Why AI can’t see your recruitment firm (and how PR fixes it)
Let’s be honest about where PR has sat on most recruitment firms’ to-do lists. Somewhere near the bottom.
Ask yourself who actually wrote the last piece of content you read. Not enjoyed but skimmed through. There's a decent chance nobody did. A model trained on the average of the internet produced something plausible, someone pasted it in, and it went live. It read fine. It also said nothing, sounded like everyone else, and was forgotten by lunchtime.
We think the question of who writes your content matters more now than it ever has, not less. So we've written down what we believe about it, and we've made it public. Here's what's in our AI policy, and the thinking behind it.
What we actually believe
Our position is simple. AI is a useful tool for distribution, research and efficiency. It's a poor substitute for someone who knows your market. The person shaping a recruitment firm's content should understand your clients, your candidates and the pressures your sector is under this quarter, not predict the next likely word. Generative AI is very good at sounding like an expert. It has never been one.
When anyone can generate a thousand words in seconds, the value of generated words falls to nothing. The things that still cut through are specific, honest and useful, and those are still made by people.
Why write a policy at all
PR runs on trust. Journalists trust that what we send them is true and ours. Clients trust that their embargoed news, their media lists and their unpublished results are safe. Audiences trust that a byline means a person stood behind the words. Used carelessly, AI erodes all three. A policy is how we make sure it doesn't.
What's in it, in plain English
The full policy is on our site. Stripped of the legal phrasing, it commits us to a few things.
A named person is accountable for anything AI touches, and nothing goes out without documented human review.
We're transparent. Where AI has shaped substance or style, we say so. Where it's checked a spelling, we won't pretend otherwise, but that’s less important to highlight.
We verify. Every fact an AI suggests is checked by a person before it's published, because confident and wrong is the LLM's natural state.
We protect what's yours. Confidential client information, media lists, journalist contacts and embargoed material never go into tools that don't guarantee isolation and GDPR-compliant handling.
We don't fake it. We won't use AI to imitate a journalist's style, mimic a named author, or claim authorship and expertise that isn't there.
And we're clear about where AI genuinely helps: ideas, outlines, desk research, competitor summaries, and sentiment or engagement analysis. Tools, in other words, not authors.
The one line that matters
AI is an aid, it is never a substitute for professional editorial, strategic or creative judgement. Everything else is detail.
If you run a recruitment firm
You'll need a version of this yourself before long. Your staff already use these tools daily, clients will start asking, and "we hadn't thought about it" is a weak answer when something goes wrong. We've turned ours into a template you can adapt, so you're not starting from a blank page. You can download it here.
We'll keep ours under review as the tools change. The principle underneath it won't. Good content still comes from people who know what they're talking about. AI just helps more of the right people hear them.
As BlueSky PR’s Marketing Director, with almost 10 years’ prior experience in the recruitment industry, Jennifer writes articles and guest posts to inspire recruitment agencies to build their brands, improve their content, bring in more leads and generally make their lives easier.
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