Recruitment, AI and income generation

February 5th, 2026 | Company News Industry News

The recruitment sector contributed about £40 billion to the UK economy in 2024-25, according to the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC). Over two thirds of this sum was contributed by the temp/contract part of the industry.

If it feels to you like your agency isn’t experiencing much of that £40 billion, you’re not alone! Agencies are currently feeling the pinch in many ways. One of the responses to this pinch is to increase automation, especially through AI, to reduce costs and improve efficiency. But buyer beware!

AI and Hiring – pros and cons

We all know that AI-recruitment is in its infancy, but some of the negative effects of AI recruitment are important for agencies to learn from:

Trust issues

Stacks of ‘good looking’ candidates are gaming the system. Their CVs are amazing, their interviews (coached by AI if not actually conducted with an AI avatar concealing the actual candidate) are stellar and their performance after hiring … bombs. Clients are forced to question not merely candidates but the whole process, losing confidence in their HR departments or recruitment agency partners.

The problem is only intensifying: as AI screening gets more sophisticated, so do the tools to beat it. This creates an arms race that agencies can’t win through technology alone – genuinely qualified candidates get filtered out while those who’ve mastered the gaming techniques sail through.

Faster not better

There’s no doubt AI is fast. Recruiters can process huge candidate pools at virtually no cost (except maybe to the planet through all that processing demand) but there’s still no evidence that AI hires better. In fact, there’s convincing independent evidence that established science-based assessment tools outperform AI – partly because AI hallucinates, and partly because human judgement continues to be vital to good hiring and AI tends to cut that human element out.

Reputational risk is rising

Wrongful rejections, made up CVs, privacy breaches and biases in the algorithms have all emerged from recent AI hiring dramas.

Where AI helps:

Giving people the chance to do their work with greater freedom is AI’s real strength. Automation, triage and screening are great AI roles.

Recruit so Simple automation update

Bearing all this in mind, Recruit So Simple has just added document tracking to its recruitment agency software. This means that if a candidate has a certificate that expires and needs updating, the system will automatically alert both the user and the candidate. This is the kind of automation (AI or not) that frees up agencies to use their people more effectively. This new feature is integral to Recruit so Simple’s web based recruitment software – saving clients the cost of running a separate system to track candidate details and report on out-of-date certifications or qualifications.

For agencies evaluating the best recruitment software for agencies, it’s worth considering whether your recruitment management software handles these administrative tasks seamlessly, or whether you’re paying for flashy AI features that may not deliver better hires.