AI is steamrolling recruitment firms. They are fighting back with more AI

We’ve looked at AI a lot over the years, but especially recently. How AI is changing M&A. How it’s changing private equity. How it’s changing operations. But how exactly is AI changing financial services recruitment itself? Well, it’s complicated.

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We spoke to Kimberley Roe, head of change and transformation IT (permanent) recruitment at UK-based recruitment consultancy Huxley. She tells us that the firm’s London office alone (and it has 55 of them) receives some 800 fresh CVs per day – and filters out around 90% of them.

“I would estimate that 600 to 700 of them have been sent using an AI model,” Roe says, “where AI has helped write the CV or someone's using the AI program to send their CV to absolutely everything.” Huxley, in turn, uses an AI application to rank the CVs on how good they are.

Huxley’s AI penalizes your AI. “How can we actually know anything about you?” Roe asks. “The reason you get penalized for AI is it's not your own work.” 

You should take heart from the fact that your CV, even if it is a bit miserable, is tenfold better than most AI-written ones. Roe gives the example of a job application for a second-line support role (basically, a bank tech job that involves solving more complex issues than “my laptop no work”), which might receive 10 CVs that are the same. “The whole CV is exactly, word for word, the same,” Roe says. “It means, straight away, we know that's not a legitimate CV, and we can't represent those people to our clients.”

So, what can you do aside from putting a modicum of effort into your CV? You write more and better cover letters. “When CVs are so generic, your cover letter is what can help personalise you, and AI is a really good tool for that,” Roe explains. “Cover letters are more important now.” Of course, writing your cover letter with AI is fine. That should go without saying.

At the end of the day, AI is just another part of the evolution of the recruitment industry. “Our industry will always change, and it needs to change,” Roe says. “When I joined in 2007, it wasn't that long since CVs were still being sent by post or by fax machine.” In turn, sending CVs over the internet was a revolution. “Then CRM systems started to pop up, where clients were using kind of their own portals for us to update people,” Roe says. “That seemed quite revolutionary.” And then there were video interviews, which were just as revolutionary.

Now it is AI. “Businesses on both sides are having to adapt to that; there will always be change,” Roe says. And unlike with other revolutions, AI has a counterrevolutionary element; it “could really help someone in their job search, or it could absolutely destroy it.”

Kimberley Roe will be hosting an ask me anything (AMA) on the bubble, our forum for financial services professionals, on 22 September.

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