With AI changing the value of human expertise, what new skills and competencies will recruiters need to stay relevant and add value?
In 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development made the bold claim that, within 15 years, automation would drastically reshape one-third of all jobs and entirely wipe out another 14%. That prediction covered more than a billion workers—and was made years before ChatGPT exploded onto the scene.
Now, six years later, hardly a day goes by without another headline screaming “AI’s making work redundant!” or “AI’s killing graduate jobs!” These claims are overboiled in my view, which I wrote about in this post: Top Five Reasons Why AI Won’t Replace Humans. But there’s no denying that new technologies are changing the role of humans in the workplace. AI can not only handle the boring, repetitive tasks, but also perform increasing amounts of knowledge work—the coding, research, writing and analysis that were once thought immune to disruption.
For many professionals, this means the job they signed up for is quickly morphing into something new.
What’s the impact on recruiting?
Recruiting’s interesting because it straddles two worlds. It’s part process and data, part relationship and influence.
Already, AI has much of the process part handled. It can write job ads, answer questions through chatbots, scan resumes, cull unqualified candidates, schedule interviews, and offer an objective evaluation of a candidate’s video responses. Gen AI is even capable of learning from previous hiring successes to identify predictive traits in new applicants. This is very cool stuff.
Business leaders are, rightly, excited by AI. Recent reports show the adoption rate in talent acquisition (TA) is now close to universal—99% of TA teams are using the AI tech to streamline hiring processes.
Where AI hasn’t (yet) made inroads is in everything that hinges on the messy, often contradictory, nature of human connection and judgment. Machines can rank a stack of resumes, but they struggle to spot the potential in someone who doesn’t fit neatly into a box. AI is good at pattern-matching, but less so at weighing the unspoken signals picked up over a conversation. Building relationships is uniquely human territory.
The World Economic Forum looked at AI’s transformative impact in its Future of Jobs Report 2025. It concluded that humans will need a particular set of competencies to stay relevant in the years ahead. Unsurprisingly, virtually all of them fall on the “relationship and influence” side of the recruiter’s skillset.
7 Recruiting Skills of Tomorrow
1. Prompt Engineering
With AI now a feature of every TA function, the most obvious skill recruiters need is AI fluency. You can’t make decisions based on AI outputs if you’re not a fluent user of the tech.
Prompt engineering—the art of designing effective prompts for large language models—helps recruiters feed the machine in a way that unlocks its full potential. Consider the difference between asking AI to “find software engineers” versus “Generate a Boolean search string for a Data Scientist with 5+ years of experience in Python and AWS, based in Boston, who has worked at fintech startups in the last three years.” The way this prompt is phrased can totally change your results, from a bunch of unqualified leads to people who match what the team needs. It’s a small shift that makes a big difference in who shows up on your radar.
Getting good at prompt engineering matters for two reasons. The first is that it comes into play across nearly every workflow:
- Writing job descriptions
- Resume screening
- Creating structured interview guides
- Summarizing interviews
- Marketing emails
- Personalized outreach
- Internal hiring updates
The second, bigger reason is that AI only works as well as the instructions it’s given. If your prompts are vague, the results won’t be helpful (garbage in, garbage out). But with a solid prompt strategy, a process that used to eat up hours can be done in seconds, and done the right way for your hiring context.
You’ll need to test and tweak your prompts to find out what’s working. Building a shared prompt library, organized by use case, keeps everyone consistent and shares the best practices you’ve learned.
2. Writing & Editing
AI can bang out job ads / emails / reports with excellent grammar, but its fingerprints are all over the copy. If your employer brand is “bland, generic, soulless” then great, AI has you covered. If not, you’ll need to step in and give your content a pulse.
No one expects you to write from scratch, and AI is excellent at creating a solid first draft. The skill of the future recruiter is taking that AI-generated content and infusing it with a genuine brand personality. There are several sub-skills involved in this process, including:
- Understanding (and writing for) the right audience
- Maintaining your company’s style and tone
- Checking sources, citations, facts, hallucinations
- Sense-checking that outputs are the messages you were aiming to deliver
- Adding stories, details, personalizations
- Spotting clichés and replacing them with something real
What’s interesting about this skill is, the better you get at it, the more easily you’ll be able to spot a copy-and-paste application with all the tell-tale signs a candidate has used AI. We’re not passing judgment on this practice—in a tough job market, candidates should be free to use any help they can get. But both resumes and employer communications need to show the writer’s personality, their passions and their story, and that is something AI simply can’t do.
3. Data Interpretation and Storytelling
Recruiters have always been surrounded by data. Most of our KPIs have some type of metric attached to them, whether its application volumes, response rates, diversity stats, cost-per-hire or time-to-fill. AI has reached a point where it massively expedites the data-gathering process. Good tools can identify patterns and anomalies in data sets that might take humans hours or days to discover. And they don’t just explain what happened, but forecast what might happen next.
But even with this extra computing power, AI alone can’t decide which data points matter most or explain what they mean for your team. Specifically, AI lacks the intelligence to:
- Contextualize the data for your business realities
- Draw parallels between the data and past decisions you’ve made
- Identify who will make decisions with the data and what they care about
- Develop a narrative arc with clear implications for decisions-makers
- Include “choose your own adventure” elements for different scenarios arising from the data
In other words, AI is great at turning out technically sound data analysis but it lacks the storytelling elements that help you sell the narrative. AI can spit out, “Time-to-hire increased by 15%.” A human recruiter evolves that into, “We’re seeing delays because competition for engineering talent picked up last quarter. We tried reaching out to more candidates, but fewer responded to our interview invites. This shows our branding or pay might need a rethink if we want to bring in top people.”
In an industry flooded with data, the ability to tell stories with the numbers ranks among the most valuable skills.
4. Creative Thinking
While AI has a multitude of capabilities that are set to increase over the next few years, the one thing it can never fully replicate is creative thinking. In recruiting—which is moving so fast at the moment—creative thinking is the act of staying ahead of change. It’s the ability to use imagination and approach problems from a different angle when the usual solutions aren’t cutting it.
More than 70% of companies surveyed consider creative thinking and analytical thinking to be the skills most expected to rise in importance between 2023 and 2027. That’s according to Statista, who conducted a study in which they surveyed 11.3 million employees from 803 organizations globally from November 2022 to February 2023.
In recruiting, creative thinking could be visualizing how people with adjacent skills may fit into open roles, designing foolproof assessments that catch the fake-it-til-you-make-its, or finding unusual ways to connect with candidate pools when traditional sourcing fails. (Google’s Foobar coding challenge being a great example). AI might suggest a candidate is a 90% match based on keywords. But a recruiter who can pivot a search, reposition a role, or change the approach entirely? That’s the kind of thinking that keeps recruiters valuable, no matter how smart the tech gets.
5. Curiosity
Hiring Ops (or RecOps, or Talent Ops) is the art and science of identifying optimization opportunities so companies hire great people in the most efficient way possible. The function has a lot of moving parts, one of the big ones being data and technology integration. Fundamentally though, Hiring Ops starts with the drive to understand why hiring processes work or fail, and that needs a curiosity mindset only humans can bring.
Curious recruiters have the urge to keep asking questions. They:
- Poke at assumptions in hiring process
- Dig into the “why” behind both wins and misses
- Learn the business, not just the process, to know what a top performer looks like
- Get curious about team roles and work culture, not just job skills
- Probe every requisition—What makes this role vital now? What does success look like in the first six months?
- Ask what market trends mean for hiring priorities
- Spot hurdles a different kind of candidate might face, and look for ways to help them
- Track down barriers to speed, cost, quality etc and share what they find to make the whole system smarter
I’d go so far as to say curiosity is the linchpin of great recruitment. It transforms the process from a transactional hunt for skills to a strategic quest for talent that can thrive long after day one.
6. Relationship Building (Empathy and Influence)
Recruiters manage a lot of relationships. A lot. Your network includes active candidates, target candidate pools, talent pipelines, hiring managers, professional communities, and passive candidates who may not be ready to move today but could be perfect fits tomorrow. The most compelling use case for AI is it frees up precious time to focus on the deeper conversations that relationships are built on.
Demand for recruiters who have relationship-building skills has surged post-AI. In LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 report, employers were 54 times more likely to list “relationship development” as a required skill for recruiters compared to the previous year. AI can identify potential candidates, but only human recruiters can inspire them to take career-defining leaps.
Relationship-building is a super trait, or a bucket holding a set of sub-traits that tend to occur together. Among them: empathy, emotional intelligence, cooperation, authenticity, trust, credibility and influence. Despite claims that AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy, its sycophantic ear is cold comfort compared to a human who listens and relates to your career story!
Relationship skills may matter more than you realize. The candidates we surveyed for JobSync’s Q1 2025 candidate pulse survey made it very clear that good, human-relationship-based experiences can make or break the decision to apply and work for a company. Candidates are getting increasingly frustrated with ghosting and having to pass AI scrutiny to even be viewed by human eyes.
On the employer side, organizations want recruiters who can sell the employee value proposition (EVP) to passive candidates credibly, not just relay a scripted pitch. Recruiters who build those competencies become true talent advisors, trusted for their judgment, not just their outreach.
7. High Judgment and Ethical Reasoning
On the subject of judgment, there are times when AI displays very little of it. We’ve all heard about the dark side of AI amplifying the biases present in its training data. Ask ChatGPT (or Claude, or Gemini) about the greatest leaders of all time, and it will list Stalin. Google Bard once wrote a wonderfully balanced essay on whether slavery was beneficial, listing both pros and cons. That’s the natural consequence when you operate on logic and don’t possess the ethical judgment to rank one principle over another.
Thankfully, humans have a much better sense of right and wrong. In AI-augmented workplaces, recruiters will serve as the crucial ethical checkpoint, sense-checking outputs to make sure we’re not just creating newer, faster ways to discriminate at scale. AI deployment may be integral to the hiring strategy, but someone has to ask: Are we hiring for what’s quick, or for what’s right, fair and inclusive?
Debates around compliance are never far away in this industry and, alongside ethics, recruiters must become sophisticated guardians of candidate privacy. The regulators haven’t caught up with AI yet, so recruiters will have to fill the gap. This responsibility will only grow as AI tools become more sophisticated—and intrusive.
What’s the takeaway as we march into the future with AI?
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that smart machines can easily outsmart recruiters on process, but certain elements of human judgment and intelligence are indispensable in placing the right people in the right jobs in the right way. Success now depends on blending machine intelligence with genuine human wisdom in a beneficial partnership—it’s in your best interests to get honing these competencies in a serious way.
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