The organisation
Morson Group, founded in 1969, is a collection of businesses offering consultancy, design, technology and people solutions. The certification body Best Companies ranked Morson Group within its top 50 Best Large Companies to Work For list, last November.
The problem
The Morson Group team needs to deliver services effectively, and at speed – particularly when resourcing, recruiting and consulting – for clients grappling with a fast-changing business landscape. For the Manchester-headquartered business, being able to deliver high-quality candidate lists to clients while reducing the time to hire would be a clear boon to both itself and its customers.
“We needed to both enhance the existing customer journey and the experience of our recruiters,” explains Katie Winstanley, Morson’s group HR director. But traditional candidate profiling and list building takes time, even for senior recruiters and experienced talent managers.
It’s a problem that intensifies the earlier in a career the recruiter is. This can put further pressure on HR to develop early career recruiters, which takes time away from acutely business-oriented tasks.
Artificial intelligence (AI) appeared to be the solution to Morson's problems: candidate list building and talent assessment is, after all, a data sourcing and parsing exercise, whether it is done by a human or a machine.
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The theory was that AI could sift through candidate and job board data at a faster rate than human recruiters, assessing viability aligned to client needs. This would benefit customers but also give recruiters time back to upskill or deliver on high-value tasks. “[AI] could streamline the process using a large language model [LLM] guided by a recruiter brief,” says Winstanley.
For this techie solution to be effective though, Morson’s HR team required buy-in from staff to improve delivery. Job frameworks and HR strategy also would have to be developed, to better get a sense of the skillsets that recruiters would need, and to ensure that the right job roles exist for the business’ future needs.
The method
Partnering with the US software firm Palantir, Morson developed an LLM which enables a recruiter to use prompts to search the internal CRM alongside job boards at the same time, speeding up the sourcing process. “Previously this task might have taken the recruiter days,” says Winstanley, adding that the LLM also rates candidates, so that recruiters and customers can assess job applicability for clients.
It’s a full-service recruitment tool. “[The AI] enables recruiters to do their job faster, searching multiple places at the same time, helping to shortlist, providing specs to clients and even formatting output to take away error rates,” she adds, noting that all of this will improve as time goes on.
Of course, this was piloted at first. Morson’s HR team used feedback from steering groups to inform a phase one rollout early last year. “We wanted to know what to do differently, and how it worked in practice,” Winstanley says. “We found it is only as good as the data you give it, so the data integrity piece is critical.”
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The efficiency process doesn’t involve taking the human recruiter out the loop. The Morson team was keen to retain human oversight, to ensure that the AI didn’t overlook candidates based on keywords, socioeconomic factors or technical literacy. “Our recruiters still do checks,” says Winstanley, “but as it stands, it doesn’t look biased.”
Rather than using AI to reduce recruiter headcount, the Morson team used a multi-strand communication and personal development strategy to work with recruiters to win buy-in and reimagine effectiveness and productivity with an AI partner. To win buy-in for this productivity-enhancing tool, the HR team made an initial big-ticket pitch at Morson’s annual conference, about how the AI-enabled move would enable individual employees to develop skills. This was followed by conversations with individuals about how they use AI, and active listening about how staff were engaging.
“We asked whether we can provide one-on-one support,” she adds, emphasising that offering consistent support is vital as recruitment job roles change over the next couple of years. “We’re working with the learning and development team to upskill people to different roles.”
The result
Since the full rollout in April, Morson has seen a 60% cut in time-to-hire across key sectors. The AI tool is being used across all levels, from entry-level to executive staff, and across all recruiter types, making its impact far-reaching.
Winstanley is almost speechless about the impact that the firm’s AI tool has had. “It’s crazy,” she says, noting the speeds. “When I first saw [the effect] I was silent.
“It’s not changed the life [of a recruiter] but it has allowed for marginal gains. It’s freeing up time, allowing our people to find [candidates] more quickly.”
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Winstanley points to recruiters being freed up for other tasks, developing future-proofed skills and doing higher-value client work as the AI does more of the admin. The tech also allows recruiters to deepen their subject matter expertise, which is critical for the consultancy work that Morson offers.
Not only are recruiters getting more time back, with improved work/life balance, there is a quicker timeline to junior recruits delivering placements for clients (down from six to nine months to, in some cases, one month.) Recruiters are reporting that they are able to fill jobs quicker, thanks to the tech’, and a pilot client highlighted a 10% uptick in CVs received for its job openings.
Having to use more prompts, and working on high-value skills, is changing the nature of recruitment, too: “We’re upskilling people,” explained Winstanley. “More prompt engineering means we’ll recruit differently. We historically had BA graduates but now need more people with BScs, and psychiatrists.”
Looking to the future, Winstanley is hopeful that the benefits won’t stand still. “We’re looking at how to improve the interview process, how to be more agile and how to do it faster,” she says.
“Technology will revolutionise career progression,” she continues. “This will mean new entry-level roles, new reward and compensation strategies and potentially a revolution of roles in recursion. It’s the first tool that has made me think ‘gosh’.”
This article was published in the May/June 2025 edition of HR magazine.
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