Re_Boot: AI in Recruitment

Kat Kingshott & Nick Rickards

Helping solo and boutique recruiters reboot their relationship with AI - not through expensive enterprise solutions, but through practical, human-centered approaches that actually work for real recruitment businesses.Hosted by Kat Kingshott and Nick Rickards, and AI educational morsels from Marley!

  1. APR 22

    The Dark Side of Claude Design: What Nobody Tells You Before You Hit Publish

    Claude Design has arrived and it's genuinely impressive. Build a polished front-end website, a workflow connecting your CRM to Google Drive, a whole SaaS-style platform. In minutes. With no code. Just a prompt. Which is exactly why Kat and Nick are talking about security this week.   Because the easier it gets to build, the more likely you are to skip the step that keeps you safe. And in recruitment - where your platform could be handling candidate data, API keys, and live integrations — that's a very expensive mistake.   Nick speaks from experience: early in his platform-building days, he nearly left everything wide open. And that was him, someone who builds this stuff for a living. Now imagine the same thing happening to a recruiter who just discovered they can type a prompt and have a working platform in five minutes.   In this episode, they cover: → What Claude Design actually is and why it's a game-changer for non-technical recruiters → The specific security risks that come with connecting AI-built tools to real data → Nick's step-by-step fix: how to use a separate Claude project to generate a security checklist for your own build → Why hardcoded API keys are a hacker's dream... and how to avoid them → The ethical hacker agent approach for more complex builds → Why Gemini 3.1 is worth using as a second opinion   No code knowledge needed. Just a bit of awareness. And the right prompting skills.   🎙️ Hosted by Kat Kingshott (Touchstone Talent) and Nick Rickards (Voltaic Group) Find us on LinkedIn and let us know: have you been building with Claude Design? We'd love to hear what you've made. Like our page and connect with us! LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/re-boot-ai-and-recruitment/ Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ai-agents-for-recruitment/ Kat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katkingshott/

    23 min
  2. APR 16

    LinkedIn Wants to Pay You $70/Hour - To Replace You

    Episode 5 | LinkedIn Wants to Pay You $70/Hour — To Replace You In this episode, Kat and Nick (husky voice and all) dig into one of the more eyebrow-raising stories in recruitment tech right now - LinkedIn quietly posting roles to hire top tech recruiters as paid consultants at $70/hour, tasked with training their AI models. The irony isn't lost on either of them. LinkedIn has been charging recruiters significant fees for years to use its platform, and is now turning to those same recruiters to fix what their AI still can't do: understand how recruiters actually think, work, and influence. Nick's take? It's an admission. Nobody he's spoken to thinks LinkedIn's AI recruiting tools are genuinely good. The agents pull back irrelevant candidates, don't ask the right questions, and fundamentally misunderstand what recruitment value actually is. Because here's the thing... recruiters don't just find candidates. They influence them. The nuance, the emotional intelligence, the reading between the lines... that's where the fee is earned, and that's exactly what AI can't replicate. Yet. Kat goes a step further, reading the LinkedIn move as something bigger: a play to eventually build an AI marketplace that cuts recruiters out entirely: employers on one side, candidates on the other, agents doing the matching in the middle. Nick's not convinced it'll work at the senior end. But for high-volume, transactional hiring? They both agree the shift is already happening. The episode also covers some practical ground with Nick flagging Claude's native connectors as one of the most underrated quick wins available right now (the little + button in Claude that lets you hook up Gmail, Slack and more in a few clicks). And there's a timely warning about tools like Claude Cowork and Perplexity Personal. They are genuinely powerful, but dangerous if you ask them to do too much in one go. Context windows fill up fast, mistakes compound, and suddenly you've got garbage data you're manually fixing. The analogy of the episode: treat AI like a trainee. Give it 20 things, not 120. Feed it small, specific, relevant information. And remember, just like a new starter who doesn't want to let you down,  it'll confidently make things up before it admits it doesn't know. Context is king. (Yes, it's officially the show's unofficial second tagline now. 👑) Like our page and connect with us! LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/re-boot-ai-and-recruitment/ Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ai-agents-for-recruitment/ Kat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katkingshott/

    18 min
  3. MAR 17

    The Hidden Cost of AI Agents (And How to Keep It in Check) Season 2 Episode 3

    Episode 3 | The Hidden Cost of AI Agents (And How to Keep It in Check) In this episode, Nick and Kat get into one of the most asked — and least understood — questions in recruitment right now: how much does running AI actually cost, and why does it keep going up? Nick breaks down how AI agents actually work in plain English — think of an agent as a digital employee who shows up at a set time (literally triggered by a timer/alarm), picks up the right tools (LinkedIn, Apollo, your CRM), and gets to work. No distraction, no scattiness — but also no human nuance, unless you train it in. The real conversation starter? Context windows and token costs. The more data you feed an LLM to process, the more it costs — and with agents running daily, that data compounds fast. Monday's four pages of LinkedIn messages becomes seven by Tuesday, ten by Wednesday... and your bill quietly snowballs with it. Nick's solution: a structured database that acts as a memory layer, feeding the agent only the specific, relevant data it needs — not the whole book, just the right chapter. This can cut processing costs by 50–60% and keeps your GDPR exposure in check too. They also touch on the limitations of existing recruitment CRMs (spoiler: most aren't built for this), and why chasing the next shiny agent tool without understanding the cost architecture could hurt more than help. Key takeaway: AI agents are powerful — but they're not set-and-forget. Understanding tokens, context, and data flow isn't just for the technically-minded. It's now a recruitment business literacy issue. Like our page and connect with us! LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/re-boot-ai-and-recruitment/ Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ai-agents-for-recruitment/ Kat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katkingshott/

    16 min

About

Helping solo and boutique recruiters reboot their relationship with AI - not through expensive enterprise solutions, but through practical, human-centered approaches that actually work for real recruitment businesses.Hosted by Kat Kingshott and Nick Rickards, and AI educational morsels from Marley!