Is the process for hiring marketers broken? A quarter of marketers rate their recent recruitment process as negative, according to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey, while 42% of marketers have been ghosted after interview. This comes after two years of redundancy, restructures and slow growth.

Recruitment challenges continue to impact many marketers’ job search experiences, with an excessive number of interview stages and a lack of communication cited as major issues. 

In the latest edition of The Marketing Week Podcast, senior reporter Molly Innes was joined by former Asahi chief marketing officer Grant McKenzie, Lauren Spearman, marketing consultant, careers content creator and Marketing Week 2024 Changemaker, and Suz Bannister and Lamees Butt, co-founders of Riser, an AI-powered recruitment startup. 

The Marketing Week Podcast: Is AI making recruitment worse for candidates?

Recruitment on the whole is facing challenges in the current macro-economic environment. However, despite a poor outlook for marketing recruitment intention, over half (55%) of marketers globally say they are actively looking for a new job, according to data from recruiter Michael Page. The figure for the UK is 44%. 

“We’re seeing more and more redundancies in the market,” says Spearman. “We’re seeing hiring freezes and we’re seeing hiring teams super, super stretched. They’re often the first to be cut when we’re seeing redundancies.” 

As internal hiring teams are stretched thin, they’re likely putting less effort into processes – where they are hiring – because of time constraints.  

However, how a business recruits reflects its employer brand.

“I really see recruitment as a form of marketing. The way you hire tells the world what kind of business you are,” adds Spearman.  

Not enough jobs

Last month, more than a fifth (22.4%) of marketers said they expected marketing job cuts at their brands in the following quarter, according to exclusive IPA Bellwether data for Marketing Week.    

Just 17.1% expect employment to be higher in the next quarter, a drop from 19.2% responding to April’s survey. 

The majority (60.6%) expect staffing levels to remain the same for the next three months, up 10 percentage points from the last quarter (50.6%).   

This means fewer roles, less movement by marketers in employment and candidates facing an uphill battle to get in front of brands inundated with applications.  

Marketing recruitment intention continues to ‘deteriorate’  

“It’s very tough for the simple fact that there are far too few positions and far too many applicants,” says McKenzie. 

He suggests the number of applicants per role has become “extreme”, as recruiters report receiving hundreds – if not thousands – of CVs.  

A key problem, McKenzie suggests, is the large number of people applying who are “fakers” – meaning they don’t fit the role or are exaggerating their experience to get in front of hiring manager. What can recruiters do with 800 applications? 

“[For candidates] if you’re a real talent and you really meet the criteria, you’re one of 800. That, statistically, is extremely difficult,” he adds. 

Is how brands hire outdated?

The Curriculum Vitae (CV) was invented by Leonardo da Vinci in 1482, when he wrote a letter outlining his skills and experience as he sought employment.  

This fact is “shocking and surprising”, says Butt, given the prominent role CVs still play in recruitment today.

“It definitely needs an upgrade,” she argues.  

Butt and Bannister want to upgrade recruitment via Riser, the hiring platform they founded last year to match candidates with businesses, leaning on the format of dating apps to foster career connections.  

“[We] were dealing with a very archaic system that wasn’t producing the results that businesses are looking for and equally that talent are looking for,” she explains.  

Marketing recruitment intent slumps to four-year low

They believe using technology and AI effectively can make recruitment more human. The platform allows candidates and hirers to ‘match’, with 48 hours to move on the process. Instead of a traditional CV, both upload videos advertising themselves or their jobs, which is scanned through the AI to pull out character traits.  

“Traditionally, the hiring process has been led by skills and experience. And more and more, we’re seeing the rise of the importance of soft skills, especially in an AI age, when a lot of roles are becoming automated,” says Bannister.  

“The process itself needs a bit of a rejig to put the gut feel up front again.”

At the moment, lots of processes start with a company generating its job description using AI, then candidates use AI to edit their CVs and generate cover letters, before being put through an applicant tracking system.

“AI is chatting to AI” is how Bannister puts it.  

Are hiring processes broken?

Beyond AI’s immediate problems in recruitment, other issues are having a big impact. Indecision from brands and multiple interview stages are dragging out processes. 

Many candidates have complained about the number of interview stages, with some reaching nine or 10.  

“I don’t mind 10 interviews if it’s in one month,” says McKenzie. “So, you give me two a week, or three a week, and it takes a month – that’s fine.”  

The issue is those interviews dragging out with large gaps of no communication in-between. It’s a “consequence” of the situation with online interviews the norm, he suggests. Before the rise of Zoom and Teams, candidates would have a phone call followed by an in-person interview, meeting multiple people from a company in a day.

‘Companies want a superhero’: How bad recruitment is impacting marketing

Now, the technology means brands can interview candidates at any moment and drag the process out.  

Spearman experienced long waits between interviews, up to seven weeks, during her last job search in 2023.

“Yes, for the hiring manager, they’ve got other priorities, but for the candidates, especially if you’re out of work or being made redundant, that is so important to you and to not be treated with that level of respect, to have that communication, it can be really disheartening,” she says.  

Spearman believes brands should give candidates as much information up front before the process – such as how many days in the office, salary, flexibility – because people “self select out” of processes.  

HR teams need to “hold themselves accountable”, says McKenzie, because in his experience they want to own the employer branding and process instead of marketing. Candidates are often customers too, he adds, something brands need to remember.   

“I would love to see more transparency within the process,” says Spearman. “So more transparency in terms of what the role is, what you’ll be doing, what it looks like, what the salary is and also what the process is.”  

Brands should start with a “clear brief”, says McKenzie.

“What are the skills and experiences you want? What personality, style? Some people call it ‘culture fit’. Be explicit about that, because otherwise I don’t understand what you mean,” he says. 

McKenzie urges brands to stop wasting time, to train their staff better to do more effective interviewing and commit to making a decision in a set time period.  

“It’s actually called a simple code of conduct. It’s quite straightforward when you say it,” he adds. 

Check out the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Acast.