Elle Green, a talent acquisition (TA) expert with nearly two decades of experience helping organisations attract, engage and retain top talent, understands how artificial intelligence is reshaping the role of the recruiter and the skills TA professionals need to thrive in an AI-driven hiring landscape.
In this piece, Elle draws on recent research to outline key trends – from AI-first recruiting to evolving skillsets – and offers practical guidance on how recruiters can leverage AI as a co-pilot, not a competitor, to enhance efficiency, fairness, and impact.
Here’s what TA professionals need to know to stay ahead.
AI is transforming talent acquisition, and fast. This is a once-in-a-generation chance to redesign hiring and the role of the recruiter.
Gartner’s latest HR research, previewed ahead of its 2026 HR Symposium in Sydney, identifies four defining trends for talent acquisition: AI-first recruiting, shifting recruiter skillsets, the redesign of early career programs, and AI reshaping candidate assessment. With the thread of cost pressures running throughout, these forces are already reshaping how organisations find, evaluate and hire talent.
For the many women leading or working in talent acquisition today, or considering a move into the field, the influx of AI into the role raises a critical question:
Just how AI-savvy does a TA professional need to be to stand out and succeed through the next round of workforce changes?
The answer isn’t “become a data scientist”, but it’s also more than “be open to using new tools”. It’s about learning how to use AI well as a co-pilot, not a competitor.
We’ve been talking about transforming talent acquisition for decades, but what’s different now is the pace. Change is accelerating, and TA teams are feeling it.
We urge TA professionals to pause, focus and identify where you, as individuals, can leverage AI to enhance your skills and amplify your contribution to the business.
Here’s what that means in practice.
1. Master the Human Code
Gartner’s analysis highlights the rise of complex, high-value hiring that still depends on human oversight and nuance.
For TA professionals, the next skill frontier is knowing when and how to apply human judgment. That includes spotting the gaps where algorithms still fall short, such as evaluating qualities like motivation, adaptability or cultural alignment.
In practice, this means guiding hiring teams through the judgement calls AI can’t make. AI can build a shortlist efficiently, but recruiters shape it into something meaningful: candidates who reflect the company’s values, goals and long-term potential.
The most effective recruiters will combine analytical insight with human intuition to assess where AI decisions need context, balance, and empathy. They’ll demonstrate how human strengths fill the spaces AI can’t reach.
2. Train the Machines, Don’t Compete With Them
Identifying where AI falls short is only half the equation. The next step is learning to teach AI how to perform better.
Gartner predicts that high-volume recruiting will go AI-first, with agentic AI automating repetitive, low-complexity tasks.
The guidance for these agents will come from TA professionals, HR and hiring managers.
TA pros don’t need to become prompt engineers, but they will need to teach AI systems culture and fairness. Training will be about feeding accurate, contextual information into the system, rather than learning programming.
This will happen during change management and tool implementation, when recruiters will audit for bias, guide customisations and identify parameters that need to be built into the algorithms. They will need AI tools that are intuitive, responsive, and designed for ease of use. In this way, TA pros will ensure outcomes and decisions reflect the values of the organisation.
This marks a shift from transactional recruiting to agent-assisted hiring. It’s less about clicking through forms and more about coaching and monitoring intelligent systems to help the business make efficient, quality, auditable, ethical choices.
3. Understand the Business of Hiring
Cost efficiency is one of the main reasons businesses are turning to automation, which means AI is not going anywhere. HR Leaders who understand this dynamic can help ensure technology investments genuinely support human capability.
As Gartner highlights, cost pressures are reshaping every HR decision. That means financial literacy will become a talent superpower.
Recruiters and TA leaders who can model ROI, connect hiring decisions to margin, understand how people drive profit, and forecast workforce capacity will be indispensable business partners.
AI will handle much of the data crunching, but the ability to interpret the numbers behind headcount and hiring efficiency gives recruiters a seat at the table when strategic spending decisions are made.
Take it a step further, and partner with data teams to ensure the right questions are being asked of the data.
4. Turn Time Savings Into Impact
Automation and tools are already freeing up hours of recruiter time once spent on administrative work, and advancements in agentic AI will accelerate that. But the value of saved time depends on what you do with it.
It’s an AI-adjacent skill, but successful TA pros will need to be able to develop structured time reallocation plans that show how saved hours are invested in higher-impact work such as hiring manager collaboration, forecasting, and candidate pipeline development.
There will also be the time spent training the AI, analysing data trends, improving hiring quality and fine-tuning the candidate experience.
The tasks here are to convert time saved into tangible results and to communicate that value. Productivity in recruiting will be measured by how well time is used to improve quality and strengthen business outcomes.
5. Stay Curious, Stay Ethical
Transparency is becoming a non-negotiable, and should be seen as an opportunity, not a burden. Gartner reinforces this shift, advising recruiting leaders to clearly communicate how AI is used in the hiring process.
People understand that with automation and digitisation come data and audit trails. As AI takes on more of the hiring process, candidates will want to understand how they were matched, assessed and progressed.
For those employers that improve the candidate experience with transparency, recruiters will be the translators, ensuring explainability, fairness and trust.
AI enables explainable scoring, audit trails, and bias detection that make decision-making clearer for everyone involved. This is transformative. When candidates understand why they move forward, and hiring teams can see what’s working, transparency becomes a lever for stronger outcomes and more equitable hiring.
Forward-thinking TA professionals will champion this level of transparency.
The Bottom Line
The recruiters who lead the next wave of change won’t be the ones with the fanciest prompts. They’ll be the ones who know when to step in, when to step back, and how to use technology to improve quality, fairness and outcomes.
At SmartRecruiters, we believe AI isn’t the future of hiring, it’s how hiring becomes faster, fairer, and more human. Those who pair digital fluency with human judgment, business acumen and ethical clarity will shape the future of AI-assisted hiring and elevate the role of TA in the process.
About the Author
Elle Green has spent nearly two decades shaping how organisations attract, engage and retain talent. With experience spanning LinkedIn, Reejig, FlexCareers, The Martec and now SmartRecruiters, she brings deep expertise in employer branding, talent communications, and retention strategy. Passionate about people and technology, she helps businesses build authentic connections with talent in an AI-driven world.