The Nursery Rhyme Nobody Saw Coming
You've probably heard of Jack and Jill, the AI recruitment platform promising to revolutionise hiring.
Jack is your AI recruiter. Jill is your AI hiring manager assistant.
They went up the hill to fetch the future of recruitment.
Except they didn't bring back water. They brought back the same broken bucket we've been carrying for years, just shinier, faster, and marketed with better deck slides.
And now? They're tumbling down.
Not because the technology doesn't work. It does, brilliantly, at exactly what it's designed to do.
They're tumbling because everyone finally realised what they can't do: the actual recruitment work that determines whether a hire succeeds or fails.
The Fundamental Mistake: Building an AI Recruiter
Jack (the AI recruiter) sends personalised messages at scale, conducts screening conversations, answers questions 24/7, qualifies interest automatically, books discovery calls without human involvement.
Jill (the AI hiring manager assistant) summarises candidate conversations, generates interview scorecards, recommends next steps, creates hiring reports.
Together, they can process 1,000 candidates while you're still reading the first proper CV of your morning.
Impressive? Absolutely.
Revolutionary? No.
Because here's what nobody mentions in the demo: they're optimising for the wrong things entirely.
These platforms make one catastrophic assumption: that recruitment is fundamentally a matching problem that can be solved through better algorithms.
It's not.
In 2026, AI fatigue is real. After two years of AI everything, candidates are actively pushing back against automated experiences. LinkedIn found that 78% of job seekers prefer human interaction during the recruitment process, up from 64% in 2024. Indeed showed that 67% of candidates would reject an opportunity if the entire process felt "too automated."
I'm not going to invest my entire career based on a conversation with an algorithm. I'm not going to relocate my family because an AI told me the culture fit score is 87%. I'm not going to leave a secure job because a chatbot sent me a compelling sequence.
Recruitment is fundamentally a human experience. It cannot be replicated by code, no matter how sophisticated the algorithm.
Building an AI recruiter assumes the recruiter's job is transactional. It's not. The recruiter's job is relational, strategic, and requires judgement that comes from understanding people, not processing data.
What AI Recruiters Cannot Do
They Cannot Build Trust
Trust is built through consistency over time. Following up even when nothing's happening. Checking in after six months. Remembering previous conversations. Saying "Actually, this role might not be right for you" instead of trying to close every candidate.
AI can simulate personalisation. It cannot create genuine trust.
Our analysis of 500+ placements shows that candidates who had multiple conversations with the same human recruiter had 73% higher offer acceptance rates than those processed through automated workflows.
Trust compounds. Algorithms don't.
They Cannot Sell Authentically
Jack can match "wants management role" to "management role available."
It cannot say: "I know you want to move into management, but here's why an IC role at this company would actually accelerate that path faster. They promote from within, the current VP started as an SDR three years ago, and if we position you correctly, you could be leading a team within 18 months."
That's not matching. That's selling. And selling requires understanding what drives this specific person.
They Cannot Exercise Contextual Judgement
The candidate with two short stints on their CV: job-hopper or someone who had the courage to leave bad situations twice?
The six-month gap: red flag or someone who cared for a sick parent and now has renewed energy?
The "overqualified" candidate: flight risk or someone exhausted from a toxic environment who genuinely wants stability?
AI sees patterns. Great recruiters see people.
The Winning Model: Human-in-the-Loop
These AI platforms exposed something important: a lot of what recruiters were doing was administrative processing that should be automated.
But when companies tried to automate everything, they discovered what actually matters: the human judgement, relationship building, and authentic selling that determines whether a hire succeeds.
The winning model isn't AI or human. It's human-in-the-loop.
AI handles what AI does best: sourcing candidates at scale, summarising videos and CVs, identifying patterns, managing logistics.
Humans handle what humans do best: strategic intake, relationship building, contextual judgement, authentic selling, outcome ownership.
The human must matter. Not as a fallback when AI fails. But as the strategic core of the recruitment process with AI as their support system.
The Moral of the Story
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch the future of recruitment.
They came tumbling after.
They fell because they forgot the most important thing: recruitment isn't about finding candidates faster. It's about finding the right candidates and making sure they succeed.
Speed without judgement is just expensive failure delivered quickly.
Efficiency without relationships is just scalable mediocrity.
Automation without care is just algorithmic indifference.
At meritt, we're not building another Jack and Jill.
We're building AI-enabled human recruitment. AI handles the noise so expert recruiters can focus on the signal: strategic intake, relationship building, contextual judgement, and authentic selling.
In 2026, the companies winning the talent war aren't the ones with the fanciest AI. They're the ones who've mastered human-in-the-loop recruitment.
Ready to step up? Start AI-enabled human recruitment today. Register for free at meritt.io/employers and see how expert recruiters supported by AI consistently outperform algorithms alone.
Because the best recruitment isn't human or AI. It's human and AI, working together.