AI in Recruitment: Transforming Public Sector Hiring with Andy Headworth

The public sector might not be the first place you expect to see AI innovation in hiring, but Andy Headworth and his team at HMRC are proving otherwise. In this episode of the Hiring Excellence with Johnny Campbell podcast, Andy shares how the UK’s tax authority is using AI to streamline recruitment and enhance the candidate experience, often outpacing the private sector.

With tools built in house for sourcing, job description creation, and location insights, HMRC is reducing admin, improving quality, and setting a new benchmark for hiring efficiency. From a team of just two people and a budget of less than 100 dollars, Andy has helped launch scalable solutions that are already making a real impact.

Timestamps:

Also available on: LinkedIn, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts!

Key Takeaways

1. Empower Hiring Managers with AI-Generated Job Specs

One of the first challenges HMRC tackled was the inconsistency and inefficiency in job descriptions. Andy and his team created an internal tool called Skills Scribe that uses a custom language model trained on public content to help hiring managers create tailored, brand-aligned job ads and interview guides.

The results have been game changing. It takes less than five minutes to create a fully aligned, on-brand job pack with suggested behaviors, social copy, hashtags, and even interview questions. It is saving time and improving candidate quality by making job ads more engaging and accurate.

2. Build AI Tools Without Breaking the Budget

You don’t need a massive vendor or a huge budget to get started. Andy shared how tools like MindStudio helped his team build usable, scalable products for hiring teams. For less than 100 dollars and a few weeks of work, they created solutions that are already helping over 160 hiring managers.

By keeping it simple and user focused, the HMRC team avoided months of procurement and rolled out working solutions quickly. That speed and agility has become a competitive advantage in the wider civil service.

3. Location Intelligence Helps Plan Smarter Recruitment

HMRC’s Places for Growth initiative uses AI to analyze local talent markets. Their internal tool scrapes available data on employment trends, education, salaries, mobility, and more to give a real-time snapshot of each recruitment location.

Hiring teams can ask the tool anything from “Where are the data analysts?” to “Who else is hiring in Manchester right now?” This helps recruiters, planning teams, and even government departments make better, faster decisions about where to invest and scale.

4. AI Sifting Speeds Up Hiring Without Removing the Human Touch

Candidate sifting is one of the most resource heavy parts of the recruitment process. For a recent role with over 200 applicants, it took eight panels of three people a full day to review applications manually. With AI, it took nine minutes.

Importantly, this AI does not make the hiring decision. Instead, it removes clearly unqualified candidates and gives recruiters a smaller, high quality pool to review. And because it evaluates each application individually, candidates receive detailed, personalized feedback on why they were not selected and what they could do to improve.

5. Adoption and Change Management Are the Next Big Hurdles

AI tools can work brilliantly, but only if people use them. Andy noted that not all recruiters on his team are fully comfortable using AI yet. The next step is building confidence, training, and mindset shifts that support adoption at scale.

The goal is not to replace recruiters or remove human decisions. It is to free up their time so they can focus on building relationships, assessing for quality, and making better hiring decisions.

Conclusion

AI is not just for the tech giants anymore. HMRC is showing that innovation in hiring is possible in any organization with the right mindset, a clear use case, and a willingness to experiment.

Andy Headworth and his team are leading the way in public sector recruitment by proving that AI can save time, improve outcomes, and make work better for everyone involved.

Whether you’re a public or private sector leader, this episode is a blueprint for how to turn bold ideas into working solutions. And it all started with a few people, a free tool, and a big ambition.

Interested in hearing the full conversation?

Catch this episode and more on LinkedIn, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.