We don't buy it. At pobl, we build AI tools that help our clients recruit brilliant people, and the good ones do the opposite. They take the admin off people's plates, so the people can focus on the parts of hiring that matter. Humans still review the applications. Humans still make the important calls on who could be a great hire.
It all depends on how you build the tools. Here's how we approach it, and what it looked like for one of our clients.
Recruiters lose more than two working days to manual admin on every vacancy: 17.7 hours on average, according to a 2025 Totaljobs survey of UK HR leaders (Totaljobs, 2025). That's time spent reviewing irrelevant applications, juggling calendars and typing up notes, instead of talking to candidates and hiring managers.
Candidates feel it too. More than a quarter of UK jobseekers (28%) say they've dropped out of a hiring process because of delays, unclear communication or too many rounds.
Most recruiters can see the opportunity. In the same survey, 77% said AI could make them more efficient, yet only around a quarter were actually using it. The barriers weren't about the technology. They were about trust, unfamiliarity and tools that don't fit how teams really work.
Every tool we build starts from one question: which parts of this process need a person, and which parts just need doing? AI is brilliant at the second kind of work. It drafts, summarises, structures, repurposes and remembers. It has no business deciding who gets a job.
The split keeps the human judgement where it belongs and gives people back the time to use it well.
An independent medcomms agency came to us with no talent function. Every new role fell to its core team: drafting the job description, writing the advert, posting it and promoting it on social media.
As part of our long-term embedded partnership, we built them an all-in-one recruitment agent in Claude. The hiring manager talks through the vacancy in their own words, either typed into a chat or spoken aloud in a voice conversation with the agent. The agent already knows the agency. It draws on their previous job adverts, a new advert structure agreed with the team, and the nitty-gritty detail of each role.
From that one briefing, it produces:
Going from an identified need to a detailed, specific advert ready to go live now takes under 30 minutes.
The speed isn't the best part, though. Every advert sounds like the role it describes. Because each one starts with a hiring manager describing the job in real terms, it carries the true flavour of the opportunity: honest, accurate and specific, never generic. The AI handles the structure, the formatting and the repurposing. The people who know the role supply the substance.
The difference between AI that damages recruitment and AI that elevates it comes down to a few design choices:
Built this way, AI doesn't replace the human side of recruitment. It gives people the time and the material to do it properly, so you attract the right talent and run a far more efficient process.
If your team is spending more time on admin than on candidates, we'd love to talk. Get in touch at pobl.work or contact our resident recruitment AI specialist Tom Davies at tom@pobl.work
Let's start with a conversation. Confidential, and with no obligation.