Navigating the New Norm: AI & Recruitment in 2026

So hi, my name is Sarah Balmer. I'm the president of Human People Solutions. I started at Human in the fall of 2016, helped to found this business, the Brand of Human. I currently oversee all of our day to day operations. As an organization we are in the recruitment process, outsourcing space. So about 95% of our employees are recruiters and which we partner with about 50 clients throughout the United States. And so I support those recruiters and recruitment leaders and clients to ensure that we are delivering on their hiring expectations. Yeah, listen, the talent market over the last couple of years has been really interesting. I think many of us have experienced the ups and downs coming out of COVID a lot of market uncertainty which has had a tremendous impact to talent acquisition as a whole. It's impacted many people personally as jobs have become really difficult to navigate and to land. And I think it's been really difficult on organizations, whether you're in an outsourced and recruitment service industry like mine or whether you're an internal HR and talent acquisition leader to be able to really understand how to digest sort of the macro workforce economics and align that with your business needs and put a workforce plan together. It's been complex because the data has been consistent for years. Now as we're going into 2026, I think a few things that I am seeing across our business with many of our customers is we're definitely starting to settle into a new norm. So there was a lot of hesitation over the last couple of years of committing to hiring figures, committing to workforce plans because everyone's had to balance budgets. There's been technology evolution and introduction. Business have had to learn to operate on tighter margins as cost of goods and cost of labor has increased. So but I'm starting to see that hesitancy shift a little bit more. I think what we're going to go into in 2026 is not so much reservation of acquiring talent and partnering with recruitment solutions, but being more disciplined and objective and data and budget driven in terms of those decision making. In terms of decision making. So that for me also underscores what I think is one of the most pivotal transitions we've seen in HRT as a whole, maybe historically, is we've seen talent acquisition shift from being really focused on people and move it more into an outcome based, growth oriented piece of the business. So we're now seeing ta more aligned with how does headcount and how do new hires align with revenue growth areas, how are they going to help us improve margins and efficiencies and that's me putting sort of my internal customer hat on. And that's a big shift. That's a big shift. So they have a role at the table when you think about dollars and cents in financial planning and financial and business impact that historically they did not have. The other big thing that I think we're going to continue to experience is a lot of internal TA functions have operated very similar to how you'd see an internal HR business partner function work where you're there to really partner with your internal customer service, a wide variety of needs and be accessible to many people across a variety of topics and specialties. I think what we're going to start to see is more verticalization. I think subject matter, subject matter expertise is going to become even more important when it comes to your role in ta, that recruiter function, that recruiter knowledge base in engaging candidates in a deeper way. That is something that we've always done in the outsource space. So an RPO or recruitment company that you might work with, it's very common that we are specialty or vertical based. But I think we're going to see that bleed more and more into internal talent acquisition teams as well as everyone just becoming more conscious of aligning quality and fit with the revenue and business growth opportunities that businesses are seeking in 2026. I mean, how many times are we going to hear the term AI this year? More than we can all count. And I think it's really important that we all embrace and understand how impactful and important the world of AI and tech overall is going to continue to be in our life, especially as it pertains to recruitment and ta. So one of the things in human that we're really focused on is embracing this change and looking at AI as a way to enable productivity, enable our recruitment process, enable our recruiters or other staff members to drive efficiencies. I think that when we look at TA as a whole, that is going to be a common trend. How we are going to consistently be scrutinized across organizations and NTA on headcount. Right. That we've learned to operate with leaner teams as market uncertainty has been there. And I think that is going to remain true. But there's going to be a reality that production expectations are going to grow as business demand grows and we're going to need to find ways to activate productivity in a more efficient and cost conscious way. And leaning into to AI will absolutely allow us to do that. I mean, specific to talent acquisition, the way that we are embracing it and the path that we are on is identifying how AI or automation in general, our technology in general works at each stage of the recruitment process that our recruiters execute in on behalf of our clients. So how can we leverage technology to technology or AI to replace administrative work that does not require sort of human intelligence or a relationship and a strong experience, but is very much administrative task keeping, note keeping, task tracking, reading content, summarizing notes, automating, scheduling, making sure there are consistent touch points with the candidates that are in process. Things that over the last decade many companies have made investments into via their ATS or CRM or whatever platform you're working in to make it slightly more automated. The goal here would to be able to make anything that can be automated and is repeatable done and AI and technology is now caught up to allow us to do that. So that's our focus, is allowing us to automate all stages of process, which allows our recruiters to do what they do best, which is to engage with candidates and spend time developing a relationship and partnership with them, find candidates that might not be obvious and readily available on the market and again develop those relationships and attract them to our clients job opportunities as well as spend time with our hiring managers or clients and consult them on the role, consult them on how to navigate the negotiations and interview process. We're really excited about that. I think our recruiters are excited about it as a business. It is going to allow us to create operating and recruitment models that are easier to scale with our clients at a more attractive price point. It's going to let us pivot our solutions more readily because we aren't so people dependent. It's going to let us match our client strategic initiatives in a more aggressive way. And again, I think that much of what I'm saying we're going to do, we're going to see in the industry, but we're also going to start seeing take more progress and prioritization and internal talent acquisition teams as well. Beyond that, I think the other big shift that we're going to see is what does the new world of AI job opportunities look like. We've already started to see that in terms of developer work and engineers and product developers. There's a lot going on in the market right now and that we're hearing about how many data warehouses and data centers are needing to be built. All this translates into job opportunities. So though I, I think there's a lot of concern and hesitation in the market about how is AI going to impact my job, I think there's A reality that we need to be aware that it's going to impact the job that you may have today. But I think there is going to be a world of new job opportunities that are going to come online as a result of this. I remind everyone this isn't the first time we've done this in the world. Right? We saw this in the dot com era as we had to hire a bunch of developers and engineers. And I remember at the time being in marketing capacity and graphic designers were concerned for their job. Well, guess what? We saw graphic designers, they just work in different ways. We saw it again in 2008-2010 when digital marketing became king. Right? The way that we work changed, but we just created new jobs and new ways of doing things. So I'm really excited about this because not only will AI make us better overall as organizations and especially in recruitment, it'll allow us to do what we do best, which is the people side of things. But I'm also excited to see about the world of new jobs and possibilities that ED unlocks for so many of us in the market today. So we at Human Candidate Experience has always been something that we've been incredibly passionate about and I think it's a differentiator that we've been able to bring to our clients for years now. We actually have a world class service team and solution and mentality here which is all about elevating both the candidate experience and client experience along the way. One of the pieces of feedback we hear in recruitment and this is sort of globally felt, you'll see in the TikTok videos and the negative comments on LinkedIn like I applied for all these jobs and I was ghosted, no one got back to me. I think when you peel back some of those layers, it's difficult for people to understand how overwhelmed recruiters are, how many applications are received, how inefficient many of the systems that we're working in are to be able to effectively sort of assess those applications and communicate with the candidates, AI is going to be able to flip that on its head. And so when we think about candidate experience and we think about the world of automation, I think we're going to see us be able to level up that game and create a much more consistent, expected, prescriptive candidate experience that is not dependent on a human being who is busy and overwhelmed. Because we're going to be able to create up systems that at least at minimum ensure someone that is applied and a candidate has consistent updates and a consistent availability to connect with someone regarding their job. I also think the other cool thing we're going to see in the candidate experience that AI allows us to do is on demand interviews. So right now in most organizations, especially if you're actively employed, right. And you work a traditional, let's call it 9 to 5, well it's, that's typically when your recruiting team is working as well. So if you are looking for a new opportunity, when are you supposed to schedule that phone interview, that initial meeting with the recruitment team, whatever it might be, you're really having to look to take off time to do that. Obviously we do have different teams that work different hours, but it's still not sort of on demand as the candidate might prefer it to be. One of the products that we've rolled out and that I think is just going to become a table stake across talent acquisition organizations is being able to have candidates schedule their phone interviews with a virtual recruiter, which might be an AI bot for lack of better term, an AI agent that has natural language processing that can speak to a candidate as if it is a human and have a full natural conversation. And the benefit to that, before they would connect with maybe a human recruiter would be that they can do it on their own time. So whenever they want, it's 2 o' clock in the morning, it's 2:15 in the afternoon, they decide they want to do it within 30 seconds. The candidate can drive and schedule when that interview happens again. It might not be comfortable as a candidate doing your full interview experience with an AI tool, but to get that first step under your way, to get your foot in the door in that process started the candidate. Having control of their own destiny and timeline and not being person dependent on this is going to absolutely change how the hiring process and the speed for their job search can go this year. So I see that the relationship that our clients have with talent providers and organizations such as myself changing that. A lot of times they've turned to us because they have a need, they need help to augment their internal teams and they're really turning to provider to help them like check a box that on a volume of hires, I think. And one of the things we tried to do at human over the years and we've seen it perform really well in some of our larger strategic partnerships is what we're going to be engaged with is just going to be different. They're going to invite us to the team who will be a part of their workforce solution. And thinking about how can we make our organization more efficient and Productive. How can we look at recruitment and recruitment productivity as an outcome based solution that helps us achieve our financial goals as an organization? So I think that's going to continue to grow as sort of a go to. I think that the world of AI and tech is just going to outpace what most internal organizations can keep up with in terms of the lens of talent acquisition. There are very few organizations that their sole focus is hiring people, right? If you're a hospital, your sole focus is patient care. If you're a manufacturer, your sole focus is producing that product for your consumer. Our sole focus is on hiring people. And so when you think about the speed of change that we're in, the speed of introducing technology, the speed of AI and all of the legislative changes that come with that, all of the EEOC compliance changes that come with that, all of the risk, security and all the factors that you have to consider, that's going to be really, really hard for an internal TA team to scale and keep up with. And so I think more and more we're actually going to be asked to be involved simply in consulting on technology strategy, recruitment, workforce processes, tech efficiencies and AI efficiencies. Even if that's the only thing we're bringing brought to the table to do. And not even the hiring in. I think that's going to become a core offering for us this year. I think that there is more hiring demand and more job opportunity than is publicly being discussed right now or felt. And I think it's really important that we aren't looking at organizations that in most cases had peak and atypical hiring environments in 2020 and 2021 and have continued to go through some rightsizing. I sort of, okay, there's no opportunities out there. Look at all the jobs that have ended. I think that there have been organizations that have done job containment and have been really disciplined in their hiring. One of the things that we look at when we are partnering with a new client is their willingness to change. And change is really hard. And sometimes it's change because you have to go through change management. Your internal customers are connected to a process and we don't want to upset sort of their day to day life. And that's fair. But a lot of times where we see change management issues is that leaders and organizations aren't willing to unlearn something, something. And so when we think about adopting new processes and then you think about adopting new processes that are AI enabled so something brand new to the world and you think about technology and changes at the speed at which this is all happening, it can feel incredibly daunting. I think it's incredibly important that as we're going into the next couple of years, everything we know as business owners and operators and the learnings that we have, that knowledge is really important and that needs to be in our back pocket. But that's where it should be kept. We need to go into every opportunity as we think about process and tech and efficiency with a fresh lens and fresh perspective, or else if we aren't willing to do that, we will all be left behind. And so, biggest piece of advice I'd give any leader is challenge yourself on living too far in what you know and think about how you can live in a space of what you don't know and lean into that learning process.