Insights & perspectives on modern recruitment

The Question Clients Are Already Asking

There is a conversation happening in procurement offices and HR leadership teams right now, and it goes something like this: if AI can find, screen, and shortlist candidates in a fraction of the time it used to take, why are we still paying the same percentage-of-salary fee we paid five years ago?

As artificial intelligence cuts candidate screening time by up to 50 percent, recruitment firms are facing pressure to justify traditional percentage-based fees.

This is not a future threat.

A 2026 Bullhorn survey of nearly 300 UK and Ireland recruitment professionals found that 37 percent reported AI cut candidate screening time by 26 to 50 percent.

Those efficiency gains are real, they are measurable, and clients are becoming aware of them.

David Berwick, owner of Adria Solutions, put it plainly: "If a recruitment agency is simply finding CVs and forwarding them to employers, AI is making that service increasingly difficult to justify."

That is a recruiter saying it, not a tech vendor.

What the Fee Pressure Actually Reveals

The discomfort around fees is not really about fees. It is about value clarity. For decades, recruitment agencies could point to the labour-intensive process of sourcing, screening, and presenting candidates as the core justification for their margin.

Generative AI and automated headhunting tools have democratised the ability to find and contact candidates, and if an agency's primary value proposition is simply "finding people," margins are likely already shrinking.

If an agency's value proposition is processing — matching CVs to specs and forwarding them — then AI is compressing that work. But if the value proposition is judgment, market knowledge, and the relationships that get a reluctant candidate to take a call, then AI is removing precisely the work that never justified the fee anyway.

That is actually good news, framed correctly. The agencies facing existential pressure are those whose service is indistinguishable from what a well-configured AI tool can do on its own. The agencies gaining ground are those whose value was always about something harder to replicate.

Agencies that use AI in their workflows were 3.5 to 4.5 times more likely to grow revenue in 2025 than agencies that did not, according to the Bullhorn GRID 2026 Industry Trends Report.

The gap between AI-enabled agencies and those still operating manually is widening, and it is showing up in revenue.

Reframing What Recruiters Actually Sell

Matt Collingwood, managing director of VIQU Group, sees automation as an opportunity to give recruiters more time to build relationships, rather than simply making the same service cheaper.

That reframe matters enormously. AI handling screening and scheduling is not a threat to the recruiter who was already spending most of their time on candidate relationships, market intelligence, and nuanced client advisory work. It is a gift.

The practical implication is that agencies need to get deliberate about how they communicate their value, and that communication needs to shift from process to outcome. Clients who understand that they are paying for access to a talent network, sector-specific insight, and the judgment that comes from thousands of placement conversations will not quibble over fees the same way clients who think they are paying for a database search will.

In a market where talent is sceptical of automated recruitment, the human touch has become a significant competitive advantage, and candidates in 2026 value transparency and feedback above all else.

The recruiter who stays close to candidates through the entire process, provides honest feedback, and treats people as more than a shortlist entry is delivering something that no AI platform automates well.

Three Shifts Worth Making Now

Lead with outcomes, not activity. Replace process-focused proposals with evidence of placement quality, retention rates, and time-to-productivity data. This is what clients who push back on fees actually want to see.

Make your process visible. When AI handles the routine parts of sourcing, make the human judgment layers explicit. Show clients what assessment, candidate coaching, and market intelligence look like in practice.

Rethink what your candidate presentation says about you. The first tangible thing a client sees from your agency is usually how you present a candidate. A polished, interactive candidate profile signals sophistication and investment; a forwarded PDF signals exactly the commodity service clients are starting to price-compare. Tools like Floats exist precisely because that first impression carries disproportionate weight in a market where agencies are competing on perceived value.

The Opportunity Ahead

One industry voice predicts that only about one-third of current recruitment agencies will survive the next five years.

That is a stark number. But it also means that the agencies who do the work of repositioning now will be operating in a less crowded market, with clients who better understand what good recruitment actually looks like.

The fee model reckoning is not the end of the recruitment agency. It is the end of the recruitment agency as a process business. What comes next is a profession built around judgment, relationships, and insight, with AI handling everything that was always just friction. That is a version of this industry worth building toward.