Tom built his career placing engineers through the dot-com bust, the 2008 crash, and the cloud hiring boom, and says the current AI-driven shift is the fastest he's seen. He runs a small independent recruiting desk in London and writes from that vantage point: real requisitions, real client conversations, real rejected candidates. He's blunt about which 'AI skills' on a CV actually move a hiring decision and which are noise. His column leans on anonymized data from his own placement pipeline.
Covers: technical recruiting trends, interview screening for AI skills, UK tech hiring market, CV and resume signals
Credentials: Chartered member, CIPD
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As teams choose among hundreds of models and providers, the valuable skill is designing a defensible system for matching intelligence, cost, speed, reliability, and risk to each task.
August 20, 2026
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Every AI training cluster ships with a tiny, always-on computer that predates the AI boom by a decade and is barely audited — which is exactly why hardware and out-of-band security is turning into a real job.
August 6, 2026
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Companies don't need someone who can "prompt an agent" anymore — they need someone who can build the permissions, adapters, and interfaces that let an agent operate safely inside real systems, and that's turning into a distinct engineering role.
August 5, 2026
