For years, we have talked about the future of work as though it belongs almost entirely to technology.
Automation. Artificial intelligence. Digital skills. Faster processes. Greater productivity.
And there is no doubt that technology is changing the workplace at an extraordinary pace.
But after many years working in recruitment and watching the labour market evolve through recessions, skills shortages, changing candidate expectations and technological change, I think something else is happening too.
Experience is becoming valuable in a new way.
Not experience measured simply by the number of years somebody has worked. I mean the judgement, perspective, resilience and understanding that are built through actually doing the job.
Knowing when something doesn’t quite feel right. Understanding how a decision might affect a customer, a colleague or a team six months down the line. Knowing when to push forward, and when to stop and ask another question.
These qualities have always mattered. But in an AI-enabled workplace, they may matter more than ever.
AI can provide answers. Experience provides context.
Generative AI has made access to information dramatically easier.
It can summarise documents, analyse information, create reports, draft communications and help people solve problems far more quickly than before, which creates enormous opportunities for employers.
I am positive about what AI can bring to recruitment and the wider workplace when it is used responsibly. Technology can take away repetitive administration and give people more time for the work where they add genuine value.
But there is an important distinction.
Having an answer and knowing what to do with that answer are not the same thing.
AI can give somebody information. Experience helps them interpret it.
It helps someone understand the personalities involved, recognise potential consequences, spot the question nobody has asked and challenge an answer that looks perfectly reasonable on paper but doesn’t make sense in the real world.
That kind of judgement is difficult to replicate.
The labour market is already changing
Employers are making hiring decisions in a much more cautious market. The latest ONS data shows the UK labour market has become less tight, with 2.5 unemployed people for every vacancy in March to May 2026.
At the same time, recruitment businesses have reported a sharp increase in candidate availability, driven in part by redundancies, fewer opportunities and concerns about job security.
That means many employers currently have more choice. But more choice does not automatically make recruitment easier. In fact, it can make good hiring decisions even more important.
When businesses are cautious about adding headcount, every new staff appointment has to count.
The question therefore becomes less about finding the CV containing every fashionable keyword and more about identifying the person who can genuinely add value.
We need to rethink what we mean by “skills”
I have always believed that one of the biggest mistakes we can make in recruitment is to treat a CV as a checklist.
Five years of this. Three years of that. Experience in a particular system. A particular qualification. A particular job title.
Those things can be relevant, of course. But they only tell part of the story.
Some of the most valuable skills in a business are considerably harder to put into a keyword search….
Judgement. Commercial awareness. Empathy. Negotiation. Leadership. Resilience. Problem-solving. Relationship building.
The confidence to have a difficult conversation. The ability to remain calm when something goes wrong. The instinct to recognise that a problem is developing before everybody else sees it.
Those capabilities are often built over years of working with people, making decisions, getting some of them right, getting some of them wrong and learning from both.
That is experience.
The strongest candidate may not have the neatest CV
This is where I think employers have a real opportunity.
I’ve spent years encouraging business leaders to think more creatively about talent, yet recruitment processes can still inadvertently favour people whose careers follow the most conventional path.
Someone who has changed sectors can be overlooked. Someone returning after a career break can be overlooked. Someone whose job title does not exactly match the vacancy can be overlooked.
And older workers can still encounter assumptions about ambition, adaptability or technology that simply should not be made.
The CIPD has highlighted that older workers are staying in the labour market for longer but continue to face barriers to mobility and reskilling. Its longer-term analysis also points to substantial replacement demand across the UK economy as experienced people leave occupations and employers need others to take their place.
That should make employers think. Because somebody with 20 or 30 years of experience does not just bring technical knowledge, they may bring perspective.
They may have seen what happens when a business grows too quickly. They may have managed teams through difficult periods. They may understand customers in a way that cannot be learned from a manual. They may know how to influence senior stakeholders, develop younger colleagues and navigate situations they have encountered many times before.
Those are significant business assets.
This isn’t about experience versus potential
There is another important point here.
Championing experience should never mean closing the door on younger talent, because businesses need both.
We absolutely need to create opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers. In fact, one of the concerns around increasing automation is what happens if businesses remove too many entry-level roles — because those roles have traditionally been where people learn, make mistakes, build confidence and eventually develop the judgement we later describe as “experience”.
Research from the CIPD has already shown employers considering how AI could affect headcount, with junior and lower-level professional roles particularly exposed.
That creates an interesting challenge.
If we automate the work through which people traditionally gain experience, how do we develop the experienced workforce of the future?
Employers will need to think carefully about mentoring, development, progression and knowledge transfer.
That is where multi-generational teams could become incredibly powerful.
Pair digital confidence and new thinking with deep experience and organisational knowledge, and you have something far more valuable than either in isolation.
Recruitment needs to look beyond the keyword match
AI is also changing recruitment itself. Recruiters and employers now have tools capable of searching enormous volumes of information and identifying candidates extremely quickly. That can be brilliant.
But we must be careful not to confuse faster matching with better recruitment.
Recruitment has never just been about finding someone whose CV matches a job description.
It is about understanding people. Understanding businesses. Understanding why someone succeeded in one environment and whether they are likely to succeed in another. Understanding what motivates them. Understanding what an employer genuinely needs — sometimes beyond what is written in the original brief.
Technology can help us reach the answer. But human judgement still plays a huge role in determining whether it is the right answer.
That is why I believe AI should allow good recruiters to become more human, not less.
If technology removes administration and repetitive searching, we can spend more time talking to people, challenging assumptions, advising clients and discovering the experience and potential that a CV alone may never reveal.
What should employers do differently?
For employers, I would start with three questions.
- Are you hiring for what somebody has done — or for what they can contribute?
A candidate may not have followed the obvious career route, but their transferable experience could be exactly what your organisation needs.
- Could your recruitment process be unintentionally filtering experienced people out?
Job adverts, salary assumptions, application systems and even language such as “energetic”, “digital native” or “recent graduate” can shape who feels a role is intended for.
- Are you valuing judgement as highly as technical capability?
Technical skills matter. But increasingly, technology itself can support technical execution. The ability to decide what should be done, why it should be done and what the consequences might be is another matter entirely.
Experience may become one of our most valuable skills
Nobody knows exactly how AI will reshape every occupation.
What we do know is that businesses will continue to need people capable of making good decisions, building trusted relationships, solving complicated problems and dealing with the situations that do not fit neatly into an algorithm.
And those abilities are often strengthened by experience.
So perhaps the future of recruitment is not about choosing between new technology and experienced people.
Perhaps it is about recognising how powerful the combination can be.
We should absolutely embrace AI. We should develop new skills. We should give emerging talent opportunities to grow. But we should also stop assuming that progress automatically means leaving experience behind.
Because in a world where information is increasingly easy to access, knowing what to do with it could become one of the most valuable skills of all. And experience might just be about to make a comeback.