When I started in recruiting, connection mattered. We picked up the phone, took the time to get to know a candidate and their motivations. The process was inherently human — built on relationships, trust and genuine understanding.
But as the hiring market picked up, so came the quest to fine-tune the recruiting “machine” — and with that, tools to drive efficiency like LinkedIn, sourcing automation, and automated workflows within your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The problem is, all that automation and speed made the process less human. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with people — people with values, career aspirations and fears.
That’s why I believe this new wave of AI is different. Unlike previous automation that simply sped up processes, AI can now handle the repetitive work while actually freeing us to connect — and reconnect — with candidates, helping us build and sustain meaningful relationships while also making faster, more confident and less biased decisions.
The Industry Paradox
There’s a fascinating contradiction in how talent acquisition professionals view AI’s potential. While 70% of talent acquisition professionals believe generative AI will increase hiring efficiency, only 33% believe it will increase the quality of hires.
The broader statistics tell the story: 65% of recruiting leaders haven’t adopted AI solutions, and the recruiting technology landscape has grown from 160 vendors in 2015 to over 550 in 2024. We’re at the edge of either a breakthrough or a breakdown.
What’s missing is a fundamental shift in how we think about AI’s role. We’ve moved from inefficient humans to efficient but impersonal automation. Now we can move toward something better: efficient and human-centered AI.
Reimagining the Candidate Journey
At HubSpot, we’re reimagining every stage of the candidate journey with a clear principle in mind: AI should enhance human connection, not replace it.
Attraction becomes deeply personalized. Candidates interact with AI copilots that help them navigate which HubSpot career paths align with their goals and values; guides designed to help people in, not screen them out.
Discovery shifts from reactive to proactive. Our CRM houses rich talent community insights, with AI agents surfacing candidates based on skills and potential rather than keywords.
Screening focuses on what matters most. AI pre-qualifies people on objective requirements while giving them space to tell their story. This improves the candidate experience — most applicants today receive no feedback on why they didn’t advance.
Interviewing becomes more insightful and less biased. Tools like BrightHire help us capture conversation insights and assess cultural attributes consistently. In our first four weeks of implementation, we’ve seen an 80% decrease in time between interviewers completing interviews and submitting scorecards.
Coordination evolves from transactional to experiential. Our team absorbed a 75% increase in scheduling volume in the past 12 months without adding headcount, while improving accuracy. But more importantly, coordinators become true owners of the candidate journey, creating concierge-like experiences that are deeply human.
Throughout this transformation, decision making becomes more confident and consistent. These changes naturally enable AI to have the greatest impact on evergreen and entry-level positions where application volume is exponentially higher and role requirements are more standardized. AI helps synthesize candidate data to surface meaningful insights for decision meetings, while humans continue to make the ultimate choices about fit and potential.
The Recruiter Transformation
The biggest shift mirrors what we’re seeing industry-wide: moving from deep specialist to agile generalist. Traditional recruiters focused on narrow stages in the funnel or hiring for very specific roles; AI-era recruiters manage full hiring lifecycles across multiple roles and departments, spending time on strategic work while routine tasks get automated.
Perhaps most significantly, relationships with hiring managers are evolving from transactional to consultative. Instead of simply processing requisitions and forwarding candidates, recruiters become strategic partners who advise on hiring strategy, provide market insights, and assist with workforce planning. They’re talent advisors, not order-takers.
Measured Impact and Future Metrics
Our early implementations show promising results, but more importantly, they validate our philosophy about AI enhancing human judgment. The measurable outcomes we’re tracking go beyond traditional efficiency metrics. Candidate quality improves through better matching and skills-based assessment. Time to hire decreases through scheduling efficiency and faster decision-making. Recruiter productivity increases as AI handles routine tasks. But two metrics address common concerns about AI in recruiting:
Candidate Experience improves with AI-enabled screening tools, allowing us to reach candidates at scale while giving them opportunities to tell their story and learn about what we’re looking for based on the questions we ask.
Recruiter Engagement increases when AI eliminates repetitive administrative tasks, providing greater clarity to recruiters on work that drives impact and contributes to their growth and skill development.
Beyond Recruiting: Organizational Transformation
The transformation we’re describing in Talent Acquisition connects to broader shifts in how we think about work itself. AI enables a move toward strategic generalists across the organization, with a greater focus on utility skills that can be flexed across a range of functions.
Onboarding becomes deeply personalized through AI copilots that pull from internal documents, team rituals and project history to create hyper-relevant journeys for new hires. Instead of one-size-fits-all orientation, people get the right information at the right time.
Performance Management shifts to skills-based assessment and fluid staffing models. AI helps map skills across the organization and identifies opportunities to align people’s highest-value capabilities with the most critical work.
Learning and Development becomes real-time and role-relevant rather than episodic. AI learning copilots recommend bite-sized modules based on actual work activity and career goals, making development continuous rather than event-driven.
Recognition and Rewards evolve to celebrate AI adoption and measurable impact. We recognize individuals and leaders who deliver outcomes by deeply embedding AI into how they work, creating a culture where transformative use of technology is celebrated.
This broader transformation reinforces our core belief: the future belongs to organizations that use AI to amplify human potential rather than replace human judgment.
The Path Forward
Our central principle of AI in Talent Acquisition: “AI handles the repetitive; humans handle the relational.” Technology should free us to do more of what makes us uniquely human — building trust, understanding motivation, and making nuanced judgments about potential and fit.
In an AI-enabled hiring market, trust becomes the currency that matters most. Candidates want to know they’re being seen as whole people, not just data points. Hiring managers want confidence that recommendations are based on deep understanding, not just pattern matching. Recruiters want to spend their time on work that truly matters. This is why we want to set the pace for an industry transformation that puts human connection back at the center of talent acquisition.
For those talent acquisition professionals worrying whether AI will take your jobs — it won’t. But AI is here to stay, and it’s on all of us to be curious, adapt and embrace this wave of change so that we can shape how it transforms our industry. The question isn’t whether AI will transform recruiting, it’s whether we’ll use it to become more human or less. At HubSpot, we’re betting on more.