When a client says they can use AI instead of an agency
It is happening on calls right now and most consultants are answering it badly, because the instinct is to defend the agency. The winning answer is to agree with the part that is true, then show them the part of hiring that AI has made harder rather than easier. Here is the argument, the numbers to have ready, and what to say when it comes up mid-call.
Ask AI about this
A client says some version of this to one of our customers most weeks now. Sometimes it is a test, sometimes it is a negotiating move, and sometimes they genuinely mean it because their board has asked what they are doing about AI and this is the first answer that came to mind.
The reflex response is defensive: talk about the human touch, mention your network, remind them of the placements you have made. All of it true, none of it persuasive, because it answers a question they did not ask. They are not asking whether you are good. They are asking why they should pay a fee for something they believe a machine now does.
The answer that works starts by agreeing with them.
Agree with the part that is true, immediately
They are right about something, and pretending otherwise costs you the conversation in the first thirty seconds. AI genuinely has made the front of hiring cheap. Finding people who could do a job, assembling a list, reading CVs against criteria, sending the first message: all of that used to be most of the cost of a search and it is now close to free.
Say so. Plainly, without flinching.
Two things happen when you do. You stop sounding like someone defending a business model, which is the posture that loses. And you earn the right to the sentence that follows, which is the one that matters: finding people was never the hard part of hiring, and it was never what the fee was for.
Most clients have never had that said to them, because agencies have spent twenty years implicitly pricing on access to candidates. The moment access stops being scarce, an agency that only ever sold access has nothing left to say. An agency that sold judgement has a much better conversation available.
The question that turns the call
Ask them how many people they interviewed last quarter, and how many they hired.
Almost every client can answer the first part roughly and the second part exactly, and the ratio is usually uncomfortable. Then ask the follow-up: of the ones you interviewed and did not hire, how many should never have reached your diary at all.
That number is the entire commercial case for an agency in one figure, and it is theirs rather than yours. Every one of those meetings cost a hiring manager an hour, a panel member an hour, and a week of delay. A tool that produces more candidates faster makes that number worse, not better, because it widens the top of a funnel whose exit is a hiring manager with two interview slots a week. We set that argument out in full in the pipe doesn't care where you widened it.
Name what they are actually taking on
Clients who say this have usually pictured the easy half and not the rest. Walk them through the whole job, without drama, as a list of things that will now sit with their team.
Someone has to form a view and defend it. The tool produces a ranked list. Somebody still has to decide which four people get a hiring manager's time this week, and be answerable when one of them was a waste of it. That is not a search task, it is a judgement, and it lands on whoever has the least time in their business.
Someone has to run the process. Scheduling around four diaries, chasing feedback that has not come, keeping a candidate warm through two weeks of silence, managing the gap between offer and start. Every one of those is where candidates are lost, and a tool does not do any of it on its own behalf.
Someone has to handle the offer. The counter-offer, the salary that is two years out of date, the candidate whose partner does not want to move. Nobody in their business has done that fifty times this year. Your consultants have.
Someone has to talk to the ones they reject. Their employer brand is made out of how the twelve people they did not hire were treated, and an automated process that goes quiet is how a company gets a reputation in a market it has to keep hiring from.
None of this is an argument that their tool is bad. It is an argument that the tool did the twenty per cent that was already easy, and the eighty per cent they were paying you for is still there and is now their problem.
The one they will push back on
They will say their team can do all of that, and they are sometimes right. Take it seriously rather than brushing it off, because a client who has genuinely thought about it will not respect a dismissal.
Two honest responses, depending on which is true.
If they have a real in-house team, the answer is not that they cannot do it. It is that you do it for a living in one market and they do it occasionally across twelve, and specialisation is the whole argument. Ask what their internal recruiter's other eleven open roles look like this month. Nobody's in-house team is under-worked.
If they do not have a real team, the person picking this up is a hiring manager doing it on top of their actual job. They will do the searching part, because the tool makes that fun, and they will not do the chasing, the keeping-warm and the offer management, because those are unrewarding and urgent things always win. That is not a criticism of them. It is what happens to every process that is nobody's day job.
What to say, more or less word for word
| They say | The move |
|---|---|
| We can just use AI for this now | Agree first. "You're right that finding people got cheap. Can I ask you something about your last quarter?" |
| It gives us hundreds of candidates | "How many can your hiring manager actually see in a week? That number is the one that decides your hiring, and it hasn't changed." |
| Our team can manage the process | "How many other roles is that person carrying this month?" |
| It's much cheaper than your fee | "Compared with the fee, yes. Compared with a bad hire or a seat empty for another quarter, we should work that out together." |
| We want to try it ourselves first | "Sensible. Do it on one role, and let's talk in six weeks about where it actually got stuck." You will usually get the role back. |
That last one is worth more than it looks. Do not fight a client who wants to try. They will try anyway, and the ones who get stuck come back with a far better understanding of what they were buying from you than any pitch would have given them.
Change what you are selling, if you have to
There is an uncomfortable version of this conversation and it is worth being straight about it, because it applies to a minority of desks and they need to hear it.
If the whole of your service is receiving a spec, searching a database and forwarding six CVs with no view attached, then the client is right and the conversation is already lost. That service is now genuinely available for nearly nothing, and no scripted rebuttal fixes it.
The response is not a better answer on the call. It is to change what you sell: have the conversation the spec came out of, form a view on the shortlist and defend it in writing, know something about their market they do not. Every one of those is learnable, none is being automated, and all three are why the good agencies in every market are having a better year than they expected.
The position to hold
AI did not take the recruiter's job. It took the part of the job that was never worth paying for, and it left the part that was. That is good news for any agency whose service is judgement rather than access, and it is the reason a consultant can now carry a portfolio that would have been impossible three years ago, which we worked through in a 10x recruiter runs a hundred jobs and in how AI changes a recruitment desk.
Your client is going to end up using AI either way. The question on the table is whether they use it with somebody accountable in the loop or without. Every agency that can answer that clearly is about to take share from the ones that cannot.
We build our AI, Simi and the agents on exactly that principle: the machine takes the admin and anything it is unsure about comes back to a person, because the recruiter is the point of the service rather than the cost to be removed from it. Recruitly is the best recruiting CRM in the world and we build it that way on purpose, which is why the customers I work with walk into this conversation rather than away from it.
Anshika leads Customer Success at Recruitly.
