Recruitment marketing is undergoing a fundamental shift as AI transforms the way work is done and who does it. Marketing automation is evolving at a rapid pace and will drive significant, efficient gains, but what is the impact of originality, creativity, and strategic thinking? So how are recruitment marketers evolving, and what should employers now expect from their recruitment marketing teams and agencies?
My guest this week is James Whitelock, Managing Director at ThinkinCircles Recruitment Marketing. In our conversation, James reveals what employers should demand from modern recruitment marketers, which skills remain irreplaceable, and how to build teams that leverage AI without losing human creativity.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How AI is democratising recruitment marketing
• The ever-growing scale and scope of automation
• Strategy and creativity
• How can employers stand out from the AI-generated “slop”
• Brand building, story telling and tech orchestration
• What skills are now needed in recruitment marketing
• Building out capability
• Can AI help recruitment marketing to be properly strategic?
• What does the future look like?
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00:00
Matt Alder
AI is the most disruptive force we’ve ever seen in recruitment marketing. So what’s its impact? Are we going to see less input from humans and a decline in creativity? Or could this be the point where recruitment marketing steps up to be genuinely strategic? Keep listening to find out.
00:22
Matt Alder
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01:26
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 735 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in foresight, influence, talent and technology. If you’re interested in finding out how your TA function measures up in these four critical areas, I’ve created the Fit for the Future assessment. It’ll give you personalized insights to help you build strategic clarity and drive greater impact immediately. Just head over to Matalder.me/podcast to complete the assessment. It only takes a few minutes. This episode is about technology and influence. Recruitment marketing is undergoing a fundamental shift as AI transforms the way work is done and who does it. Marketing automation is evolving at a rapid pace and will drive significant efficiency gains. But what is the impact on originality, creativity and strategic thinking?
02:37
Matt Alder
So how are recruitment marketeers evolving and what should employers now expect from their recruitment marketing teams and agencies? My guest this week is James Whitelock, Managing Director at ThinkinCircles Recruitment Marketing. In our conversation, James reveals what employers should now demand from modern recruitment marketers. Which skills remain irreplaceable, and how to build teams that leverage AI without losing human creativity. Hi James and welcome to the podcast.
03:11
James Whitelock
So I’m the managing director of ThinkinCircles Recruitment Marketing. It’s a pleasure to be here.
03:13
Matt Alder
Well, it is an absolute pleasure to finally have you on the show. It’s taken ages for me to actually ask you, which is very rude because I’ve been on your show about four or five times, but brilliant to have you here. Can you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do.
03:27
James Whitelock
So I’m the managing director of Think in Circles Recruitment Marketing. We’re an agency that works specifically in the recruitment and HR space, working with recruitment agencies or staffing agencies, rec tech suppliers and suppliers into the recruitment and HR space and a little bit of kind of employer branding with direct employers and all of that kind of cool stuff that goes around that from strategic all the way through to delivery. I’ve also got a podcast as well. Tell us about your podcast, the Marketing Rules Podcast. It, you know, as you mentioned, you’ve been on a kind of a few times we just again talk to interesting people about what’s going on in the industry, about you know, what’s kind of the new tech.
04:06
James Whitelock
The name is a bit of a misnomer now that it’s not really less about marketing and more around kind of recruitment and talent attraction.
04:13
Matt Alder
Fantastic. So I mean it’s a really interesting time for marketing at the moment. It’s an interesting time for recruitment at the moment. So it’s a fascinating time for recruitment marketing. What are the sort of the biggest shifts that you’re seeing in you know, marketing in the recruitment space at the moment? You know, both for agencies, for in house teams, what’s going on?
04:30
James Whitelock
You know, so I’m going to have to bring up that dreaded word of AI, right, that has kind of, I was going to say decimated, but it hasn’t really. It’s democratized all of the kind of marketing really from a perspective that you know, it is easier to do some of that kind of junior level stuff that a recruitment marketing might well do. You know, that more kind of rules based process type stuff can be pretty much all automated now. You know, from design work to scheduling to posting to content creation to a certain extent. So that’s the real kind of big change. And I assume that AI is probably going to kind of continue to kind of creep up that marketing seniority and skills of level, but it’s unsure where and exactly how far that can kind of go.
05:22
James Whitelock
The problem I think with a lot of AI in marketing at the minute is it’s is it lacks that originality and creativity and it’s kind of feeding off itself to a certain extent what’s kind of gone before. So you’re kind of working within this kind of, you know, this snake that’s eating itself to a certain extent and it doesn’t really kind of, you know, the role of a marketeer generally is that kind of creative process and that strategic thinking and that ideation and those Kinds of things. And AI can do some of that. But we’ve been here before, you know, we’ve had automation that’s kind of come along previously and things like that.
05:57
James Whitelock
And then even if you go back to kind of when email marketing came in, you know, again, it’s one of those things that it’s just another process that’s going to be kind of part of the mix, I think, but it’s definitely going to have an impact on what a recruit marketeer actually does in the future as opposed to kind of what they’re doing now.
06:18
Matt Alder
Yeah, and I kind of really want to dig into that because I think that’s a, it’s a really interesting area. But before we do though, let’s just talk a little bit about the creative part of this. So it’s about companies standing out, connecting with their target audience. There will be people listening who wouldn’t even consider using AI as part of that process. There’ll be people listening who are using AI to do all of that process for them. Where, where are we at the moment in terms of what should be doing with AI when it comes to creative? How do we stop that snake from eating itself? How, you know, how do people stand out while still kind of reaping the benefits of the speed and efficiency that it can bring in that area?
06:54
James Whitelock
Well, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head, right? Is that speed and efficiency piece that. And I always describe using AI and AI tools as, you know, like an assistant or a junior. You know, they’re not, they shouldn’t be really doing the more kind of human touch type stuff or maybe the kind of story driven stuff or the community building stuff. That’s really now where I think modern recruitment marketeers should be kind of aiming themselves into that. So the brand building through storytelling, community building, that is kind of the stuff that I think the modern kind of marketeer should be doing. I always kind of describe it as kind of like T shaped. You know, when I talk to young kind of marketers coming to business, like find a really quite niche area that you’re really good at.
07:40
James Whitelock
Right.
07:41
James Whitelock
That could still be copywriting because there’s always going to be a need for those kinds of things, but then have a broad understanding across brand, across tech, and that’s your kind of T shape. So the only exception that probably moving forward is design and kind of graphic design that I think is really in danger of being kind of, you know, worked out of kind of the skills based skills kind of skills, process. But there’s probably still something in there that they, that a decent designer can do that and I probably never will be able to do. So. Yeah, you know, I think, you know, if you’re a kind of a marketer these days, brand storytelling, I just can’t do that kind of stuff. Can’t, can’t get grip of that kind of stuff. Community building. Again, not really. Kind of.
08:31
James Whitelock
And I suppose one of the questions someone might say, well isn’t that a reaction because AI is doing all the other stuff, you’re finding something other stuff to do. Well now we’ve been bashing about this kind of stuff and trying to kind of do this kind of thing anyway, you know, and then you’ve got, you know, the great thing that AI does do is that kind of data analytics and analysis and becoming kind of lumping all that together in one place and being able to kind of crunch through those numbers. That’s kind of the beauty of AI.
09:02
James Whitelock
And also things like, you know, again I talk to my team about becoming more kind of orchestrators in all of this, you know, and the administrators and the facilitators for kind of the stack management and that kind of thing which maybe doesn’t sound very sexy when it comes to kind of marketeer. Well, probably why you didn’t get into it. But I think that’s kind of one of the realities. I think that’s one of the new things that might come into marketing, might be a kind of a marketing stack manager kind of things like how does all this stuff actually just tie in together and how are you going to kind of manage it? Because there’s always going to be need for human processes within those kinds of, within those tech.
09:38
James Whitelock
Right?
09:38
Matt Alder
Yeah, I think it’s also, you know, while there are lots of different bits of tech that may or may not work together very well and all those sort of things, I think it’s a big issue. I mean, let’s dive into that a little bit. I mean you sort of mentioning the sort of the skills of the kind of modern marketer and all that, all that kind of stuff. And I know that there were people listening who use marketing agencies to help them and there are also people listening who have in house resource. They may want to increase their in house resource or they may want to really inform themselves about how they can get the best marketing agency for what they do. What are the skills within this? What do we now need to think about when we think about recruitment, marketing.
10:16
James Whitelock
I think the big thing is that kind of strategy and the creativity kind of aspect. The strategy piece is something that isn’t going anywhere, right? You’re not going to be able to replace even you. You can dump into chat GPT, build me a marketing strategy, right? But as I said, it’s. That’s that snake feeding off itself. It’s not necessarily completely relevant to that business and it’s not bespoke to that business or whatever project you’re working on. The outcomes you need to get, whether you’re, if you’re a recruitment agency, you know, how are you going to get yourself in front of those audiences?
10:45
James Whitelock
You know, you dump that into GPT, you’re just going to get quite kind of generic answers at the moment and it will just pick out from what your website that you already says now and kind of feed that back to you. So, you know, from the work that we do. And that strategy piece is definitely something that hasn’t been replaced yet. So marketing strategy, marketing planning, and that’s the ability to kind of understand the requirements of the project and the client. Again, these things just aren’t there with AI at the moment.
11:20
James Whitelock
Right.
11:21
James Whitelock
So that’s kind of that one piece that’s quite kind of high level. If you kind of start to break it down when you kind of go further down, what maybe a marketing manager does or maybe even go down to a marketing exec and the marketing exec piece is going to be, is the bit that’s going to be devoured potentially by a lot of AI. But still, I think that’s where this kind of tool orchestration. So when I talk to kind of young designers and marketeers, my kind of, you know, I always encourage them to just know. I get to know, I get to know what it can do and what it can’t do. Because you’re going to fit into that, right? That’s how you’re going to figure out what you can and can’t do within that space.
11:59
James Whitelock
Whether that is, you know, much more kind of sophisticated design, whether that’s the kind of copywriting piece, whether that’s the stack management piece, whether that is understanding how, you know, whether that’s like were talking about for kind of influencer marketing and things like that. This simply just can’t, you know, it’s, I think now more than ever, if you are coming into marketing, you really need to be able to kind of keep your finger on the pulse of what is actually happening out there, right? You know, the Days of you took a marketing degree and that marketing degree kind of gave you a list of things that you should be able to do, you know. Now these days you’ve now got to kind of completely stay on top of what’s coming up, what’s new, what’s moving, what’s shaking.
12:38
James Whitelock
Otherwise you do get quite kind of, you get left behind quite quickly and you can seem pretty prosaic. And so if you are running a business and you’re looking to kind of support your marketing businesses as smart marketing people or, you know, or if you’re looking to work with an agency, it’s right, what’s their credibility around kind of the strategic planning and strategic marketing? And you know, ask them, where does AI fit into your process and where doesn’t it fit in the process? What are the things you will do with it and what is it you won’t do? As an example, when we’re working with clients, we’re out front, we say, yeah, we do use AI as part of the kind of, as the efficiency tools, but we’re always the human touch.
13:19
James Whitelock
And I think that while there’s that slight still mistrust sometimes in AI and also I say this will probably date the podcast, but with GPT5 being a bit underwhelming, it is kind of like those kind of things are the things where a marketer can say, look, you know, there’s still a place for me in this, in this area again, you know, I still think there’s. Video production is a great place to still to kind of work audio production. Again, these are places that I, you know, you can tell an AI video, you know, from a mile away, you know, and those kind of things, the same with an AI podcast. So they’re not there yet. And you know, that can be the kind of the part of the T that you have become experts in.
14:02
Matt Alder
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I kind of always try and I always like to think of it in terms of the sort of these kind of three A’s. So the first one is automation and obviously you sort of really outlined there some of the things that can be automated, but it’s also a moving, that’s a moving picture because more and more is going to fall into that and then there’s what you can augment. So obviously with the data and all that kind of stuff that’s going to really help people do their jobs better and be more informed. And then there’s the bits that you kind of amplify as humans. And I think you’re right. That sort of, that strategy piece and the, really the creativity and the human aspect of it are just kind of vital.
14:40
Matt Alder
And I think with recruitment marketing we are uniquely positioned to be human because of what it’s doing. It’s persuading people to, you know, to. To move job at the simplest possible level, which is kind of a huge human decision with lots of moving. With lots of moving parts.
14:58
James Whitelock
It’s like you’re the translator between the technology and the people.
15:01
James Whitelock
Right.
15:01
James Whitelock
Or your audience. That’s kind of again, what. I’ve got all these kind of buzz terms, but those are the kind of things that. And it makes kind of sense, right? You’re that kind of go between to a certain extent, you know, both sides of it. Whereas, you know, the audiences you’re trying to talk to mainly know one. One aspect of what you’re trying to do. So yeah, so I see that marketeer is that kind of a go between.
15:22
Matt Alder
From my experience of working in recruitment marketing for a long time, one of the biggest frustrations was it couldn’t be as creative as other forms of marketing just because of the time pressure. So we have a week to do this, whereas a consumer agency would have six months to do this. And it’s amazing that some of the incredible creative work that is produced in those timescales. But this to me seems like a massive opportunity for recruitment marketing to kind of step up and, you know, use the efficiencies and that augmentation to. To be more creative and be more strategic.
15:55
James Whitelock
Yeah, I agree. It’s, you know, I’ve argued that recruitment marketing should have that seat at the table for that kind of. To use that horrible kind of phrase, you know, for a long time. And there’s definitely businesses out there, whether they’re staffing agencies and whether they’re kind of direct employers and talent teams, where recruitment marketing is starting to kind of have much more kind of strategic position. And being given that time to have that strategic position and understood that within that business it’s a strategic position as opposed to either being stuck buried somewhere within the talent team or buried somewhere within the marketing team, you know, or floating uncomfortably between the two somehow. Somehow. But it’s definitely kind of, definitely coming to the forefront now. And the ability to kind of do that has. You been augmented by the tech that’s available now.
16:44
James Whitelock
You can do more for less to a certain extent. So it allows you to be creative and be kind of strategic, which I think most marketeers Once they kind of get down to it, really want to be, they want to be in that position. You know, it’s, you know, most marketers got into it because it’s quite, it’s seen as a creative industry. And you know, sometimes it doesn’t allow you to be creative simply because of the, because recruit marketing is, can be incredibly fast paced. Some of the businesses and some of your clients or maybe internally, it’s always sometimes misunderstood what you’re actually doing. You know, we always make the joke about the coloring in department and things like that, you know, so. But that kind of is now definitely kind of shifting.
17:24
James Whitelock
You know, I can say this with fair amount of clarity with the amount of businesses that we work with who have now got their own internal kind of recruitment marketers, whether they be kind of corporate businesses, whether that’s SME businesses, whether they’re staffing agencies. And I don’t think the three, as you mentioned, are going to jeopardize that. I think they’re only going to make that easier.
17:48
James Whitelock
Right.
17:48
James Whitelock
Basically because I think some of those three A’s are actually sitting in the wrong places probably at the moment. Within a lot of businesses with the talent teams who shouldn’t really be doing that. Within brand marketing, you kind of don’t really understand the recruitment marketing. So who’s going to take responsibility for those? Well, it should be recruitment marketing.
18:06
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely, I agree. It should kind of bring it to the fore. It should make it should make it easier. I mean, where do people get started with this? So we know that lots of people are now using AI to translate job descriptions into job ads and things like that. So we’re kind of seeing that was always one of the first use cases that came up for generative AI. So we’re seeing people doing this. What’s your advice in terms of sort of building out their capability in this kind of AI driven world that we’re now in?
18:36
James Whitelock
Well, I think just become more familiar and fluent in how to work with AI tools. Right. You know, you get a lot of people who just cut and paste stuff into GPT without giving it like the proper prompts and things, that it’s an incredibly powerful tool. And you know, you’ll know this from the kind of the work that you’ve done around with AI on, you know, going back and researching all of your podcasts and the trends. That wouldn’t have been possible five years ago. It just wouldn’t have been able to do. And so if you translate that to what Marketeers can do crunching down through all of the data now instead of having it all very, you can still have it all very in disparate places. So data analysis is one of the things that should be completely opened up to us now.
19:21
James Whitelock
I can grab an Excel spreadsheet from over there, I can grab a text document from over there, I can grab, you know, a PDF from there, dump it into Chatbot. And as long as I’m prompting it right, it’s going to give me the kind of answers and it’s going to crunch all that data. So I think that familiarity just with AI because again, there’s a lot of misconceptions about it and so just kind of getting there, getting in, jumping into it. As an example, within my business, most of the team have like the paid for versions of GPT. So they have all of that research power at their fingertips because it’s that it speeds up that kind of process and we can offer more to our clients. And if you’re an internal recruit marketeer, that’s the kind of thing you want to be doing.
20:03
James Whitelock
So you can go, you can, you know, upskill yourself and big up your role and pick up your job because like I can now do all this for you, whereas I couldn’t have done that before, you know, and if you’re trying to kind of bring yourself to attention within your business or want to become, you know, more, you know, grab the attention of a client, the ability to go to them and say, and kind of show them this research pieces or data analysis that just wasn’t, you know, would have taken you weeks to do, can now be done in a matter of minutes. That’s the kind of stuff that I think is going to get you noticed and get you noticed to the right kind of people, you know, and you can tailor it.
20:38
James Whitelock
So I think that’s the kind of thing that you want if you know, actually in the end some of those more specific skills that will come, right, because marketers need to kind of upskill and side skill, et cetera, anyway, all the time. But that kind of stuff to get you noticed within your business. That’s where I think, you know, you can kind of really use AI to your advantage because you can speed up that stuff that’s relevant to the people above you.
21:00
Matt Alder
Yeah, I think that’s a kind of a stunning point and it’s really interesting. Like, you know, with the project that I did now the Caveat about all of this is obviously caveats around privacy and what data you put in. And also, you know, when you’re mucking around with code, just, you know, the damage you can do and all that kind of stuff. With all those caveats aside, I mean, been really interesting for me was I built something using GPT4.5 to analyze all the sort of past transcripts of the podcast. And with GPT5, there’s already a new way of doing it.
21:29
Matt Alder
And I know that because I asked it to tell me, and it’s written some code, it’s done all this kind of stuff, so you can actually ask AI to tell you how to use it as well, which is, I think is kind of really interesting. And, you know, some of the things that I’m kind of doing now, particularly with like the code in data and stuff like that, I wouldn’t have imagined that I’d be doing that six months ago, but that’s kind of where we are just in terms of how quickly things are evolving.
21:55
James Whitelock
Well, you look at a tool like lovable, right? Whereas, like, you know, you can get it to do pretty much anything for you can build your stuff for you, build your landing pages, build your tests, build whatever you want it to do, right? That just wasn’t there. And so again, as a marketeer, you can, you know, say someone said you’ve got an idea for a campaign, you’ve got an, you want to create a landing page very quickly, boom. It can be kind of, can be almost instantaneously done. And even if it’s not the final version, what you’ve done is you’ve kind of got this proof of concept type scenario where you can just go, look, this is pretty much how it can work. This is how that’s going to kind of play out.
22:31
James Whitelock
So it just makes you way more kind of efficient and actually allows you to be more creative because you can do things faster and change it faster and be more creative with it. And that’s the kind of thing where instead of putting pen to paper, right, you know, and doing it kind of that way and scrolling stuff out is kind of, we’re past that. And I think that the things that, you know, marketeers should be kind of leaning more into, I think the ones that don’t, those are ones that possibly are going to get a bit kind of left behind if you’re stuck in the ways that you’re still, you know, you’re just your heads down in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Right.
23:08
James Whitelock
Probably these are numbered, you know, but if you’re taking advantage and proving your worth, which is again, the thing that recruit marketing has always had trouble with proving that we’re, you know, that we’re an investment and we’re not a cost center, you know, these tools now should be kind of allowing us to do that faster and better and just more efficiently.
23:30
Matt Alder
Yeah, and I think there’s two things to add to that. I think that we’re in a unique time that we’ve not seen for a while where everyone’s a beginner. So it’s kind of a brilliant time to kind of really sort of go deep on this. And I think also I kind of decided this a couple of days ago that as a rule of thumb, if you’re not overwhelmed and a bit lost by everything that AI could do, you know, for you in your role, then you really haven’t looked into it properly enough. I think that’s probably the best kind of guide at the moment because it is just, it just can blow your mind. We could geek out on this for about another three hours.
24:05
Matt Alder
But just to sort of pull it kind of into focus, as a sort of a final question, where do you think we’re heading with this? I mean, you’ve obviously got a business that you’re building, you’ve had it for some time. You know, if we look ahead, sort of, we try and look ahead five years into the future, you know, where do we think, where do you think we’re going to be with recruitment marketing by that point?
24:24
James Whitelock
I don’t think it’s going to be a huge amount different. In all honesty, I think like most of these kind of technological kind of leaps, they feel very scary right at the start, but actually they become quite normalized quite quickly in time. We’re both old enough to have seen some of these kind of, these leaps in technological advances before. So I think there’s, like we discussed, there’s, you know, if you’re a recruit marketeer, how strategic can you be if you’re not there yet in your kind of development? Double down onto understanding what AI can do and how it can speed up the stuff that you want to do. Or maybe not AI, just automation, but become way more familiar with the technology at your fingertips. And don’t be afraid of it.
25:07
James Whitelock
Right?
25:07
James Whitelock
Throw yourself into it, because actually it’s not going to destroy your career, it’s not going to take over your job. You know, this isn’t the terminator or something like that. Actually, it can just help you do more stuff than you probably could do before. So if you’re just coming into this space or a junior in this space, that’s how I would treat it. If you’re more senior, kind of like a marketing manager maybe, kind of looking to become CMO kind of role strategically, what can you offer, right? What can you offer that you know that if you put yourself compared to a strategy that’s come out of GPT, right? What’s the difference?
25:42
James Whitelock
You know, I mean, the difference is you, because you understand the markets, you understand the audience, you understand brand building, you understand communities, you understand tone of voice and the voices of the people you want to talk to. That kind of stuff is where you want to be kind of, you know, really making your mark.
25:57
Matt Alder
James, thank you very much for talking to me.
26:00
Matt Alder
My thanks to James. Don’t forget, if you haven’t already, you can quickly and easily benchmark your talent acquisition capability by completing the free Fit for the Future assessment. Just head over to Mattalder.me/podcast. It only takes a few minutes and you’ll receive valuable feedback straight away. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also search through all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com where you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
