Why you can't replace your recruitment marketing agency with AI

As a recruiter, you’ve been told AI is coming for your job and will replace your agency. For the last couple of years, you’ve increasingly heard that a recruitment consultant’s role is essentially obsolete.

Have you found this to be true? Has an AI platform replaced you yet? Or even made you feel like it’s nearly time to throw in the towel?

From what we see and hear daily in this industry, it’s a resounding: ‘no’.

As marketers in the space, we will join you in the chorus. We’re experiencing the same thing. We hear people asking ‘Can AI replace a recruitment marketing agency?’

Let’s take a look at the wins, and the absolute AI flops we see by making a simple pros and cons list.

Pros of AI in recruitment marketing

AI can increase speed of delivery (in some cases)

A well trained Cowork project, agent or GPT, holding all the context of a client’s brand, can assist with completing basic tasks more quickly or automating some simple, guided data collection or research. It can be helpful for troubleshooting, adding context when learning new processes (as new tools come flying at us from every direction), or summarising information. Of course, tools like Claude Code can also come in use in web dev workflows.

However, it cannot be fully relied upon and requires heavy human oversight and direction in order to be useful, not hallucinate, or generally not do a poor job, subsequently requiring more time spent fixing its errors than if you had done it unassisted.

AI can be a tool to assist learning (taken with a pinch of salt)

Using it as a research assistant to navigate complex, specialist markets and provide additional information on niche subjects is useful. Not necessarily as a search engine, but as a helpful way of connecting the dots on research you’ve already carried out. At Halt, we speak to our clients on their expertise all the time, but we can also help them by setting up workflows that keep us on top of the latest industry news even when our clients are overwhelmed with work.

However, it’s a tool to assist only and should not be taken at its word. Any learning must be supported by a richer context that you yourself have explored.

Some may add points like copywriting, design, pitch deck creation, reporting, etc to a Pro list. I’m adding them to the Con list.

Cons of AI in recruitment marketing

AI is shockingly bad at copywriting

Truly. It might help in giving feedback on pieces you’ve already written, help structure a flow for readability, and support you in writing about topics that you’re learning about. But always use your critical thinking and take its responses with a large pinch of salt. It can give ridiculous advice.

What it does do, is write awfully. It has a distinct robotic cadence, and its AI slop ‘tells’ are extremely difficult to get rid of even if you’ve created skills, policies, and prompt engineered like a pro. It’s certainly not just the em dashes (a perfectly acceptable punctuation mark, by the way).

Reliance on it screams ‘untrustworthy’ to your audience. There’s a risk of your content being flagged, reported, not pushed organically, or turning someone off your brand. If you haven’t yet noticed the obvious tells, you will soon start to, and hiring managers and decision makers are picking up on it already.

We’re all crying out for human voices, so even if it’s not textbook perfect writing, that’s probably even better! Professional copywriters are literally intentionally adding in grammatical and spelling mistakes to ensure readers know they are reading human generated content.

AI design is extremely obvious, and looks bad

Where to start on this one? It’s just too easy to spot, and again, screams ‘untrustworthy’, ‘unprofessional’, ‘fake’, ‘poor quality’. Using it as a tool amongst many others in design can be helpful, but using AI generated content for everything is not going to do you any favours, and is more likely to tarnish your brand.

This rings true for everything from branding, to social content, web design, and marketing collateral including pitch decks. If you’re using AI to generate design, imagery, and copy, your clients can tell and they aren’t impressed.

If this feels and sounds familiar, your content’s blending into everyone else’s, or your engagement’s dropping and you’re unsure why, that may be the AI effect. Turning it around takes a skilled professional who knows your brand and your market, which is exactly what our social media team does.

AI often gets the numbers wrong

There are some expensive reporting and data collection tools that are AI powered, and work well enough. However, if you think you can just ask Claude or ChatGPT to reliably do your reporting for you, it cannot. Unfortunately, it will make up numbers no matter how much you guide it. Perhaps, if you have a developer working in your recruitment agency, or you’re willing to pay for a bespoke tool, you could gather more reliable analytics, but if you’re thinking this is just something an LLM can take over for you internally, you will be bitterly disappointed.

This is also an issue when researching and collecting data in general. Always fact check. Always expect hallucinations.

AI is not good at SEO

It may convince you that it knows what it’s talking about, and whatever it advises you on key words is brilliant, so you don’t need tools like SemRush or AlsoAsked. Despite sounding pretty convincing, the results will tell you otherwise if you do decide to trust it.

AI is not going to automatically create, schedule, publish, and monitor your content. It’s also not going to create your brand or build your website for you. You still need a human to do these things for you. They may use some AI in their toolkit, but that’s it.

Just like how as a recruiter, you may use AI in your toolkit, but your clients and candidates still need you as a human to do the job.

What happens if you rely on AI for your recruitment marketing?

The proof will be in the pudding. Not only would it be ineffective, it can actively harm your brand and reputation with your audience, and crucially, with decision makers.

What now?

We’re always open to hearing other sides of the story, so if you have a brilliant example of it working for you, get in touch and we would love to chat about it!

Otherwise, if like us, you would like to work with humans who deliver, talk to us about your business and how we can support you with: