Somebody give me a signal!

Something strange is happening out there.

It’s easier than ever for people to find out who’s hiring and get a CV out the door in seconds. Clients are receiving more applications for their roles than ever before.

So when the internal talent team says, relax, we’ve had 200 applications, you’d be forgiven for thinking the difficult bit was done.

Except clients tell us that appointing the right person isn’t getting easier. It’s getting harder.

So what’s going on?

AI has opened Pandora’s box and seemingly made the whole hiring world everyone’s oyster. But that abundance is creating a whole new challenge.

Because 200 applications tells a client how many people applied. It doesn’t tell them whether the person they need is amongst them.

Applying for a job has become almost frictionless. Candidates can find a role they like, drop the job description and their CV into AI and, seconds later, have an application tailored remarkably closely to what the employer is looking for.

Candidates have always tailored their CVs, and absolutely should. AI simply allows them to do it faster, better and at a scale that wasn’t previously possible.

But everyone else can do it too.

The result isn’t simply more applications. It’s more applications that look right. More people able to present an increasingly convincing case that they have what a client needs.

And candidates are experiencing exactly the same problem from the other side.

They see an opportunity for which they are eminently suitable. Their experience fits. Their skills fit. They make that case clearly — and get rejected.

Why?

Probably because the other 200 applicants look just as suitable.

The technology that has made it easier for candidates to find and pursue the right opportunities has also made it much harder for them to stand out amongst everyone else doing exactly the same thing.

Then add into the mix the technology being deployed on the other side, reading and selecting candidates based on increasingly little discernible difference between applications.

No wonder that somewhere in all of this, the person behind the CV becomes invisible.

That matters particularly when skills are scarce, when clients are hiring at the frontier, or when strategy, judgement, thought and character matter every bit as much as technical capability.

When it comes to hiring, we think the human network is about to become more valuable, not less.

Some clients have already sensed the shift. They're not abandoning technology; they're becoming more discerning about where they rely on it. For volume hiring, the economics of automation are persuasive. But for significant hires, where understanding the person matters as much as identifying the skills, we're seeing a pivot back towards networks, relationships and human judgement.

And clients who make that distinction early may steal a march on those still assuming that more candidates must mean more choice.

This is where the real shift in value is happening. Technology has made finding people extraordinarily easy. But finding the person still requires knowing what really matters — and, increasingly, knowing the people behind the profiles.

More talent.
Less signal.

Perhaps one of the more unexpected consequences of AI will be that it teaches us something about the value of the human in hiring.

And for that, AI, thank you.