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your moat is taste, not tools
Robert Infantino
Every week, a new AI recruiting tool hits my inbox. They all make the same promise of faster candidate identification and easier wins. And to be fair, in capable hands, they can be very useful. But nearly all of them are aimed at the wrong problem. The real bottleneck in recruiting has never been “finding candidates that look good on paper.”
The dirty secret is that these tools often strip out the very mechanisms that make a recruiter valuable. Repetition, pattern-spotting, and judgment are forged through the grind of sourcing and evaluating candidates. Automation promises efficiency, but efficiency without learning leaves you hollow. You are outsourcing vital learning to tools.
Recruiting is a flywheel, not a checklist. Sourcing is not just about filling the top of the funnel, it is where you sharpen your understanding of who is scaling, where attrition is happening, where rare skills are clustered. Those signals make outreach sharper, screening more meaningful, and client conversations more substantive. Each cycle compounds. What starts as data becomes fluency, fluency becomes judgment, and judgment matures into taste. Taste cannot be automated. It is the only durable moat a recruiter has.
The paradox is that what feels efficient in the short term makes you weaker in the long run. And the long run is coming fast. The top 10–20% of talent in any domain will soon be more productive by an order of magnitude. Companies will do more with fewer people. Easy-to-fill roles will shrink, brute-force recruiting will collapse, and the jobs and fees attached to them will follow.
So the real question isn’t whether AI tools can help. Of course they can. The question is whether they are helping you climb the value curve, or quietly racing you to the bottom.
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