Posts by chris.rockingham@talenthawk.com

Why a Quieter Labour Market Still Contains Serious Skills Shortages More applicants do not necessarily make the right experience easier to find   The apparent contradiction A client can receive two hundred applications and still have nobody they should appoint. That is the central contradiction in today’s recruitment market. Overall hiring activity can slow while…

Thirty Years in Recruitment: Why Judgement Still Outperforms Automation When I started in recruitment over 30 years ago, there was no LinkedIn, no job boards as we know them today, and certainly no artificial intelligence quietly screening CVs before a human ever sees them. Finding candidates meant picking up the phone, building networks from scratch,…

AI Will Not End Recruitment—but It Will Expose Recruitment Without Real Value There has been considerable speculation about whether AI will replace recruiters. I do not believe that is the most useful question. A better question is: what will clients continue to pay recruitment companies to do? AI can already search databases, suggest candidates, draft…

When Everyone Has a Perfect CV, How Do We Find the Exceptional Candidate? After more than 30 years in recruitment, I have seen the industry evolve in ways few could have predicted. The arrival of AI is one of the most significant shifts yet—not because it replaces recruitment, but because it is quietly changing the…

Manufacturing has spent more than a century attempting to solve the same problems. Downtime. Quality defects. Equipment failure. Waste. Capacity constraints. Labour shortages. These challenges remain among the most expensive operational issues facing businesses today. Artificial intelligence may finally provide a path towards solving them. The downtime challenge Unplanned downtime remains one of manufacturing’s most…

For decades supply chain management has focused on responding to disruption. Factories close. Ships are delayed. Demand changes. Suppliers fail. The challenge has always been speed of response. Artificial intelligence introduces a different possibility. What if disruption could be anticipated before it occurs? The problem supply chains never solved Every supply chain professional understands the…

Retail has spent decades managing problems that nobody has ever truly solved. Out-of-stocks. Shoplifting. Demand forecasting. Product availability. Labour scheduling. Waste. Every retailer experiences them. Every retailer invests millions attempting to reduce them. Yet they continue to exist. The reason is simple. Most retail systems have historically been reactive. They tell managers what happened. Artificial…

The recruitment industry has spent the last two years discussing artificial intelligence. Every technology provider has an AI strategy. Every conference agenda includes AI sessions. Every software roadmap contains AI features. And every recruitment leader is asking the same question. Will AI fundamentally change recruitment? The answer is yes. But perhaps not in the way…

For twenty years, the technology industry sold a simple message. Software would reduce costs. Cloud software would reduce infrastructure costs. Automation would reduce labour costs. Now AI is being sold as the next stage of that journey. But a difficult question is emerging. What if AI reduces some costs while simultaneously creating entirely new categories…

The discussion around artificial intelligence often sounds impressive. Vendors talk about agents, copilots, assistants, automation, machine learning and autonomous processes. The problem for many business leaders is that these terms can become difficult to translate into practical business value. When organisations invest in SAP, Oracle Fusion or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, what are they…