‘There is certainly pressure on people to stay relevant in this economy’

Declan Fitzgerald remembers the first time AI’s role on recruitment really impacted on his professional life. He was heading up talent acquisition at tech firm Apollo and the number of applications landing with his team suddenly exploded.“It’s back about two and a half years ago, and we just started getting slammed with huge volumes of CVs to the point where the team started saying to me, ‘I can’t do my job and look at all these CVs’. “What internal teams then will do is they talk to their application tracking vendors and say: ‘Can you help with this?’ And some might try to use AI to cut down those 300 applicants to 15. But I felt very uncomfortable because I didn’t really understand the algorithm and I didn’t think it was fair to assess people on that basis.“So I told them we had to go through the applications one by one and they were saying: ‘Fine, but if I do that, I can’t do these other things you want me to do, driving referrals, direct sourcing.’ READ MORE“Well, in my experience direct sourcing, targeting individuals, is usually your highest quality of hire. And referrals are really good. As a general rule, smart people know smart people so if someone already in your organisation, someone you trust, recommends someone, you take it seriously.“The companies I’ve worked for typically are trying to get maybe 35 to 45 per cent of their hires through referrals, and you’re probably trying to get 40 to 50 per cent through direct sourcing, using companies like LinkedIn.”There is, of course, the potential to pay outside recruiters to hire your people for you but Fitzgerald says that sector is still big business although at the higher end of things, firms can be reluctant to pay the fees involved.Ireland’s economic outlook ahead of Budget 2027 and agentic AI going rogueOn this episode of Inside Business, we start with Ireland’s economic outlook a week out from the Budget 2027 announcement. After years of consistent steady growth and running a surplus, what potential challenges await next year? Are we putting enough into the State’s rainy-day funds?And why do developments with the US Federal Reserve have a clear impact on our economy?To discuss all this, host Cliff Taylor was joined in studio by Rossa White, Chief Economist at EY Ireland.In the second half of this episode, we look at agentic AI and why it has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons lately.Data breaches and deceptive behaviour have led to growing calls from AI leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, for a more cautious approach to AI development and stronger safeguards. But why don’t these companies know what their software is up to?And is proper regulation even a possibility at this point?Irish Times business and technology journalist Ciara O’Brien has been following these developments closely and she explained why agentic AI is giving big tech cause for concern.Produced by John Casey with JJ Vernon on sound.“It can be 30 to 35 per cent of the total compensation of a senior leader. So if someone’s earning €200,000 base and €100,000 bonus, that’s €300,000 and a third of that, €100,000, could go to the agency in three instalments. “Now, there are times you would do it. For confidentiality, for instance, you might decide this is a very sensitive search and you don’t want anyone to know. “You could be targeting an individual in a company that’s adjacent to your company. There might be political sensitivities. So there are reasons you might go down that road but it is expensive and not really something you are likely to do for more general hiring.“So then the question becomes: ‘Well, maybe we don’t advertise all the jobs, we just advertise a few. Maybe just advertise each one for two days, get 100 applicants, then close it down again.’ So you find yourself trying to manage the numbers while staying focused on the fact that the ultimate metric is quality of hire.”Start-upWhen Fitzgerald, who previously held senior global executive talent acquisition roles at Meta and HubSpot, subsequently saw a report of data from Greenhouse that suggested the numbers of job applications recruiters were receiving had quadrupled as AI was increasingly used to generate and tailor CVs, he concluded there had to be a better way and in August, Hireovate was born.The start-up is, he says, his attempt to reinvent outplacement for the AI era. “It combines AI, market intelligence and recruiter-style mapping to support individuals in career transition, employers looking for a more modern business-to-business outplacement solution, and universities or career services that want to give people better visibility into the hidden jobs market.”The central idea, he says, is to take the methods commonly used by recruiters at global firms to look at the international talent landscape and reverse engineer them to make job-searching far more intelligence led.“I’m trying to get around this concept of people just constantly having to apply for jobs through career sites and quite often not hearing anything back,” he says. “It’s about using available information to help candidates understand what’s actually happening in the marketplace, what signals are out there to suggest there is hiring behaviour going on, so they can take a more proactive approach rather than just waiting all the time for a job to pop up on a recruitment website.“Those signals are things like: Is the company hiring at the moment, and if so, what volume? Has the company raised capital? Is it raising investment? Has it expanded? “What kind of senior leaders have they just hired? Are they about to launch a new technology? Or into a new market? These signals might be suggesting that this is a company with activity, a company that’s moving, that’s about to hire.“But you can also try to map out what the current situation is within the company, even if they’re not growing. There could be an incumbent in a job and it might be a good idea to build relationships up with the team so that if that incumbent leaves, you might be seen as the next person in line.” The breadth of the exercise is only made possible, he acknowledges, by recent developments in AI but he believes what he is offering is currently unique. Initial meetings with those looking to be hired or transition into a new area are intended to establish what role they are looking for, what sort of compensation they expect, whether they want to work on-site or remotely and the nature of their preferred employer, pre IPO, post IPO, established multinational or branch of the public sector. He also advises on what’s being sought so they can adapt their skill set or change the language they are using to develop their current one so as to look like a better fit.He cites the example of a C-suite executive with a well-known international tech firm and suggests that after performing what he describes as a “market scan”, the search throws up 29 firms “that could be a hit, seven of them actively hiring with three of those roles verified live roles, and by verified, I mean they’ve been double checked to confirm the role is live right now”.It’s a far cry, he suggests, from the traditional outplacement model operated by some of the sector’s biggest names that typically includes career coaching, advice on CV, training for interviews and even emotional support for those struggling with having been let go.Some people benefit significantly from these supports while for others, particularly those for whom this will not be the first transition, the entire process can feel like a “box ticking” exercise by companies who might genuinely want to do all they can to help those they are letting go or want to be seen to be doing something.`Made redundant’“I’ve been made redundant myself several times,” he says. “I’ve experienced it. My wife has too. It’s a difficult place to be for a lot of individuals. And it’s becoming a lot more common.“In San Francisco, at the very top level, C-level jobs or senior VPs, if you last two or three years, you’re doing well. Isn’t it crazy to even say that? But at the very top levels, you see people working 90 hours a week or more because they are earning so much money the company’s attitude is, `You have to earn it. We own you’. So it’s a whole different world, and I think what you’re seeing, certainly what I’m seeing, is people over 50 finding it very difficult to get back into the workforce.”They are not the only ones finding the shifting landscape more challenging, he suggests. Many graduates, for instance, are struggling to secure the sort of first career roles they would traditionally have moved into from college.“Youth unemployment is over 13 per cent and 16 per cent in the UK. What if that gets to 25 per cent? I think there would have to be a major policy response and personally, I think even now, it would be good to see a sort of Job Bridge type initiative specifically targeted towards providing young people with internships in these sorts of companies and getting them exposure to working with AI technologies.” Of course, a lot of people in-between the two age groups are also being caught by the cuts sweeping through the tech sector since Elon Musk turned up at Twitter’s offices wielding a big white sink.“I think we’re seeing more redundancies, seeing a lot of companies starting to shrink for whatever reason. And it’s interesting, if you look at the unemployment numbers, they don’t look like there is a crisis taking place, people are still in work but I wonder about the quality? “How many jobs are going and not being replaced by jobs of the same quality? Are we seeing people rotating into lower quality jobs, starting their own companies, doing some part-time consultancy or lecturing work because there are fewer of those really high quality jobs.“In some ways, I think that goes back to Musk that day basically saying, `Why are there so many people around here?’ He gutted the place after that and that kind of sent a tsunami across the tech sector. A lot of executives have been asking: ‘Can we reduce the cost base, particularly the labour part of it, and still drive the company forward?’ And in some cases you’ve seen major waves of redundancies, as with Meta where Mark Zuckerberg announced the following year was going to be the year of efficiency, despite the fact that profits were super high.“Jack Dorsey did the same in Square. It’s easy to look back and see how many CEOs were saying we’re cutting our workforce because of X, Y or Z. Two years ago, a lot of them were using AI, but now it’s much more subtle and maybe linked to performance, much more aggressive performance appraisal systems. The companies are going in and doing annual reviews but with the bar now really high.”Even where jobs are not being cut, he suggests, they are changing, often dramatically and speed with existing employees suddenly finding themselves under significant pressure to reinvent themselves.“Companies are looking at people who are mid-tier and maybe deciding that’s not good enough anymore. ‘Maybe we can get someone with AI skills that could do that person’s job in a different way. Maybe there’s a transition that needs to happen.’“I’m not saying it’s happening with every job, or in every company, but it’s very much happening in the tech sector when it comes to, say, software engineering.“They might say: ‘We now need people who can use AI technologies, and they need a year’s experience. Have you got it? No? Okay, we’re going to give you six months to get there. And we’ll give you all the resources you need.’ But six months later, when they ask ‘Are you there?” If the answer is ‘no’ then they might say: ‘Maybe this is not the right environment for you’. So there is certainly pressure on people to stay relevant in this economy.”When it comes to AI itself, he says he is one of the optimists but it is a matter of numbers because in a technological revolution that is going to produce both winners and losers there are, he acknowledges, going to be plenty of losers.Still, he insists, in the face of all the reports suggesting it is among the economy’s most vulnerable sectors, he would tell his kids to study software engineering.“Because I think the logic, the problem-solving skills you need to hone as a software engineer are still going to be incredibly important. And when you come at things that AI won’t touch, like the human element, the human-in-the-loop element of how to use AI, what you learn in software engineering is fantastic.“I think what you’ll start seeing in some other areas, like HR and legal, is an engineer helping design the structure of how the AI automation will happen, partnering with the senior HR person or the lawyer. It’s not going to be about just doing code but architecting software layers to empower the other functions.”It seems like it might not be the tech, the rest of us have to get used to working with, but the people behind it too.CVName: Declan FitzgeraldAge: 52Position: Founder of Hireovate and RecruitovateFamily: Married to Camila with three children Sophia, Joseph and Alana.Outside Interests: Travel and sport.Something you might expect: He’s quite into tech.Something that might surprise: He played League of Ireland football for UCD then Shamrock Rovers and hometown club Waterford during a career impacted by and ultimately cut short by a serious leg break.