The Recruiter Is Dead. Long Live the Talent Advisor.
The first time I heard someone say, “Recruiting is going to be replaced by AI,” I had the same reaction a lot of recruiters do: a mix of annoyance and disbelief. Because if you’ve ever actually hired for a hard role, one that needs the right blend of skill, attitude, timing, and culture...you know it isn’t a keyword search problem. It’s a people problem. A business problem. A trust problem. But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized something important: the part of recruiting that’s being replaced isn’t the part that makes recruiting valuable. The part that’s being replaced is the part that made recruiting…busy. The old version of the job revolved around effort you could measure. How many messages you sent. How many screens you booked. How quickly you pushed candidates through. How fast you filled the requisition. And for a long time, that worked, at least well enough to keep the machine moving. The recruiter was the engine: sourcing, scheduling, screening, nudging, updating, fo...