At the inaugural South African edition of Recruitment Tech Talks, three recruitment leaders sat down to talk honestly about what technology has actually changed in their industry, and what it hasn’t. Talent Genie’s Jonnathan Koch was one of them, alongside Tracey Lee Shearer of EQ8 Recruit and Kabwe Mulolo of Construct Executive Search. What came out of that conversation, as reported by Talent Business Partners, is worth unpacking properly, not because it flatters the software, but because it’s an honest picture of where the industry actually stands.
The spray-and-pray problem
Start with the diagnosis, because it’s blunt and accurate. South African agencies are still operating in what the panel called a spray-and-pray model, a client briefs 20 to 30 agencies for a single role, and the result is a race that rewards speed over strategic fit. Feedback loops break down. Candidates get ghosted, or worse, hit what the panel called the Wall of Silence, the practice of a hiring company going quiet on the market entirely, leaving candidates to assume that no news after two weeks means no. Tracey Lee Shearer put it plainly, agencies end up “very busy not making money”, chasing thin margins on roles nobody actually wins cleanly, while corporates talk about their people being their greatest asset without the recruitment process on the ground reflecting that at all. It’s a system that treats hiring as a lottery rather than a partnership, and it quietly destroys an agency’s reputation with both clients and candidates over time.
Capacity, not headcount
This is where Jonnathan’s contribution to the panel matters most, because it’s not a claim about a product, it’s a specific account of running an actual team. “I ran a team of 22 recruiters in Joburg,” he said. “With the technology we have today, I could have run that same operation with 10 or 11. I would have had better people, earning more commission, and I would have had much less stress.”
That’s a genuinely different way of framing what this kind of technology is for. The panel noted that the average South African recruiter works upwards of 52 hours a week, with the majority of that time going to manual screening and administrative overhead, updating spreadsheets, chasing CVs, re-keying candidate details. None of that is the actual work of recruitment. It’s the tax on doing the actual work.
The point isn’t that fewer people are needed. It’s that when a system can process a large volume of CVs in minutes rather than days, the recruiters who remain aren’t made redundant, they’re freed to do the work software genuinely can’t, selling the client’s business, building candidate relationships, and handling the judgement calls that come with senior or specialist placements.
Where the line actually is
That last point matters, because the panel didn’t pretend automation has no limits. Kabwe Mulolo, who works in construction and engineering placements, offered the sharpest warning of the discussion. Precision matters when placing senior technical talent, he said, and if an AI hallucinates on a CV for a bridge engineer, and that leads to a wrong hire, the consequences aren’t abstract. The bridge might fall down.
It’s a vivid way of making a simple point, automation is genuinely useful for formatting, screening and admin, the high-volume, low-judgement end of the work, and genuinely reckless applied to the final call on high-stakes roles. The honest version of this technology isn’t a replacement for recruiter judgement, it’s a way of clearing everything else off the desk so that judgement has somewhere to land.
From vendor to advisor
The third strand of the panel connected capacity back to how agencies actually make money. Tracey Lee Shearer argued that the agencies pulling ahead are the ones moving from contingency risk, where the agency carries all the cost of a role that may never close, toward retained and exclusive mandates. Her suggestion, an agency should audit a client’s actual time-to-hire and the cost of a wrong hire before ever taking a brief, reframing the conversation from a price negotiation into a business risk discussion. Recruiters who reclaim hours from admin are the ones with time to actually do that kind of consulting work, rather than just processing the next brief that lands in the inbox. Kabwe Mulolo took the same idea further, arguing agencies need to run a background check on their clients too, and be willing to walk away from ones that treat recruiters and candidates as commodities rather than partners.
What this means in practice
Put these three threads together and the shape of the argument is clear. The spray-and-pray model isn’t a client problem or a candidate problem, it’s a capacity problem dressed up as an industry norm. Technology built specifically for how agencies actually work, handling the admin and screening load that eats most of a recruiter’s week, doesn’t replace the recruiter. It’s what makes the shift from vendor to advisor possible in the first place. The real question for most South African agencies isn’t whether this kind of shift is coming. It’s what they’d actually do with the hours back.
The last word
Tracey closed the panel with a comparison worth sitting with, this moment in the industry is like the shift from the typewriter to the computer. You can refuse to adapt, but eventually you’re the one still using ink ribbons while the market moves on. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s just where the industry is.
If you’re curious what agency-specific software built around that idea actually looks like, have a look here.