Volume hiring when AI speeds up sourcing but confidence in candidates does not follow

Two surveys reported by HR Dive on 16 October 2026 tell the same story from different angles. AI has made it quicker to find candidates, but much of the time saved at the top of the funnel is being spent again further down. For organisations hiring at volume this matters, because a volume process only works if every stage of the funnel can scale.

The first survey comes from TestGorilla, which according to HR Dive polled more than 1,400 US talent professionals. 72 percent said AI had made finding candidates quicker. Among those who reported that speed gain, however, a third said they had gained no confidence in how solid the candidates were, and 18 percent said their confidence had actually fallen.

The most concrete figure in the survey concerns where the time goes instead. More than two in three recruiters told TestGorilla they spend an hour or more manually checking a candidate's credentials, and 30 percent spend two hours or more. TestGorilla's chief executive Wouter Durville summed it up by saying recruiters got a better search engine and a worse index in the same twelve months. His point is that most tools offer no way to tell a verified claim from an unverified one, so the verification ends up being done by people.

HR Dive places the figures in a wider context. Recruiting platform Ashby found earlier this year that applications per hire have tripled since 2021 and that an open role now attracts around 300 applications on average. The American Staffing Association reported in June that recruiter call time had risen to a record 286 minutes per week, roughly double the level of two years earlier. HR Dive reads this as a sign of where the time gains from AI tools are being put.

The second survey is from Employ and draws on more than 1,200 US-based HR recruiters and managers. Its most striking finding is that AI is, for the first time in the study's 19-year history, the main source of recruiters' frustration. 33 percent named AI-polished CVs as the biggest source of stress, ranking above the lack of qualified candidates. At the same time, 43 percent said their main priority is improving candidate quality, and 30 percent said their main challenge is identifying and prioritising qualified candidates.

The Employ survey also shows that satisfaction with primary recruitment technology has dropped to 69 percent from 82 percent in 2025, and that 64 percent consider it at least somewhat likely they will change technology within the next year or two. Respondents pointed to friction and avoidable delays at critical moments in the process, which in their view lead to candidates dropping out.

Neither article mentions psychometric or skills tests by name, and it is worth being precise about that. But both describe a problem that a test is, in principle, designed to address, namely separating what a candidate says about themselves from what the candidate can actually do. When a CV can be polished by a language model in seconds, its value as a sorting criterion falls, and when 300 applications sit against one vacancy, an hour of manual checking per candidate does not scale.

In a volume process the question is therefore not only whether to test, but where in the funnel the test sits. The earlier a standardised measure is placed, the less manual checking is needed later. The trade-off is that an early test puts demands on the candidate experience and on the documentation showing that the test measures something relevant to the job. Those demands do not go away because the pressure on recruiters increases.

Both surveys were carried out by companies that sell recruitment technology. HR Dive describes TestGorilla as an AI recruiting platform and Employ as a hiring firm. That does not make the numbers wrong, but it means they should be read with the same scrutiny as any other vendor data. HR Dive gives no fieldwork dates or methodology for either survey, and both are US samples. What the picture looks like in Denmark cannot be inferred from these figures. HR Dive also cites a ManpowerGroup survey in which only a third of respondents felt AI had made hiring faster than in 2025, 42 percent saw no difference, and a quarter said time-to-hire had become slower. The view of AI as a time saver is therefore not unambiguous, even in the US data.

Kilde: https://www.hrdive.com/news/recruiters-find-people-faster-with-ai-but-confidence-in-candidates-hasnt/833206/ and https://www.hrdive.com/news/ai-is-the-root-of-recruiters-biggest-stressors-survey-says/833223/