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Google AI Overviews and employer brands: the citation gap

Social care: the assistants are willing. The websites aren’t.

The SetpointHQ Index · Sector report 3 of 14 The AI assistants are more willing to recommend UK care employers than they are the banks, the retailers or the tech firms. On this week’s scoring run, most of the sector still isn’t converting that goodwill, and the reason is sitting in its own markup. The...

Nobody Reads CVs Any More. Here’s How to Get Hired Anyway.

It has never been easier to apply for a job, and never been harder to get one. That paradox is the whole youth jobs market in one sentence, and understanding it is the difference between applying into a void and actually getting hired. A graduate in the 1990s might have posted a dozen job applications...

Retail and consumer goods: famous everywhere except the answer

The SetpointHQ Index · Sector report 2 of 14 Everyone in Britain can name these 10 employer brands. The AI assistants candidates now ask first can name them too. What the assistants will not do, on the evidence of this week’s scoring run, is recommend them. Each week The SetpointHQ Index scores 100 UK employer...

UK banking employer brands are close to invisible in AI candidate research

A candidate weighing up a banking career in 2026 doesn’t open your careers site any more. On a Sunday evening she asks an AI assistant which UK banks are actually worth working for, and reads the short answer it gives back. The assistant names three employers in a couple of sentences. If yours is a...

AI won’t replace the best recruiters. It’ll hand them a superhero suit.

The bit a machine can take was never the bit that fills the job. Every few months someone tells me recruiting is finished. A model writes the advert, screens the CV, drafts the outreach, so who needs the human. I get it from clients, from candidates, from people at dinner who’ve just found out what...

SEO vs GEO: Recruitment’s New Arms Race Has Started, and Most Employers Haven’t Noticed

A software engineer weighing up her next move doesn’t type “software engineer jobs near me” into Google any more. She opens ChatGPT on a Sunday evening and asks which companies near her actually treat their engineers well. The AI answers in four sentences. It names three employers. Yours is not one of them. No job...

Google just published its AI search playbook. For employer brands, the interesting part is what it leaves out

A care worker weighing up two employers doesn’t open your careers site any more. She opens ChatGPT, and asks it whether you’re worth applying to. “Is [Employer] a good place to work? Are there enough available shifts? What’s the night-shift pay actually like? Better than [Competitor]?” Whatever comes back (confident, cited, sometimes wrong) decides whether...

The £500k Billers Asked for an Apprentice. Yours Costs £149 a Month.

Twenty years ago I was the recruitment marketer at an agency, sitting at a desk surrounded by billers. I built the careers pages. Ran the ad campaigns. Wrote the job posts. They worked the phones. We rarely got in each other’s way. What I had that they didn’t was time to watch. And every quarter,...

Recruitment Website Audit: A Practical Framework for Careers Sites That Convert

Most recruitment websites are leaking candidates, and nobody is measuring the leak. The careers page gets a redesign every three years. The job ad template hasn’t changed in five. The application form is six pages long because that’s what the ATS spat out at go-live. And every quarter, someone in TA gets asked why cost-per-hire...

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know — And That’s the Hardest Problem in Solo Recruiting

My first job in recruitment was as a solo recruitment marketer. No team. No manager who’d done the role before. No handover document, no playbook, no senior practitioner down the corridor I could tap on the shoulder and ask “is this right?” There was no plan. There was just me, a brief, and a blank...

The Best Candidates Aren’t Applying. Here’s How to Reach Them.

The best candidates aren't refreshing job boards. They're passive, discerning, and researching your reviews before you reach out.

How to Build a Talent Pipeline That Compounds Over Time

Most organisations start from zero every time a vacancy opens. A talent pipeline changes the economics of recruitment.

The Job Board Trap: Why Spending More Is Getting You Less

If your recruitment advertising budget has increased year-on-year while results have declined, you're experiencing a structural problem.

How to Calculate Your True Cost-Per-Hire — And Why Most Organisations Get It Wrong

Most organisations think they know what it costs to hire someone. Most are wrong by 2-3x.