AI made finding candidates faster. Trusting them didn't get easier.

Faster is not the same as better.

HR Dive wrote up a new TestGorilla survey last week, more than 1,400 US talent people. 72% said AI made finding candidates quicker. But a third of them said it gave them no extra confidence in the people they found. And 18% said their confidence actually went down.

That matches how it feels from my side.

Finding people is not the hard part anymore.

Knowing who is real is.

CVs look polished. Cover letters sound the same. Everyone has the right keywords, because everyone has the same tools to write them.

So the work did not disappear. It moved.

The same survey says more than 2 in 3 recruiters spend an hour or more checking one candidate's credentials by hand. 30% spend two hours or more.

For a small startup hiring its first five people, that is a lot of hours.

I don't think the answer is more AI on top of AI.

I think it is going back to something simple. A real conversation. A small paid task. A reference call where you actually listen.

The boring parts of hiring that we were all so happy to automate.

Turns out they were the parts that told us the truth.