AI recruiting tools are everywhere right now, so we ran an experiment of our own. We asked Google’s Gemini, one of the biggest names in AI, to generate a commercial for RFT Search Group. Ten seconds later, we had our answer, and it wasn’t the one we expected.
What we got: a guy in a hallway doing finger guns, screaming “NEED AN OFFICE MANAGER? ASAP?” A man clutching a giant vintage brick phone next to someone who just got handed a box with a stapler in it. A woman burying her face in a pile of folders. And a closing shot of the same guy yelling directly into the camera: “GO TO RFTSEARCHGROUP.COM ALREADY!!!!”
It’s loud. It’s frantic. And it has almost nothing to do with our business.
We’re not sharing this to pile on Gemini for making an ugly ad. We’re sharing it because the mistakes it made are exactly the mistakes you run into any time AI recruiting gets applied to something that requires real judgment, and they’re the same mistakes you’d get from letting AI handle your next leadership hire.
Here’s what AI recruiting actually got wrong, and why it matters for anyone evaluating AI recruiting tools for a real hiring decision.
It picked the wrong job
Gemini’s ad is about hiring an office manager. RFT Search Group doesn’t just place office managers. We work with middle market business owners to build out a solid team where the wrong hire doesn’t just create an inconvenience, it sets the company back a year.
That’s not a minor detail to get wrong. It means the AI didn’t understand what we actually do. It pattern-matched “recruiting company” to “generic staffing agency” and stopped there. That’s the same failure mode you get any time you hand something specialized to an AI recruiter that only knows how to guess at the surface instead of asking questions.
It got the tone backwards
Our entire brand is built on being the opposite of the frantic, high-pressure recruiter stereotype. We lead with straight talk. We acknowledge that business owners are tired of overpromising firms and automated noise. Every piece of client-facing copy we write is deliberately low-pressure, because the owners we work with have already been burned by someone who oversold and underdelivered.
Gemini’s version of us is a man screaming at a wall and demanding you visit a website immediately. That’s not a tone miss. That’s the exact archetype we spend our marketing working against.
It missed the one thing that actually differentiates us
There are more than 3,000 recruiting companies within 25 miles of our office in Livonia. We know, because we counted. In a market that crowded, generic doesn’t survive. What sets us apart is specific: we stand behind every placement for five years through our Client Loyalty Pricing Program, not the industry-standard 90 days. Most firms disappear once the check clears. We don’t.
None of that made it into the AI’s version. No differentiator, no proof point, nothing that would separate us from the other 2,999 firms in the same 25 miles. Just a stock-footage energy that could have been slapped onto any staffing agency in the country.
Here’s the part that should actually worry you
If an AI can take a real company’s name, scan the company’s website and still guess wrong about who they serve, how they talk, and what makes them worth calling, ask yourself what happens when that same kind of guessing gets applied to your next leadership hire.
Recruiting isn’t a content-generation problem. It’s a judgment problem. It’s understanding that a family-owned manufacturer needs a controller who can navigate a boardroom that’s also a dinner table. It’s knowing that an entrepreneurial company needs someone who thrives without a manual, not just someone with the right resume keywords. It’s recognizing when a search has to stay confidential because the person being replaced doesn’t know yet.
An AI tool can produce something fast. It can even produce something that looks polished on the surface. What it can’t do is understand your business well enough to represent it accurately, and it definitely can’t understand a candidate well enough to know if they’re the right fit for your specific company, your specific team, and your specific stakes.
So will AI replace recruiters?
Not the kind of recruiting that matters for a critical hire. AI in recruiting is genuinely useful for narrow, high-volume tasks: scheduling, resume parsing, first-pass keyword filtering. What it can’t replace is judgment about fit, culture, and stakes, the exact things that separate a placement that lasts five years from one that walks out the door in five months. Our own commercial is proof of the gap. If AI recruiting can’t correctly describe a company from its own name and industry, it isn’t ready to decide who leads that company.
This isn’t the first time we’ve made this argument. We wrote about the same gap between speed and fit in Speed vs. Fit: Why “First to Submit” Doesn’t Work for Leadership Hires, whether the shortcut is a contingency recruiter racing to submit first or an AI tool racing to generate an answer, the problem is the same. Fast isn’t the same as right.
We’ll take a real conversation over a confident guess any day.
If you’re weighing a critical hire and want it handled by people who actually know the difference, that conversation is free, and it starts with a phone call, not a prompt.
Let’s Talk About Your Next Leadership Hire
No AI guesswork. Just a straight conversation about what you actually need.