AI tools promise to revolutionize recruiting, but often add more noise than value. Learn where AI helps - and where it breaks candidate trust.
AI is everywhere in recruiting right now. Every tool promises “smarter sourcing,” “instant matching,” or “automated outreach.” But let’s be honest: most of it feels more like hype than help.
The promise that never quite delivers
I’ve seen the demos. AI that “reads” your job description and magically produces a perfect shortlist. Bots that write outreach messages so you don’t have to. Dashboards that glow with analytics about candidate fit.
It all sounds incredible. But then you actually use it, and you realize the AI is pulling from the same old data you’ve already seen. The “perfect matches” are the same five LinkedIn profiles you’ve been staring at for weeks. The “personalized outreach” still sounds like a template.
Instead of magic, you get more noise.
Developers can feel it too
The funny thing is that developers are on the other side of this experiment. They can tell when the message in their inbox was written by a bot. It’s grammatically flawless, but soulless. It feels mass-produced because it is.
And if you think developers already hated spam before, wait until they’re drowning in AI-polished spam. A bad outreach message is still bad, even if it uses ChatGPT to add more synonyms.
Worse, developers are also seeing AI on their side of the job hunt. Résumés generated at scale. Cover letters polished into oblivion. It means recruiters now have to sift through piles of auto-generated applications, many of them indistinguishable from each other. Nobody wins.
Where AI might actually help
That doesn’t mean AI is useless. The pieces that feel promising are the ones that remove grunt work without faking connection. Drafting a first-pass outreach that you can then personalize. Automating reminders so candidates don’t slip through the cracks. Cleaning up data so you’re not copying and pasting all day.
In other words: AI should support the human part of recruiting, not try to replace it.
The bigger truth
Recruiting has always been about trust. Candidates don’t care how slick your tools are if the experience feels cold or dishonest. Developers especially have zero patience for being treated like numbers in an algorithm.
The danger with AI is thinking it can solve the trust problem. It can’t. If anything, it makes the trust gap wider if you lean on it to do your job for you.
At daily.dev, I see both sides: developers skeptical of recruiter spam, and recruiters desperate for shortcuts that actually work. The common thread is simple: technology can help, but only if it amplifies authenticity instead of replacing it.
AI isn’t going to make candidates trust you. Only you can do that.
