AI hasn’t broken hiring. Hiring has broken hiring.

Broken recruitment costs the UK around £75 billion a year. There’s lots of talk around the costs of AI, but these problems pre-date AI. In this article, we unpack why hiring still runs on centuries-old foundations, how years of piecemeal optimisation have left cracks, and why AI is forcing the industry to confront them. And crucially, what needs to happen next to build a hiring system that actually works.

Keep reading for:

• Why “hiring is getting worse” misses the point, and what’s really going on
• How decades of incremental innovation have betrayed the system
• What AI is exposing about our recruitment processes
• The case for shared standards and industry-wide collaboration
• How the ARTP aims to create a blueprint for better hiring

Let’s go.

“Modern” hiring… that an 18th century mill owner would recognise

“Hiring is broken and it’s getting worse” is the sensationalist hot take right now. But what if that’s wrong? 

What if hiring isn’t getting worse? What if it’s always been inefficient, inconsistent and unfair, and we’re only seeing it clearly now?

That’s what Keith Rosser, Chair of the Better Hiring Institute, suggested in episode 18 of The View. “Hiring has never actually worked that well”, Keith observes. “What we’re seeing now is a continuation. We’re seeing a hiring problem that we’ve failed to fix.”

Keith talks about how the fundamental building blocks of hiring have stayed the same for decades. Even centuries:

Job ads would’ve been paper not digital, but there’d have been an advert. References might’ve been based more on personal recommendation or who knew who, but there’d have been some social proof around suitability. There’d have been an interview. Terms agreed, if not a formal paper contract.

Yes, the recruitment industry has seen bucketloads of innovation. But there’s this uncomfortable tension, because that innovation focussed on the individual trees at the overarching expense of the woods.

The downside of cottage-industry optimisation

Keith points out how, for years, recruitment technology has focused on tweaking discrete parts of the hiring process. 

Which makes commercial sense – vendors are innovating within a part of the hiring process, because there are too many moving parts to tackle the whole system. Companies have picked off the bits they can chew, as Keith says. 

So we end up with faster screening; better referencing; more automation; clever psychometrics. All that good stuff. But the underlying system stays more or less the same.

But if the underlying system is broken, optimisation doesn’t fix it. It just makes those problems happen faster. As our CEO Neil puts it, “if you’re automating a crap process, you’ve just got a fast crap process.” 

We’ve patched around these problems for years. Optimising in fragments; mending and making do. But we can’t do that anymore. 

AI hasn’t broken hiring. What we’re seeing now isn’t a new reality, magically created by AI. It’s exactly what we’ve always had, only sped up and exposed so we can’t keep ignoring it. No more rose tinted glasses.

AI hasn’t broken hiring. It’s exposed broken hiring.

Spend five minutes with any TA team right now and the patterns are clear:

• Application volumes are skyrocketing
• AI-generated content is everywhere 
• Candidate quality is harder to differentiate 
• Recruiters are under pressure to move faster with less resource 
• Candidates are ghosted, or stuck in slow, black-box processes 
• Fraud risks are growing, from fake CVs to synthetic identities 

Sure, some of the tactics are new. But the underlying problems aren’t.

Candidates have always embellished CVs or worked out ways to play the system.

Processes have always been inconsistent. Communication has always been patchy. Fraud has always been a threat. Recruiters have always had fewer resources than they need. 

What’s changed is scale. AI is making it easier to apply, easier to optimise applications, and easier to game weak points in the system. At the same time, it’s increasing expectations around speed, clarity and fairness.

So the gaps that were once manageable are now unavoidable. The road is more pothole than surface. And discrete, piecemeal, seeing-the-tree-and-only-the-tree innovation isn’t the way to fix it. This is not (just) a technology problem. 

The case for shared recruitment standards

It’s tempting to frame all this as a tech problem (especially as tech vendors). But we’ve always said, tech on its own is never a silver bullet. 

It’s about more than technology. It’s about the fact that there’s no real definition of what “good hiring” looks like in practice. No blueprint.

• Processes vary wildly between organisations; even between teams 
• Decision-making criteria are often unclear or inconsistently applied 
• Candidate experience depends on the day; person; weather; star sign
• Software is implemented in different ways with different levels of oversight 

And now, AI is amplifying and scaling those issues. When volumes increase; when decisions happen faster, risk gets multiplied. Many times over.

As an industry, we urgently need more alignment. We need a shared understanding – across employers, technology providers and policymakers – of what responsible, effective hiring looks like.

(This is also why Tribepad recently became the first UK recruitment platform to be Warden AI assured, because we believe in third-party standards that raise the collective bar.)

Improving hiring outcomes demands collective effort. Not just individual vendors optimising their slice of the process, but a broader shift towards consistent, accountable practices across the system.

That’s where the Association of Recruitment Technology Providers comes in. 

Taking on the whole elephant with the ARTP

Tribepad is a founding member of the ARTP – a new industry body focused on raising standards across the recruitment technology ecosystem. 

It’s an attempt to “take on the whole elephant”, as Neil says, rather than the piecemeal cottage-industry approach to innovation that’s been happening. 

At a time when hiring decisions carry greater responsibility and scrutiny than ever, and when AI is exposing cracks we’ve ignored for years, the ARTP aims to set clearer standards, influence policy, and create trusted markets for recruitment tech solutions. 

The idea is to create a shared vision for fairer, faster, better recruitment, in areas like:

• Data privacy and security 
• AI transparency and responsible use 
• Technology stability
• Fairness and inclusion 
• System reliability and governance 

And to align vendors and employers around those expectations, so recruitment starts to actually work better for everyone involved. 

• So applicants aren’t stuck sending 100 applications just to get an interview, even when they’re a good fit for the role. 
• So candidates aren’t sucked into a comms black hole, hearing nothing for months on end (if at all).
• So recruiters aren’t stuck sifting through thousands of applications they can’t assess.
• So hiring managers aren’t making rushed decisions based on incomplete, inconsistent info. 
• So leaders can trust their hiring processes are fair, auditable, and reliably identify great talent that moves the organisation forward.

And so AI can fulfil its potential as a great enabler for jobseekers and recruiters, becoming (positively) transformational for the economy. 

Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, assessment, video screening, compliance, onboarding, analytics and a fully-integrated AI assistant, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.

B-Corp certified and multiple-award-winning (like Best ATS for Enterprises and Tech Company of the Year), Tribepad is trusted by organisations like Hotel Chocolat, cardfactory, Greggs, Tesco, Subway, DFS, Met Office, and Home Bargains.