The recruitment industry is on the verge of a fundamental transformation. Not through better processes or smarter recruiters, but through a radical shift in how we combine data and leverage AI. Geert-Jan Waasdorp, founder of Intelligence Group, envisions a future where inefficiency makes way for intelligence.
The numbers don’t lie. More than half of all recruitment professionals report that 50 to 75 percent of their time is spent inefficiently. Ghosting, bad matches, administration, unanswered messages, it’s a familiar reality. On average, two thirds of all time in recruitment is wasted on activities that produce no results. Even more striking, 19 out of 20 applicants are never hired. Not now, not later. They disappear into a talent pool that is more of a “deadpool.” At the same time, we continue to invest massively in systems and platforms that keep this inefficiency alive.
“Inefficiency drives the recruitment industry,” says Waasdorp plainly.
That inefficiency is built into the systems we use. LinkedIn, with a market position that for many feels like a monopoly, has no reason to make recruiters more productive. The response from talent acquisition leaders around the world when asked why? “Money, money, money. There’s no financial incentive for LinkedIn to improve their products or the productivity of recruiters.” And the data backs that up. In Europe, 79 percent of the working population does not use LinkedIn. Even in the Netherlands, the frontrunner with 41 percent LinkedIn usage, the platform still fails to reach more than half of the market. When you look purely at the numbers, it’s clear that things can and must change.
But change is coming. And it’s not driven by recruiters or platforms, but by candidates. In the second quarter of 2024, only 3 percent of candidates used AI in their job search. Four quarters later, that number had grown to 10 percent — and among active job seekers, even 15 percent. The speed of that growth is unprecedented.
The consequences? Rebecca Carr, CEO of SmartRecruiters, foresees recruitment fundamentally transforming within the next 12 to 18 months through conversational AI. Arvind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, launched Comet this year — an AI browser capable of solving any sourcing challenge automatically within 12 months, and it is already approaching candidates directly through LinkedIn. Things are about to change. But the real transformation lies in combining data.
Where the power of data four years ago still rested in structured databases, today it lies in unstructured data. The traditional ATS — uploading CVs, structuring them, and storing them in databases — has become outdated. The future is Model Context Protocol (MCP).
MCP, launched by Anthropic and embraced by OpenAI, is an open standard that connects AI models with external data sources, tools, and APIs. Think of it as a universal adapter that allows you to plug in various data sources and access them through conversational AI.
And the best part? It’s remarkably simple. “If you can use ChatGPT — and you can — you can also combine data through MCP,” explains Waasdorp. “This is no longer about spending three months building a Power BI dashboard. These are MVPs you build in days.”
Imagine this: your ATS data combined with external labor market intelligence from Intelligence Group through an MCP in an enterprise environment. In real time, you gain insights into critical skills, predictive capacity demand, access to external and internal talent pools, and the ability to calculate the value of candidates and your entire talent pool. AI will predict what you need now, in a week, a month, a quarter, and a year. It will also suggest which candidates are currently available for those roles and which talent you should engage with for future demand. And AI will be the one doing it. This is not a distant future — for some innovators, it’s already reality. From reacting in the dark to proactively recruiting based on insight.
Another accelerator will be employers sharing data with other organizations. Those 19 out of 20 rejected candidates represent a goldmine of data and talent. What if you shared them with companies where they do fit? In the Netherlands, this is already happening through The Talentpool Community, where rejected candidates are matched with vacancies at other member organizations. Recruiters are happy because they refer candidates instead of rejecting them. Candidates are happy because they get more opportunities. It’s a circular talent pool where everyone wins. And when vendors and agencies — representing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of employers — join in? You don’t just multiply data; you raise it to the power of X. The first agencies are already doing this, positioning themselves to become the winners in tomorrow’s labor market.
Waasdorp dares to say it out loud: by 2030, 70 percent of staffing agencies will be gone. Ninety percent of job boards will have disappeared (some even sooner). Everyone will have their own career coach or job agent. And you will have purchased your last traditional ATS.
Combined data is not just the rocket fuel for your talent strategy. It’s the fuel to win the war for talent by allocating talent more intelligently — within your organization and across the labor market.
The question is not whether this change is coming. The question is: are you ready for it?
Geert-Jan Waasdorp spoke on September 23 during the Global Talent Strategy & Intelligence Conference. Intelligence Group conducts weekly research among 2,000+ European employees and candidates on labor market behavior, preferences, and trends.
Watch the presentation by Geert-Jan Waasdorp in the video below. This is a shortened version. Would you like to watch the full video? Request access via the form below.
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