AI recruitment UK is currently a noisy market pretending to be a settled one. Job titles appear and vanish. CVs list tools the way they once listed Microsoft Office. Boards ask for “someone who can do AI” as if that were a trade like electrician. Meanwhile the useful hire is still a person who can sit inside a real business — operations, performance, a transformation programme — and make a change that survives contact with customers and constraints.
Viktorija Sherriff’s practice is not a volume shop for that noise. VS Recruitment is a boutique UK headhunter. She starts a named search for a £450 engagement fee and works her own network. She does not scrape job boards. She does not spray CVs because a profile mentioned a model. If you want theatre, there are agencies for that. If you want someone who can ship, that is a search.
The job title is not the brief
Digital transformation roles have always suffered from vague naming. AI has made it worse. “AI lead”, “automation manager”, “head of innovation” can mean a person who has implemented a workflow that saved a team genuine hours, or a person who has run a lunch-and-learn and a pilot that never left a slide. A specialist search starts by refusing to hire the title. What does the week look like. Who do they sit with. What would have to be true in six months for you to call this a success.
That conversation is closer to built sector recruitment than it first appears. In construction you do not hire a “buildings person”. You hire someone who can run a site, a contract, a facility. In AI hiring you should not hire a “tools person”. You hire someone who can change a process in a UK company that already has customers, a board, and a regulator somewhere in the background.
What she looks for, without fake credentials
There is no CSCS card for generative tools, and VS Recruitment will not invent one. Viktorija vets the way she vets digital marketing recruitment: by talking about the work. Has this person shipped something that other people now use. Can they talk to operations without condescension. Do they know the difference between a proof of concept and a process that has an owner. Are they honest about what a model cannot do. Prompts are not a department.
She also looks at where the role actually sits. An AI hire inside a performance team needs to be numerate and commercially literate — the same instincts that matter in PPC recruitment. An AI hire inside a facilities or property business needs to respect how buildings are actually run. A decade in the built sector and in digital/PPC is relevant here. The transformation that sticks is usually the one that understands the existing trade.
Why volume fails this market even faster
A CV spray is always a bit of a lie. In AI hiring it is a louder lie. Keyword matching now returns everyone who attended a webinar. You then interview fluency. The person who can talk about agents, copilots and “the stack” will outscore the person who quietly automated a reconciliation and documented it so a colleague could run it. If your business is not a lab, you want the second person. They will not apply to a generic advert. They will take a call from a headhunter who can describe the work without sounding like a conference.
Confidentiality matters more than people admit. Plenty of UK firms are exploring AI roles without wanting the market to think they are either behind or naive. A network-only approach is built for that. The role is not posted. The conversations are named. The shortlist is short on purpose.
Duties that did not disappear because the role is new
New job titles do not cancel old law. Employers still check right to work, using the process on GOV.UK. How you describe a role and how you select still sits under the Equality Act 2010; the statute is on legislation.gov.uk. If the work touches health and safety systems on a site or in a building, the HSE construction guidance is still the adult reading list — an AI workflow does not replace a dutyholder. VS Recruitment is a headhunter, not your lawyer or your safety adviser. A careful search just does not skip the boring parts.
How to start
Write the work, not the fashion. Sector: AI, or AI sitting on top of built or digital. Role: what you need done. Constraints: in-house or contract, seniority, whether this is confidential. If it is a fit, the £450 fee opens the search and Viktorija works the network. If it is not — if you want a hundred “AI interested” CVs — she will decline. That is the service.
AI recruitment UK will calm down eventually. The businesses that hire well in the meantime will be the ones that treat it as a specialist search, the same way they should already treat construction recruitment and PPC recruitment. If that is the way you want to hire, start a search. A short note is enough. Precision, not volume.