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What AI actually changes in recruiting.
Concrete takes on AI agents at work, sourcing and automation. No empty promises.
Latest
Agent washing: telling a real agent from a chatbot
Gartner estimates only around 130 vendors, out of thousands, sell a real agent. Five questions to settle the category before you buy.
Product
An AI agent on Teams or on Slack: what changes
Teams holds about 37% of the market against 13% for Slack, yet the agent ecosystem is built on Slack. What each surface forbids, and what it costs.
Engineering
The MCP server you plug in is a supplier
An MCP server holds your credentials and feeds your model text it reads as an instruction. The 2026 measurements, and three questions to ask first.
Engineering
Claude Tag: what an agent living in Slack changes
Claude Tag installs an agent as a member of a Slack channel, with an ambient mode that speaks unprompted. What it changes, and what it does not do.
Product
Cobalt and Balt: two products, and which one you need
Cobalt is the ATS-CRM where your data is written, Balt the agent that works in Teams and Slack. Balt runs without Cobalt, and here is when.
Craft
Entry-level hiring is collapsing, and the pyramid with it
The employment gap for 22-25 year olds in AI-exposed work has reached 19%. This is not a redundancy plan, it is a hire that never happens.
Engineering
Running two agents that both know your company
Yes, on one condition: their contexts must not overlap. And to cooperate, one of them has to stop being a colleague for the duration of the call.
Vision
Specialised or generalist agents: which will win?
The question is badly posed. What protects a vertical agent is not its knowledge, which the model will eventually have, but the responsibility it accepts.
Governance
Must you tell a candidate they are talking to an AI?
Yes if they converse with the agent, no if a human reviews and sends. Article 50 has applied since 2 August 2026 and the line is not where you think.
Craft
Time-to-fill: 18 days for one firm, 81 for another
The top decile places in 18 days, the bottom in 81, in the same market. A 4.5x gap does not measure scarcity, it measures dead time.
Governance
Uniform governance is what makes AI agents fail
Gartner expects 40% of enterprises to demote an autonomous agent by 2027. The cause is one blanket policy applied to agents of unequal reach.
Engineering
Your AI agents have no identity, they have your keys
An agent does not have an identity problem but a delegation one: it acts with its rights instead of yours. The test that reveals it fits in one question.
Engineering
Your agent will subcontract to other agents
Yes, and it is already standardised: over 150 organisations behind A2A in one year. An expert agent is called like a tool, provided it keeps nothing about you.
Engineering
An AI agent’s memory: what it has to forget
A memory that swells unfiltered drops accuracy from 39 to 13 %. What an agent forgets matters as much as what it keeps, and that is settled at design time.
Vision
Can you automate 100% of a company?
No, and the limit is not model capability. A company is a person that answers for its acts: automation stops exactly where somebody has to answer.
Vision
Cited without being visited
Between 82 and 88% of citations in an AI answer produce no visit at all. The click stops being the unit of measure, and recommendation replaces it.
Delegation
How to test an AI agent before you sign
With thirty cases from your own history, whose right answer you already know, replayed three times each. A demo proves none of that.
Craft
One candidate profile in four will be fake by 2028
Gartner expects one profile in four to be fake by 2028, and half of applications to remote IT roles. 41 % of companies have already hired one.
Governance
Two thirds of your team use a banned AI
66 % of office professionals used an AI they believed was banned, and over a third entered client data into it. Banning harder only moves the usage.
Engineering
Skills or subagents: what actually works
A single agent with well-written skills matches multi-agent architectures. But an auto-generated skill adds nothing, and a bad one actively degrades performance.
Craft
The AI doom loop in recruiting
Candidates apply with AI, recruiters screen with AI, and response rates collapse on both sides. Getting out of the loop means changing channel, not adding tools.
Product
The AI match score is the wrong instrument
A score of 87 % cannot be argued with, only applied. 75 % of companies let an AI reject without review, and 26 % of candidates call that fair.
Vision
Intelligence is becoming free. Where does the value go?
The cost of the same level of answer fell 280-fold in eighteen months. When intelligence costs nothing, what becomes scarce is context and the right to act.
Vision
The end of interfaces, not the end of software
At Supabase, 60% of new databases are launched by an agent, and probably 90%. What is dying is not the software: it is the access layer.
Engineering
The four eras of AI, and the one now starting
Symbolic, machine learning, deep learning, generative then agentic. What comes next is being decided on memory and world models.
Product
Twelve agents that do not talk to each other
A company runs twelve agents on average and half of them work alone. The right criterion is not how many you have, it is how many contexts you duplicate.
Vision
What is left to humans when agents do the work
It is not the job that disappears, it is the pyramid. The volume work that trained juniors is going, and nobody has planned a replacement.
Engineering
Why an AI agent costs 30 times a chatbot
Because an agent rereads its whole context at every step. Resent context is 62 % of the bill, and past fifty steps the multiplier goes beyond thirty.
Delegation
The work that looks finished and is not
40 % of workers get it from a colleague, and each instance costs almost two hours to whoever picks it up. The cost does not vanish, it changes person.
Governance
AI Act deferred to 2027: what still applies
The high-risk rules move to 2 December 2027. But telling a candidate they are talking to an AI has been required since 2 August 2026, and GDPR never moved at all.
Product
AI agent or automation: which one for which task
An automation follows rules, an agent makes decisions. The rule for choosing: if you can write the script, automate. If you can only describe the outcome, delegate.
Delegation
Training your teams on AI is now an obligation
Article 4 of the AI Act has required a sufficient level of AI literacy since February 2025. It is an obligation of result, with no format imposed.
Craft
Automating LinkedIn in 2026: what it really costs
40% of accounts using non-compliant tools were restricted in Q1 2026. And what you are risking is not a company account.
Craft
Bench time is not a sourcing problem
An 11.4% average bench rate, 41 days, €5,480 a month per consultant. The cost is already committed once you learn about the roll-off: the lever is the date.
Craft
Candidate ghosting is a capacity problem
53% of candidates were ghosted in 2026, up from 38% in 2024. It is not rudeness: it is a saturated queue, and AI is the cause before it is the cure.
Governance
Can a CV manipulate an AI agent?
Yes. Text hidden in a CV gives an order to the agent reading it. It is the least covered flaw in enterprise agents, and no filter fixes it.
Delegation
Delegating to an AI agent: where to start
Start with work you can check in ten seconds: follow-ups, interview notes, record updates. Here is the order that works, week by week.
Governance
Does a recruitment AI agent require a DPIA?
Almost always yes. France’s CNIL names algorithmic candidate screening explicitly, and a missing DPIA is a priority enforcement theme for 2026.
Craft
Before evaluating an AI agent, look at your data
A candidate database loses about 30% of its accuracy a year. An agent reasons soundly over that wrong data, confidently, which costs more than no agent.
Product
Should you require your AI agent to speak MCP?
MCP is genuinely good news, but it is not a buying criterion. It is an exit criterion: what matters is the day you change tools.
Product
What an AI agent costs, and why not per seat
Between €200 and €3,000 a month recurring. But the real question is the billing unit: per-seat pricing is structurally broken for an agent.
Product
What an AI agent should not be able to do
A good agent refuses. Deciding for you, acting outside its scope, silently retrying: five things it should be incapable of, by design.
Governance
Who approves what when an AI writes to your candidates
No, approving everything is the same as delegating nothing. The rule that holds: approval whenever a message leaves the company or closes a door.
Craft
Why 40% of AI agent projects will be abandoned
Gartner expects over 40% to be abandoned before the end of 2027, for three reasons: no measurable ROI, no governance, no integration. All three are preventable.
Governance
Must you consult the works council before deploying AI?
In France, yes. A court suspended two HR tools in January 2026, an appeal court two more in May, with daily penalties, and no need to prove urgency.
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