Computer says no: AI x recruitment.

This week, Olly and Lisa sit down with Be Kaler Pilgrim, a design and tech recruitment leader who has spent more than two decades helping creatives find their place in changing organisations. 

We get honest about where the jobs have gone, how to get seen when robots are the first reader of your CV, and what soft skills genuinely look like in an AI workplace. As always, it's personal, practical and grounded in what is actually happening right now.

Why listen?

1. Understand the real story behind the vanishing creative roles. 
2. Learn how to get past automated gatekeepers.
3. Make peace with soft skills being hard to show, and find your way.

Some things we took from our conversation with Be Kaler Pilgrim

• Most companies don't actually know what “AI skills” are yet. Curiosity and fluency can help us stand out. Ditch the empty claims.

• Hiring is slower, more stubborn and more competitive. We have to be resilient and ready to compete.

• Communities matter more than ever. Let's not struggle alone.

• Robots can filter keywords, but they cannot judge fit or values. Humans still hire humans, which is a relief to us.

Tune in

Whether you are hiring or you are trying to build a creative career in the UK, and want help to make sense of the changing rules.

Find us

Be Kaler Pilgrim: https://www.smithfieldsearch.com/#who

Olly Veysey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverveysey/

Lisa Talia Moretti: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisataliamoretti/

Transcript

Hello, welcome to IS THIS AI? We humans on the BIMA AI Council are back to bring you more myth-busting insights, practical ideas, and a little more clarity for the AI road ahead. I'm Olly Veysey and today, as ever, I'm joined by my co-chair of BIMA's AI Council, Lisa Talia. Lisa Talia, hello.

Hi, how are you? Good, good, good, good.

I'm well, thank you. What's... I'm going to skip the part where we ask where you are this week because you're settled. So, you know, the game was fun while it lasted. What I am going to ask you though is, which is great and lovely, what I am going to ask you though is what have you spotted in this week's AI headlines?

Yes, exactly, exactly.

Well, I don't know if you saw, but OpenAI have launched their own browser, which I haven't tried just yet or experimented with, but I'm very concerned with regards to all the privacy issues that may come up from that. 

I'm baffled by it, to be honest, because I thought we were moving away from browsers, but apparently we're not. different, but same, same. So we'll just wait and see, I guess, on that.

The other thing I spotted, which I'm not sure if you saw, is that from 2024 last year through to September 2025 this year, Anthropic has spent more than 100 % of its estimated revenue on Amazon Web Services. So of the estimated 2.55 billion that they've made in revenue from the beginning of 2024 to September 2025. So of that estimated 2.55 billion, they have spent 2.66 billion on compute.

That is how expensive the AI business and industry has become. And that's one company. I found that pretty just extraordinary.

That's pretty mega ⁓ and certainly a pretty high barrier to enter the game. 

Thank you for that.

I'm going to jump straight in because we are here for episode six. And we have with us someone who has spent their career at the intersection of talent, innovation and organisational change.

The very brilliant Be Kaler Pilgrim.

Hello team, how are you doing?

We're very well and very happy to have you here to guide us through this most personal and pertinent of subjects.

It's a funny old time, isn't it? I'm very happy to be here.

Jumping into our provocation, which is how we always start, as listeners will know, this week it is: THE COMPUTER SAYS NO. You may have felt it, I certainly have. That silent rejection, the algorithmic shrug when your CV disappears into a system that decides you're not the right fit and they never even met you.

AI is writing job ads, shortlisting candidates, and even listening in on interviews. So I would like to ask, and I know Lisa Talia has lots of questions, where are the humans in all of this? Where are the jobs? How do we get a job when we're applying to robots and readers? And what does a fair hiring journey look like?

In this AI age.

Just a few questions Be, and I'm hoping you've got all of the answers. So how do you respond to any of that? Some of it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

You gave me some questions in advance and I really scratched my head and I tried to really write down some thoughts for your audience that would help them on their journey. Because there's a lot in there, isn't there? So where do we start?

We did give you some questions and it was very unfair of me not to just ask one of the questions that we gave you. So why don't I rewind and give you question one, which is what on earth happened to all the design and creative jobs?

Yeah, that's a good question to start on, isn't it? So for context, I think it's useful to share that I've been a design, a tech recruiter since 2000. So I've seen the market through a few things, but nothing quite like

And we started seeing the jobs in creative disappear around sort of end of 2022, No, actually beginning of 2023. But...

There was a number of things. don't think we can lay the blame at anybody's door, just one thing's door. 400,000 redundancies in the USA was a really big part of this. We were seeing those stats and I think it really spooked everybody in the UK. And then we started seeing, you know, kind of our client base follow suit. First hiring freezes and then swathes and swathes of redundancies.

in big tech and also the agency world, so everywhere. We had two wars in the mix and the NI contribution increased. That was a big part of it. I don't know if you remember we had several prime ministers over this time. C Suite suddenly started talking about AI and using AI to drive efficiency.

Sadly I do remember, yeah. None of them covered themselves in glory, frankly.

Yes, yep.

That became a really big theme, spending money to drive efficiency. And we also saw a real trend of client demands changing. Can't we just use AI for that? Isn't that cheaper now that we've got AI in the mix? So I think it was a real mix of those things. Those were the triggers I really saw and the work market, the job market got really stubborn.

Hmm. So, well, that's pretty bleak backdrop, but not all the fault of AI, which is an interesting place to start. Lisa Talia how are you coming into this?

Yeah, so, I mean, unfortunately I was part of that group of people that at the end of 2023 found themselves in an organisation that were making mass redundancies. And the team that I was in, we went from a team of 12 to a team of three, pretty much overnight really. And I was one of those three and it became, you it was obviously very personal. I was left in a very small team with no directors, no line managers. And I eventually, you know, made a decision to leave and I resigned and I've been freelancing ever since and you know but it's been incredibly difficult like not only just to get you know permanent work but to get freelance work during this time and you know one of the things that I've experienced personally is you see a job ad go up and then you know I say on LinkedIn and you save it and you think I'm kind of busy right now in emails I'm gonna come back to this and then three hours later you see something like 400 people have applied for this job. And it is just overwhelming because, you know, how do you actually land a role or land any contract work in this environment? you know, I kind of love to put that to you, be like, what is your advice for, you know, job seekers like myself and, you know, who are not just looking for permanent work, but contract work? How do you untangle, how do we untangle ourselves from this very spaghetti mess that we feel like we're in?

Yeah, well firstly take a breath because it's really disheartening isn't it? And this is not about you, just you. We talk about 2023 and 2024. I spent six months doing walk and talks with design and creatives in and around Smithfield. And the main thing that I appreciated from that was that lots of people were struggling on their own. Nobody was talking to each other.

And nobody knew how to find themselves a job because they were so used to being approached by recruiters, being headhunted, their friends got a new big job taking them with them. So it is a new set of skills that we are all having to learn in this job market. You don't get bonus points for being first so I'm glad that you don't use that button which just allows you to go click I've applied for that job because...

That is, know, that LinkedIn has got lot to answer for putting that functionality, I think, because it's really bad timing. I think it's really, really important to tailor your approach. You know, I've had situations where I've heard line managers talk about getting the same covering letter many times over because everybody's using ChatGPT to be more efficient and do stuff quickly.

But receiving end of that, do you compare one candidate to another when they're both using the same covering letter?

I know of a situation in our business where we had 400 applications and we genuinely thought that most people could do the job. So we were really looking at the minutiae of detail and that is because, you know, there is a lot more people on the job market. So how can you stand out? How can you really tailor your approach and just be consistent and strategic about how you follow up with that?

According to Boston Consulting Group, approaching 70 % of companies are using machine readers as first screening contact for hires and for roles and for that first short listing.

What can people who are looking for jobs do? Which way should they turn? Should they be applying so robots can find them or should they be applying for the human read?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think a bit of both because you need to get a job, right? You've got to think about yourself. And I've heard a similar stat that 70 % of recruitment agencies are currently trialling AI. And AI can help uncover talent that wasn't otherwise available, but it can also screen out talent.

My personal view is that AI should be supporting us, not replacing us. And by us, I mean the employer. So that could be an agency or a person or a client direct. Some people are screening stuff out of their CVs because they don't want to come across as a jack-of-all-trades.

And actually, if the reader has been asked to look for that information, then it's really important. I wouldn't be so keen to strip out bits of your CV anymore because you want to keep the relevant stuff in. And it's really hard because some people over report on skills and some people under report, right? And I'm sure that in our career we've all had experience of that.

I also want to give advice to people who are the employers, to companies, to other recruiters, don't put something on a job spec or a person spec if it's not necessary, if it's not skills based criteria, because that's when bias kicks in, right? So I'll give you an example, a client may be looking for a midway, six, seven years experience of working in a certain field, but they'll put a computer science degree and that will rule out...

if they put it in to the AI, they will rule out everybody that has a computer science degree. And actually, that might be somebody that couldn't afford to go to university but has spent the last seven years learning their trade. So it just feels really unfair. there's change that needs to happen and education that still needs to happen. Like I just don't think it's as simple as getting AI to do that. It's the person who's driving it and the person who's driving it needs training to understand that actually if you put in a load of stuff in the AI criteria, it's going to rule a load of people out. But it's also for the person who's looking for a job today and needs to pay their bills tomorrow, that if a screen reader is being used, you need to play it little bit. And that might mean putting stuff in your CV that you might not usually put in and not stripping stuff out.

Lisa Talia do want to pick up on any of that?

Well, one of the things I'd love to pick up on is this idea around skills based hiring. And of course, you know, suddenly we're talking about AI skills and it's fascinating because no one is actually listing what these AI skills are. We're all saying proficiency in AI, you know, almost as a bullet point on every job spec that goes out there now. So with so much talk about AI literacy, like Be, do you have any advice on, you know, what AI skills people or companies are actually looking for. And I'm wondering specifically about senior design and creative leadership really. What should they be bringing? What kind of, they're expected to bring leadership, but they're also expected to have all of these new AI skills that they're meant to bring. So do you have any advice on what these mysterious AI skills are?

Can I just say that this time really reminds me of about 2007-2009 when every single branding agency in the country was asking for a head of digital and we were like, yeah what do want them to do? And they were like, we don't know, get them to come along and then we'll interview them and then we'll work out the fit and I kind of feel like that's what's happening again. So maybe the reason they're not listing it is because they don't know always, and they're trying to work it out. Who's the expert in this, right? 

And what value do they bring?

Yeah, good question, right? I think that a growth mindset is the thing that is most important in this marketplace because nobody knows the answers and the reason why people feel like leadership is zigzagging around is because the leaders, the levers we used to pull are not working, so we're all trying to work ourselves out of this funk together. So for me, I think that's quite important from a contextual point to sort of start with. But I think for creatives, understanding the products that are disrupting your space and having a sort of embracing that a little bit and seeing where they can be useful is really important. Being really fluent, how you talk about these products and services.

So that gives people comfort that you know what you're talking about. able to cite case studies, use fluency in how you discuss, and also, know, of having an understanding of what prompts work, how to prompt, creating your sort of own library around language is really important. You know, we keep hearing that you're going to be a curator, not a creator as a design talent.

And I think that's right, but you need to have context of how and when to apply these products. I don't think anybody's expecting you to have experience of hands-on working and delivering them, but I think there is something there about leading from the front with those softer skills, being really open to what's out there, and having that growth mindset, because...

You know, a year and a half ago when I talked to people about AI in creative, people were running away from the gunfire and going, you know, hoping that they would get to the other side of their careers and it wouldn't affect them. And I think there were some people that were proclaiming to be AI experts. And I don't think either of them existed. But I think now you have an opportunity to show what you know and apply what you know to how you might use those products and cite projects that have been successful, unsuccessful or notable in any way.

That's such good advice. Thank you. Just because you mentioned it, can we talk about soft skills? We're being told, in senior positions, as AI does more of the sort of execution and production work. How do you sell soft skills on a CV?

That's a good question. That's a hard question. Well, I guess, firstly, should we say what soft skills people are looking for at the moment? Because I am a big fan of this and I recently wrote something about this, you know, being able to dance with ambiguity, understanding that transformation is here to stay, like being a really good communicator.

Really critical thinking, problem solving. Those are the ones that I think are really important at the moment.

I don't know how you sell them on your CV because I think they are so much louder and clearer when you talk to somebody. So you've stumped me there. I don't think listing them is going to work. I think you could use the words, but they don't really come to life until you talk to somebody, right? Those, yeah, they don't.

They don't, do they? And they're skills that you have to show rather than tell people about was my inkling. And I was hoping you were going to prove me wrong. And my second question was, do businesses pay for them? And this isn't entirely self-interested line of questioning, but there's some self-interest in it. Will businesses really pay because they value the skills that you're talking about?

Yeah, absolutely. I think people will go through an interviewing process and identify and prefer candidates because they show and are able to demonstrate those softer skills for 100 % sure. I think that is across the board. That is why we haven't started hiring people based on just CVs yet. We're still doing interviews, we're still doing face-to-face. Even if they are video interviews.

Mm, Lisa Talia jumped in here anytime.

Well, I think, you know, the point that you make around, you know, it's things that you show and not necessarily things that you can say. I think that's one of the biggest challenges, right, is that for so many of us who have so much to offer in that soft skill space, as well as, you know, competing on expertise and experience and, you know, the degrees that we have and, you know, the additional deep experience we've, you know, crafted after that, just to try to get an interview or to try to land in front of a person where you have the opportunity to speak to someone at the moment is a really difficult thing to do. I think, you know, it just makes me reflect on how tiresome the job application process is and, you know, how much pressure people then land up putting themselves when they do land up getting an interview because all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is like my one shot. Right. And, and I guess I just have a huge amount of sympathy, empathy and consideration for so many people who are in the job market at the moment who are finding themselves in this position.

I get these ads on LinkedIn, I don't know if you get them, I get them as a recruiter, like - Would you like to come and talk to us? We've got an AI recruiter bot. And I think, no, I do not want to hire an AI recruiter bot. I want to invest in my staff at Futureheads and Smithfield and SyncD. And make sure that those people have the critical thinking and the good questioning and able to build rapport and they're willing to go out and be part of the network and understand what's trendy at the moment and what will be useful to our candidate and client base. That value add stuff, right? That real stuff. I think that's the stuff that we are concentrating on more actually in the face of AI.

That's that's how you get a great result and find the right person to me. But -

Isn't the prevailing wind taking everyone towards the bots? What are your competitors doing?

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that because they don't call me and tell me but I am part of a, I chair the DEI committee at APSCO which are the governing body for the recruitment industry. So I do get to talk to lots of recruitment agencies across the board.

Sure.

What I would say is that in the DEI space, people are going to be very values focused, right? They're coming to those communities. I think people do care and they do want an experience. But I think there are, you know, there is, like all industries, there's going to be a lot of commercial businesses who it's a race to the bottom line, the race to increase the bottom line. And that has always been the case in recruitment. I've been surrounded by people who have been in the pursuit of financial success and that has been their number one thing. And then there's been people like me who have gone, actually we care about values, we care about DEI, we're a B corporation, we care about other stuff too. And I think when people choose who they work with, that will influence the decision. I also think what we're looking for is quite complex. And I think there will be perhaps some other recruitment that is much easier to automate. If for a body, that is probably easier to automate than if you're looking for your next creative director or your next product director where it's very much leadership, where those softer skills that we've talked about are actually as important as the technical nous.

AI can do many things, but it doesn't have any kind of quality control mechanism built into it. And these tools, even if they're being used for recruitment, AI recruitment tools can't tell a hiring manager why a candidate is a good fit or not for the job, right? Because it's just reading certain keywords.

And there's something definitely about if you are an organisation and you are a B Corp, when you are trying to stand for certain values.

Being really clear that you audit the tools that you're using and you're understanding how they're working and how they filter through these different CVs and also auditing how they work within your recruiting tasks within your processes, right? So what tasks are they handling? How are they handling those tasks? What kind of tasks are they even doing, right? Are they sorting? Are they filtering? Are they curating? Are they categorising? Or are they making decisions? And if they're making decisions, you know, legally that organisation can actually find themselves in hot water because really, if it's filtering out on certain protected characteristics and automatically disqualifying a candidate before that candidate is even seen by the hiring manager, that could be a really dangerous place for that organisation to find themselves in. And that's regardless of whether you are trying to stand for certain DEI values or not.

Absolutely, I think that's a real big fear for me and I think that might be the reason why we have, you know, you could say that we're late to the party and we're in the tech space, we talk about AI every day, we understand it but we are using it for very nominal tasks like for me to sense check lists and agendas to make sure I haven't missed stuff.

I tend not to use it and nobody in our business uses it for short listing at the moment. It's not part of our process. I can't say that we will never do that but actually there's two things that we're looking at now. One is what is our process? What is our end to end process and where could we create efficiencies that don't devalue the service? And then actually one of the things I shared, I saw really good sort of...playbook, the business had been really, really clear about what they were using AI for and their kind of ethics and values around that and I was like, that's who we aspire to be. When we start using AI, I want to be very, very clear with people what we're using it for and I absolutely don't want it to be something, as I said to you earlier, that is a gatekeeper, it's got to be an accelerator for people, it's got to...uncover candidates from protected minority groups that you might not have been able to use before or identify that actually that brief has got too many words in it and you are restricting the number of candidates that might be able to apply. I want to be a force for good, I want to be a conduit for change.

Being clear about how you use AI. I mean, it's just, that's just good practice for anyone. It's clearly important for all the reasons you both described for hiring. But also it could really help in the hiring process, just listening to this conversation. Like if companies could be more clear about how they're using AI, people can be more clear about how they can help them do that.

And so the matching process becomes better, clearer, more transparent. I have one final, just nuts and bolts question about, we talked about skills in terms of AI fluency, but in terms of skills on a CV, and

I now have like 12 iterations of my CV having put a bunch of prompts into chat GPT to try and make it the most robot friendly. I'm not convinced.

But where do you, Be - it would be great to get your thoughts, whether it's a human reading it or otherwise, just on skills versus experience versus credentials and the story we tell about ourselves on these bits of paper.

What can you, how do you prioritise that list? Do you prioritise it? Where does the story start and what captures your attention?

Yeah, well, what I'm going to tell you is very personal, right? If I'm hiring for me, I look at what people like to do at the weekend and the tone that they use and how they introduce themselves. That becomes much more important to me than when I'm recruiting for one of my clients. In fact, I'm not going to sit next to that person. But when I talk to a client, my job is to understand what their preference is, what they are looking for and...

Sometimes you've got an organisation who just wants somebody to come in and do the job. You know, that business is driven by different things. And sometimes you've got a very values or very culture driven and they are willing to go, do you know what, we don't need the exact fit, we want the right person to fit into our organisation. So it's different for everybody and that's why I, you know, that's why I think a bot doesn't really do that for you because it can't discriminate in the way that your next employer will, in the most positive way. It can't tell you that. Maybe it's really hard though isn't it?

So put my hobbies back on my CV. Is that what? But what I'm learning though is to not go mad trying to second guess what all the AIs and all the humans want out there because you just can't.

You can't, you can't because every human, I have recruited for thousands of people and they are not all looking, they don't go, I'm looking for a creative director so I'm looking for this bang and then I can, you know, because one creative will suit one business and not another. know, we talk to VC and PE funded businesses, quite often they're much more binary about how they approach recruitment. And then you talk to a founder owner, how they approach recruitment is very different.

So all of these, you you guys know personas. The persona for all of the different hiring managers, very different. When I'm working with an internal recruiter, a HR person, they're quite black and white as well. They're quite black and white. They're adhering to a culture and a structure and a pay scale. So the way that what they're looking for is also very different. So absolutely good advice to yourself. Do not go mad trying to work out what the bots are looking for because the people informing the bots don't know.

No, but maybe create some personas. I quite like that idea.

I was literally going to jump in here and say exactly the same thing. Maybe this is a new thing we need to add all new job specs. Like the persona, like this is the persona of our organisation. And if you'd like to work here, this feels like a match. This feels like something missing.

We are out of time. Lisa Talia, you've shared with us a lovely final thought. I don't know if you have anything left to say and then to you, Be.

I absolutely loved recording this podcast and I think one of the things that really stood out to me the most is around the soft skills and thinking of different ways that you can actually demonstrate your soft skills and not just waiting for that interview process. So I'm gonna put on my creative thinking hat and explore different ways to do that and also share that with others. Thank you Be, you've been a great guest.

Thanks very much for inviting me. I ⁓ love sharing this stuff because I hope it really helps people. You know, one of the biggest things that came out of my walk and talks I did before I launched Smithfield Search was that everybody just thought this was happening to them. And when I was sharing that actually this is happening to lots of people, we were able to create little communities of people that could help each other and share or just...

reduce that mental load and I really am such a big fan of community and in work particularly because I think so much good stuff happens to there and my advice for anybody looking for a job is try and get out. There are lots of great communities in the creative industry, like BIMA is just one of them. It is nerve-wracking but it's nerve-wracking for everybody and so you just have to kind of put your big pants on and do it and go and network and meet other people.

And if you're really struggling call me I'll be your chaperone I've got really good at it over the years.

Wow, that is an offer. Thank you. Big pants on and Be by my side. I'm ready to go. Really appreciate both of you. I don't know if this breaks our editorial guidelines, but I'm also just going to finish by saying, if you are looking for someone who has deeper expertise, has thought more carefully, and has more experience working with humans, implementing AI fluency in huge organisations then get in touch with Lisa Talia Moretti. Thank you. Goodbye.

Olly, that's very kind. Thank you so much.