Five lessons from the Winter Olympics on implementing AI in recruitment

Snowboard Cross riders scan three or four bumps ahead at all times. They know the course, they've studied the competition, they're making micro-adjustments based on what's coming up - not just reacting to the next turn. One bad line choice and you're out, with your competitors right behind you ready to slip through.

Most recruitment agencies are riding blind - picking up AI tools reactively without a plan for where they're heading. Stop reacting to every new launch or shiny demo. Map your 3-month AI implementation plan - what gets AI'd first, second, third? Know your line before you commit.

Xtreme games Skiers spend years perfecting a trick (1620 - Kirsty Muir), but on competition day they get one shot to land it. Judges reward difficulty plus execution - doing something basic perfectly gets you nowhere.

Most agencies are treating AI pilots like practice runs. They're not. Pick one high-impact use case - something genuinely ambitious like AI-powered candidate sourcing or automated reference checking - and treat it like your competition run. Perfect it. Make it a differentiator, not just "we use AI too."

I believe that the women who do this are the toughest sports people I have seen live, they fall from 6m up, face plant then get up and get on with it.

Giant Slalom is decided over two runs on different courses. You can nail run one and still lose if you blow run two. What matters is combined performance, not individual brilliance. Most agencies measure AI tools in isolation - brilliant AI screening (run one), but rubbish ATS integration or recruiters who ignore the outputs (run two). Your combined time is terrible.

Stop measuring AI tools separately. Track the metric that actually matters end to end - time to placement, margin per role, candidate quality. If AI shortens longlisting by three days but your interview scheduling is still manual chaos adding five days back, you're losing on combined time.

This one was interesting as the first person down (from Brazil) then was the last person down and won.