Recruiters have made up their minds about AI. So have candidates. The problem is they’ve reached opposite conclusions.

We surveyed Talent Acquisition professionals on how they’re actually using AI day to day, then put the same question to candidates: how does it feel to be on the other side of it? The gap between the two answers is the most important thing happening in hiring right now.

On the recruiter side, AI is everywhere. 85% use it daily, most treat it as a co-pilot, and almost none think it has improved the quality of who they hire. On the candidate side, trust has collapsed. Just 26% believe AI can evaluate them fairly, and 88% walk away with a worse view of an employer after an AI-only rejection.

Then there’s the part nobody is talking about: candidates are using AI too. Two thirds of them are now using it to write the very applications recruiters are screening. The tools are competing with each other, and the human signal is getting harder to find.

This report maps where AI belongs in hiring, where it’s quietly doing damage, and what the data says TA leaders should do about it before the trust gap widens any further.

Download the full report below.

What’s inside

The full report runs 13 pages across both surveys. You’ll get:

The recruiter benchmark: real adoption data on how TA teams are using AI day to day, which tools actually dominate (it’s not the agents), and why 58% say it’s created a “manual tax” rather than frictionless time savings.

The candidate trust data: where job seekers accept AI, where they reject it outright, and the assessment line they will not let a machine cross.

The AI arms race: how candidates are using the same tools to beat your screening, and what that does to the signal in your pipeline.

The Automate / Blend / Protect framework: a one-page reference mapping every hiring stage to the level of AI candidates will actually tolerate.

Five strategic takeaways for TA leaders, plus the full methodology and demographic breakdown.

For a US technology company, the decision to open a Dublin operation is the easy part. The harder question is what happens next. How fast can you actually grow a team, will the people you hire stay, and can you build the kind of balanced, committed group your parent company expects.

To answer that, we analysed the hiring data of emerging FDI technology companies that set up new Dublin operations with an engineering or sales focus, then layered on our own experience helping companies land and scale here. The findings are encouraging. Teams move through three clear stages from Seed to Core to Grow, companies that transfer a little culture early grow noticeably faster, the local multinational ecosystem hands you a ready-made talent pool, and the people who join tend to stay longer than industry norms would predict.

Growing a Great Team in Dublin lays out what that journey looks like in practice, so you can plan your first three years with realistic expectations rather than guesswork.

Planning your Dublin operation?

Knowing the pattern is useful. Building the team is where it gets real, and the first hires set the tone for everything that follows.

If you are standing up a new Dublin site, working out your Seed and Core hires, or trying to scale toward that first 30 without the cost and lock-in of traditional agencies, the TA.guru team can help. We work as an embedded extension of your business, bringing local market knowledge, access to the FDI talent ecosystem, and the execution to turn a hiring plan into a team on the ground.

Tell us what you are building in Dublin, and we will help you get there faster.

Get in touch or email info@ta.guru

There is a question every founder eventually faces and very few answer well. Not who do I hire next, but how should my whole organisation take shape as we grow.

To find out what the answer looks like in practice, we profiled 1,385 employees across ten of Dublin’s most successful software start-ups and traced how their teams evolved from the early product-only days to a fully built-out organisation. The patterns were remarkably consistent. Engineering leads, sales arrives on a predictable clock, customer teams follow sales, and talent itself shifts from an afterthought to a strategic advantage.

Charting Your Course turns those patterns into a practical hiring blueprint you can hold against your own company, so you can see where you are, what comes next, and where the common scaling mistakes tend to hit.

Reading about hiring patterns is one thing. Building the right team for where your company is heading is another, and that is the harder part.

If you are weighing up your next hires, working out when to bring a function in-house, or trying to scale without the cost and lock-in of either agencies or fixed headcount, the TA.guru team can help. We work as an embedded extension of your business, bringing the strategy, structure and execution to match your plans to your stage of growth.

Tell us where you are and where you want to be, and we will help you chart the path between the two.

Get in touch here or email info@ta.guru to set up a conversation