AI adoption in recruitment has accelerated sharply. CIPD’s Resourcing and Talent Planning 2024 report found 78% of organisations increased their use of technology in recruiting and onboarding, with 31% specifically adding AI tools. The direction of travel is clear.

What’s less clear is whether the returns are evenly distributed across everything AI is being applied to — because the evidence suggests they aren’t.

The CIPD Good Work Index 2025 found that 85% of employees whose tasks had been automated by AI reported improved performance — but the tasks being automated were predominantly repetitive ones. That’s consistent with where AI is genuinely delivering in recruitment: advert rewriting, drafting candidate FAQs, interview scheduling, summarising hiring data, producing campaign content. Real efficiency gains that compound at scale — less admin time per hire, faster turnaround, more consistent output.

The picture shifts when AI moves beyond process support into judgement territory. Research found that 64% of recruiters noticed an increase in near-identical AI-generated applications in 2024–25, which actually increased their screening workload rather than reducing it — a reminder that AI on the candidate side can complicate AI on the employer side. More significantly, the EU AI Act, now effective and with phases running through 2026–27, will require thorough risk management and documentation for AI used in recruitment — raising the compliance stakes for organisations that have deployed these tools without sufficient oversight.

The approach that seems to be landing well in practice is applying AI to specific steps within existing workflows rather than attempting end-to-end automation. Reducing admin load. Improving turnaround. Keeping recruiter involvement where judgement and relationship matter most.

That’s not a particularly exciting conclusion. But it may be more durable than the version where AI transforms the entire function overnight. Healthcare recruitment involves regulated professionals, complex individual circumstances, sponsorship obligations and candidate decisions that will shape someone’s life and career. The human layer in that process isn’t inefficiency. It’s the point.