Beyond Candidates and Clients

"AI won't replace the human part of recruitment" might be the most dangerous sentence in our industry right now.

Not because it's wrong. But because it's being used as a reason not to think harder.

Sequoia Capital, arguably the most successful venture firm in the entire industry, published a piece recently mapping every major services industry by how exposed it is to AI automation. 

Recruitment and staffing sits on that list at a $200B+ market. Their framing: the top of the hiring funnel, screening, matching, outreach, is pure intelligence work. The judgment layer, closing a candidate, reading culture fit, is what remains human. For now.

Check out the article here if you want to have a read.

There will be more tools tomorrow. Better ones. That's not a threat, it's just the reality.

So don't get defensive. Get curious. Talk to the people already using these tools. Understand what problems they're actually trying to solve. Be honest with yourself about how you show up for the people in your market.

If you do that work, your answer won't simply be "AI can't replace the human part of recruitment" It'll be something far more specific. And far more compelling.

I've always wondered how helpful it is to label people as candidates or clients.

I get it. You have people who go through a recruitment process and land a job. The candidate. You have people who make hiring decisions and sign off on headcount. The client. The labels exist for a reason.

But when you start putting everyone you speak to day to day into one of those two boxes, I think you start to limit yourself. And more importantly, you limit the relationships you're capable of building.

Here's what I mean by that. The best recruiters I've come across are world-class at one thing above everything else. Connecting the dots. Seeing the opportunity in front of them and acting on it. That's commercial awareness at its finest.

But connecting the dots requires dots to connect. And if you enter every conversation with a fixed perspective, you reduce the number of dots you can even see. You miss signals. You miss context. You miss the moment where a conversation could have gone somewhere far more valuable.

That's what the candidate and client labels actually cost you. Not just relationships. Commercial awareness.

That's the thinking I want to challenge this week.

The best recruiters I've spoken to over the past year consistently do one thing differently. They don't train their teams to think in those two categories at all. Instead, they train them to grow a network of industry peers. People they could help in some way, at some point, in ways that aren't yet defined.

That shift sounds subtle. The commercial difference is anything but.

The problem with the candidate lens

When you enter a conversation with your candidate hat on, you're primed for a specific set of topics. Career goals. Next move. Motivations. It's what you're supposed to do in that conversation, so that's where your attention goes.

Which means you can miss the signals sitting right underneath.

The person you're speaking to mentions offhand that their team is stretched. That a key hire has been open for months. That the pressure is coming from above and nobody seems to have a solution. Those aren't candidate signals. But if your lens is fixed, you're not hearing them as anything other than background noise.

The problem with the client lens

Flip it, and the same trap exists on the other side.

When you enter a conversation with your client hat on, you're focused on the brief. The package. The timeline. The spec. All legitimate. All necessary.

But you can miss the person in front of you. The fact that they're navigating a restructure. That they're under pressure and not entirely sure the role is even signed off. That they might be quietly exploring their own next move, and the trust you've built means you'd be one of the first people they'd tell.

A fixed mindset doesn't just cost you insight. It costs you relationships.

The reframe

The best recruiters I've interviewed don't walk into conversations thinking "this is a candidate call" or "this is a client call."

They walk in thinking: how can I help this person today, tomorrow, or in the future?

That one shift changes everything. It keeps you alert. It keeps you curious. It keeps you noticing the signals that a transactional mindset filters out.

And that's where commercial awareness actually lives. Not in how many calls you make or how well you know your market on paper. It lives in the quality of attention you bring to every single conversation. The recruiter who walks in thinking "industry peer" sees more dots. And the best ones connect them.

And over time, it compounds. The candidate you helped two years ago is now a hiring manager. The client who went through a redundancy round is now looking for their next move. The industry peer you just had a genuine conversation with refers someone to you because you were the only recruiter who actually listened.

None of that happens if you put everyone in one of two boxes at the start of every call.

This week on the pod, I sat down with Luke McCluskey, founder of Circle Recruitment.

Luke built his business from £2K in the bank to £100K weekly GP and shared the craft, the frameworks, and the hard lessons behind that journey.

A brilliant listen for anyone in contract recruitment or building a contract business.

Open LinkedIn. Search the names of ten people you placed in the first two or three years of your career.

Have a look at where they are today.

The candidate you helped land their first big role in 2021 might now be a team lead. The person you placed in 2022 could be a hiring manager signing off on headcount. The person you spent three calls coaching through their offer negotiation might now be setting the people strategy for a growing business.

If you haven't spoken to them in the last six to twelve months, that's the only action from this week's edition you need to take.

Don't pitch. Don't sell. Just reconnect. Ask how things are going. Be genuinely curious about where they've landed.

You might be surprised what one conversation opens up.

Keep smashing it & honing your craft!

Hishem x

Know a recruiter who needs to hear this? Send it their way.