somewhere in that pile is a person who didn’t optimise. They wrote their CV themselves. It’s real, it’s honest, and it doesn’t have the exact right keywords. They never get the call.

I’ll make it personal. My official lane has always been ad monetisation, but I’ve always been curious about the buy side, so I went and learned it on my own time. I’d walk into meetings and ask questions UA teams hadn’t even thought of yet. Half the time I knew more about their domain than they did, and it was never my job.

You can’t keyword-match that kind of curiosity.

And Luke sits with that discomfort daily: “I always have this horrible feeling that I’ve missed someone. That there’s someone out there not being pushed to the top because of the noise.”

Operators of Tools. Builders of Relationships.

AI makes hiring faster. That’s real and necessary. But every layer of automation is also a layer of distance — between the person hiring and the human being applying.

The real gold is in the conversation. It shows when someone handles a question they weren’t prepared for, which is where curiosity and resilience come through. An AI can’t read that, and I’m not sure we should be rushing toward a world where it can.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

It’s a structural problem. There’s no clean fix. When the volume of applications is this high, automated filtering is inevitable. When candidates know AI can give them an edge, CV optimisation is inevitable. Both sides are responding rationally to a broken system.

Luke sits inside that system every day, and this is what he wants candidates to hear:

Stop playing the volume game.

When a role gets 600 applications, the candidates who stand out clearly understood the role, the company, and why they specifically are the right fit. Applying fastest or optimising hardest doesn’t get them there. That clarity is almost impossible to fake, and it’s exactly what a flat AI-generated CV can’t convey.

Mass applying makes things worse for everyone, including the candidates doing it. It feeds the volume problem, forces recruiters deeper into automation, and buries the people who took the time to apply thoughtfully.

The practical advice is simple, even if it’s hard:

Apply to fewer roles. Focus your approach for each one. Show that you actually understand what the company needs. A focused application to ten roles will almost always outperform a scattergun approach to a hundred.

Because in a world optimising for speed and efficiency, being human might still be our biggest advantage.

---

Big thank you to Luke Barry for inspiring this. His Pitch Club session sparked the conversation, and our follow-up call gave it depth. If this topic resonates, go give him a follow — he’s thinking about the right things.