Me, Myself, and (A)I: AI’s Proper Role in Recruitment for iGaming

Boy, did the AI rollercoaster start fast. We’ve climbed a long way, very quickly, and even felt a few of those stomach-churning drops. We’re far enough in now, I think, that we can loosen those white knuckles a little and take stock – allow both the thrill and the nausea to sink in a bit. So, of all the sights of the metaphorical theme park flying past in a blur, let’s try to focus on just one for a moment.

Recruiters, HR teams, and hiring managers in this industry are keenly aware of both the promise and the pitfalls of automation. After all, iGaming is home to some of the most digitally literate candidates on the market, most of whom can spot a generic, AI-generated message a mile away. The result is a now familiar tension: excitement at the potential to streamline and power up recruitment, coupled with a gnawing unease about what could be lost in the process.

That tension is what we need to address.

Why AI Isn’t the Point

Let me begin with a potentially unpopular opinion: you don’t really care about AI. Not in and of itself. Just as you don’t care deeply about word processors, GPS satellites, or your coffee machine’s inner workings. What you care about is what these tools mean for your work, and for the people doing it alongside you.

First up, AI automation won’t take people out of your business, it will just reprioritise what they’re doing. Most likely, each AI-empowered staff member will be delivering even more tasks, carrying even more responsibility, and becoming more influential in your business. When we talk about hiring in the iGaming industry, we’re talking about the teammates who will be solving bugs at three in the morning, brainstorming your next customer acquisition idea, or managing the compliance stack in 12 languages. Whatever tools they use to do that, these are not faceless profiles; they’re future colleagues and culture carriers.

The right question to address the tension of AI in recruitment, then, is not simply the bland automation question of “How do I do this faster?” Rather, it is the age-old human question: “Who do I want to work with?”

Every Problem Looks Like a Nail

We’re currently in the phase of AI adoption where enthusiasm sometimes outpaces thoughtfulness. The best way to describe it is to tweak an old adage: if your favourite tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

A few years ago, every database wanted to be a blockchain. Today, every step of the recruitment journey wants to be AI-enhanced. Many applicant tracking systems and recruitment agencies now offer features that promise to:

• Write job descriptions for you

• Automatically screen CVs

• Craft personalised outreach emails

• Conduct interviews using AI-generated questions

• Summarise candidate responses and rank applicants

On the flip side, job seekers are turning to AI-powered chatbots to:

• Optimise their CVs based on job specs

• Generate cover letters

• Predict interview questions

• Write perfectly worded answers

In the iGaming space, where many candidates are already developers or tech specialists, the automation arms race risks becoming an echo chamber. Bots writing to bots. Machine-generated CVs being read by machine-generated readers. It creates the illusion of a smooth, modern recruitment process – at the cost of scrubbing away human intuition from the most fundamentally human of processes: building a relationship.

The Danger of Mediocrity at Scale

AI is only as good as the data it learns from—and a lot of that data is, frankly, mediocre. Poorly curated or overly generalised content leads to generic, middle-of-the-road output. And in recruitment, where you’re supposed to be finding the right fit, that’s a serious problem.

There’s a time and place for mass production, and our metaphors reflect that: cookie-cutter, production line, rubber stamp. But recruitment in iGaming? That’s not it. You’re not hiring paper clips. You’re building complex teams to operate in highly regulated, globally distributed environments. You need specialists. Creatives. Problem solvers. Cultural contributors.

That requires hand-crafted, not mass-manufactured.

Automating the right tasks, like scheduling or filtering obvious mismatches, can create space for you to focus more deeply on the conversations that matter. But when the human element is stripped away in favour of speed and uniformity, you’re left with a process that’s efficient but not effective.

Where AI Works

None of this is to say that AI doesn’t have a valuable place in recruitment. It absolutely does.

At our firm, we use AI tools daily: to help draft content (yep, including this article), spot patterns in data, and improve the candidate experience. We’ve absolutely built AI capabilities into our applicant tracking system. We are, however, crystal clear about the boundaries.

Don’t try to automate connection or intuition. Instead, use AI tools to give yourself more time to exercise those qualities.

Use AI to:

• Eliminate repetitive manual tasks

• Ensure consistency in basic communications

• Quickly summarise large volumes of candidate information

• Highlight possible red flags or areas for deeper inquiry

But don’t use it to:

• Replace personal engagement

• Shortcut the process of understanding candidate motivation

• Make hiring decisions without human input

• Reduce every job or person to just a set of keywords

Candidates Can Tell

One thing that’s often underestimated is just how perceptive candidates, especially those in tech and iGaming, have become. They can tell when a message is AI-generated – yes, even if you remove all the em dashes, as I (manually) did in this article! They know when they’re talking to a bot. And if they’re using AI themselves, they’ll be especially attuned to the telltale signs of robotic communication.

That doesn’t create a “gotcha” moment; it creates a trust gap.

If a candidate senses that the hiring process is impersonal, they may assume the culture is too, and in a competitive market, that can be the difference between an accepted offer and a silent dropout.

Recruitment as Relationship

Ultimately, recruitment is about relationship-building. It’s about finding not just someone who can do the job, but someone who wants to do it, aligns with your values, and will thrive in your environment.

That’s particularly important in the iGaming industry, where regulatory changes, fast-paced growth, and evolving tech stacks mean you’re often hiring for potential, adaptability, and culture fit rather than simply a static list of skills. Indeed, as AI gets exponentially better at coding, drafting, and other specialist skills, these soft skills only become a larger part of the hiring decision.

AI can help you get to that conversation faster. But it can’t replace it.

Human Conversations, Supercharged

So where does this leave us? Use AI where it makes you faster, sharper, or more consistent, but always ask whether it’s helping you have more human conversations or fewer.

Recruitment isn’t going to be AI-free any more than it’s going to be email-free. The tools are here to stay. The challenge is not to resist them, but to use them in ways that preserve what matters most.

In recruitment, what matters most is people, and the best AI tool in the world still can’t shake someone’s hand, look them in the eye, and ask, “What do you really want from this role?”

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Author Bio: Graeme is the co-founder of Van Kaizen, the world's largest and most diverse gaming talent firm, which has specialised technology recruiters based on six continents, across every major time zone, and speaking two dozen languages.

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