As organisations compete for scarce, high-impact skills, the traditional model of recruitment is proving inadequate. Irrelevant applications clog recruiter pipelines. Hiring timelines remain stubbornly long. And candidates often feel reduced to keywords in a database.

AI-enabled talent marketplaces offer a powerful alternative: hyper-personalised experiences that match candidates not just to jobs, but to growth paths aligned with their skills and aspirations while offering recruiters a sharper lens into fit, readiness, and retention potential.

In this expert-led session, held in partnership with Faxoc, leaders shared diverse perspectives across the talent lifecycle. Vinutha Rao M.S. (Senior Vice President, HCLTech), Nobina Banerjee (CHRO, Rentokil PCI), Harsha Kumar (Associate Director – Talent Acquisition, Brillio), and Prakash Verma (Founder, Faxoc) explored how AI is reshaping talent discovery, improving recruiter productivity, and unlocking business agility through smarter, faster, and fairer hiring.

The shift from search to strategic engagement

In an era of AI-powered platforms, sourcing is no longer a skill advantage; it’s a baseline. The competitive edge now lies in how recruiters engage, evaluate, and convert the right-fit talent. Harsha noted that “searching talent is not a vanity anymore. What matters now is how you engage talent, how you evaluate cultural fit, and how you go beyond a profile to assess real potential.”

The infusion of GenAI has democratised search. “Earlier, recruiters took pride in advanced search tricks. Today, any decent platform can run a profile search, initiate assessments, and trigger AI screening all in one flow,” Harsha noted. “The recruiter’s value must evolve from transactional sourcing to strategic judgement.”

Vinutha echoed the shift in focus from effort to impact: “We’ve seen a remarkable reduction in shortlisting effort. AI understands JD–CV matching at scale, strips out bias, and allows recruiters to channel their energy toward deeper evaluation and stakeholder collaboration.”

Prakash brought a marketplace lens to this evolution. For him, automation isn’t about volume, it’s about precision: “Traditional job boards flood you with irrelevant profiles. Our platform flips that model. We use AI to map job descriptions to the right candidate profiles across a network of 10,000+ staffing agencies and freelance recruiters, cutting through noise and cutting down time-to-hire. Faxoc’s AI-driven job board features 1.5+ crore active seekers, 5 lakh new sign-ups monthly, and a vast pool of quality data helping recruiters screen and shortlist the most relevant CVs with AI Intent Search.”

“AI should not just find candidates; it should qualify them. That means CV scoring, intent signals, skill mapping, all done before a recruiter even picks up the phone.” Hiring isn’t just about finding talent anymore. It’s about earning their attention, validating their potential, and engaging them in a way that sets the stage for long-term success.

Rebuilding trust and accuracy in hiring: From credentials to competence

Prakash, while offering a glimpse into what AI should focus on, said, “At Faxoc, we’re working on AI that understands what people can do, not just what they say they’ve done. Our system doesn’t stop at keyword matches. It’s built to recommend roles aligned with demonstrated skills and growth trajectories, because that's where long-term success lies.”

But smart hiring isn’t just about better assessments; it’s also about ethical readiness. As bias risks shift from human to algorithm, vigilance must scale too.

Vinutha underscored the infrastructure required for responsible AI adoption: “Before you scale AI, get your house in order, define skill taxonomies, clean up job descriptions, and train recruiters. Otherwise, you’re just automating flawed processes.”

She also stressed data responsibility: “With audio transcripts, sentiment scoring, and facial analytics, you’re handling deeply personal data. Whether a product is built locally or not, you still need to meet global standards, such as GDPR. Ethics can’t be optional.”

Harsha noted that “We spend a lot of time guarding against human bias, but not enough questioning algorithmic bias. Don’t lose great candidates because a tool made the wrong call. Make AI earn your trust, not the other way around.”

What’s next – Human-AI synergy and the future of hiring

If today’s challenge is reducing inefficiency and improving candidate fit, tomorrow’s opportunity lies in shaping more intuitive, ethical, and insight-driven hiring ecosystems. The big question for talent leaders: What should we be preparing for over the next five years?

Vinutha laid out a clear call to action: “AI adoption is no longer optional; it’s imperative. But it has to be grounded in self-awareness: Where is your organisation today? What tools, processes, and recruiter capabilities are in place? Only then can you scale adoption meaningfully.”

She emphasised the importance of starting with foundational readiness, defining skill taxonomies, auditing current frameworks, and creating room for pilots, before moving into advanced use cases such as behavioural analysis, duplicate detection, and candidate engagement scoring.

Nobina highlighted an emerging frontier: using predictive analytics to track intent and engagement signals from candidates, from the time they spend reading an offer email to whether they complete pre-boarding formalities on time.

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