Do You Still Need to Hire Staff in the Age of AI? Recruitment Strategies for Recruitment Agencies in 2026

James Dooley: Do you need to hire staff in the age of AI? Today I'm joined with Mads Singers, who owns a very large recruitment agency, does a lot of business coaching. So I want to talk about recruitment and I want to talk about the roller coaster ride that you've told me about where everyone seemed to be looking to get rid of staff and now it seems to be a lot of people now are like, hold on a minute, we could probably supercharge existing. We could even look for new staff, replace maybe some staff. So, let's talk about recruitment in the AI era. What are you finding? Can you talk through the last 18 months of what you've seen for recruitment with artificial intelligence?

Mads Singers: Yeah, I think the biggest thing last year, particularly early last year, we saw a lot of companies more or less stop hiring. I would say the last 12 months, our business has more than doubled. Uh, and it's been very obvious, people coming in looking for both AI-ready people, but also people just looking for regular staff. And the core reason for most of our clients is that AI has enabled them to scale. Like, AI has really enabled them to, you know, the service delivery of whatever they're delivering, uh, has been made so much more effective, so much smoother. And therefore they can now hire more salespeople, they can hire more marketing staff, they can hire more engineers or whatever it is they're doing, right? And we're really seeing a big uptake in that. So, we're experiencing companies really benefiting from AI and they're really utilising that momentum to really grow.

James Dooley: So, I want to roll it back a little bit away from business owners to start with. You've got a recruitment agency and let's say I'm a candidate that comes in and says, "Mads, I'm looking for a job." Can you find me the right employer to come and get me a job? Yeah. And I come along and I've got great education, but I've not used... I don't even know what AI is. You mention Claude Code. I'm like, "I don't even know what it is. I don't know what ChatGPT is. I've lived under a rock and I don't know what artificial intelligence is." Are you making them go away before they come back again to say, "Look, if you want a job and you want a successful career, you need to be learning AI"? Are you actually trying to level up even candidates before they go for...

Mads Singers: For many of them. So we have, obviously, we have a candidate database of hundreds of thousands of candidates that have applied to jobs over time. And we are sending out lots of both recommendations for training and courses to those people because we realise in many, many roles it is critical. Now there's obviously certain roles, like we have on-the-road salesmen, for example, that is driving around from one client to the next. They might need it a little bit less. But, um, for many, many roles, it's definitely something we're looking for. And it's one of the questions we ask in interviews now. Like, pretty much whatever role people are applying for is, you know, "What's your experience with AI?" Because, again, everything else being equal, if I have two or three candidates that are similar and one has a lot more experience with AI, the AI person is significantly more likely to succeed in the new role.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And then off-air this morning, we spoke about, um, bottlenecks in businesses. And operations used to be a huge bottleneck for so many businesses. They could be brilliant on the marketing front. They could do Meta Ads or PPC or SEO, whatever marketing they was doing. The sales team was good, but fulfilment of operations seemed to be... Sales and marketing could always push it forward. Operations couldn't deal with it. Now it's kind of flipped on its head where operations can almost do infinite amount of work. You can do 100x more work. Now the bottlenecks start to be, start to become potentially sales and marketing, or could even be finance. What are you finding when, on this podcast, where we're talking about, do I need to hire new staff? Are you finding that the new staff that people are looking to employ is different than what it was, let's say, three years ago?

Mads Singers: It is for some businesses. Uh, some of them, it's still very much the same. But for some businesses, it has changed a lot. I would say operations as a bottleneck depends also on the business. Some businesses have, as you said, can literally deliver infinite scale now. Um, but there's definitely also a lot of businesses doing physical products and so on and physical services that still have struggles in operations, right? But, um, yeah, I think when looking at it, most of the companies, probably I would say about 60% of the companies hiring now are hiring different types of people. And they're generally looking for AI skill set, right? Because a lot of business owners realise if they hire someone who has the AI skill set, they can deliver significantly more.

James Dooley: Yeah. So, like, I'll give you two roles that I have implemented in one or two businesses that I want to implement in a few more that was never here. All right? And one of them is AI ideation and the other one is AI fulfilment. Yeah. And with regards to these roles, and we've spoken about this a little bit off-air with regards to recruiting and stuff like that and levelling up existing staff and stuff, but sometimes existing staff might miss the ideas. Or the ideation person could bring certain information to existing team members and it triggers something in their subconscious and go, "I don't like that idea, but why can't we do this?" And it brings back the ideas. And we, two of my best hires that I used to do years ago was R&D testing and someone that's literally just looked at our SOPs and made them more concise. Yeah. And those two roles was brilliant for me. And I do feel those roles now are going to be similar to the, someone's going to come up and just keep speaking to all members of staff with ideation, and then someone's going to be showing them how certain things can be set up. Yeah. Which then trains them to go from zero to one on the levelling-up part. Yeah. What, how could someone look to hire certain roles like that? How could you try to find, because we've had to do it internally with existing staff. How could we try to, we're looking to hire new members of staff. Is that somewhere where they could come to somebody like yourself to say, "We have someone that is able to elevate your whole team now with what can be done and this is how you do it"?

Mads Singers: Yeah. I would say I would look at people who have built and who are good at building out these kind of things, right? So, um, there's obviously a lot of demand for these people. So they're not necessarily cheap to find, right? Uh, but there are some really good people out there. And to your point with the ideation, the biggest thing for us that the person needs to say is, "Yes, you can automate that. Yes, you can build that." Most people, particularly less tech-savvy, have no idea what can be automated. And reality is today, anything that's done on a computer can really be automated to a certain level. Now, there might be some decision point. So, there might be some things that are still needing a little bit of, you know, human input. But again, if you can automate 90% of something, that's still a huge saving over time, right?

James Dooley: Yeah. And if someone's looking, they're watching these different episodes with regards to how to build a team in the AI era, how to level up existing staff, and they're going, "I really need to embrace artificial intelligence." If someone's looking to now go, "Okay, I need one or two new players within the team," and they might even need to be AI players that's going to come in to elevate everybody else. How can someone reach out to someone like yourself? One, maybe for a little bit of AI business mentorship, but also, two, for, "Okay, you've got a recruitment agency. You understand AI. Can you go and source me some candidates for these roles?"

Mads Singers: Yeah. So, for sourcing of specific roles, people can always go to AristoSourcing.com. And if they want to get a mentor, if they want to do coaching and consulting, MadsSingers.com is how they find me.

James Dooley: I strongly recommend heading over to Mads Singers. Mads Singers has got an amazing business kind of mentorship programme and is able to then go through what can and can't be done. I'd also make certain that go and check out a couple of links in the description. There's a couple of episodes about levelling up existing staff and how you should be building a team in the AI era. Mads, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.