This year’s MAD//Fest theme is The Human Touch, and for a talent business, it’s hard to think of a better one. Hiring is the most human thing an organisation does. It’s the moment you decide who sits beside you and who carries your culture forward.

And yet hiring has never been more tempting to automate.

AI can write the advert, sift applications and rank a shortlist. Used well, that’s a gift. Used carelessly, it strips the humanity out of the one process that needs it most. The answer isn’t to reject technology, but to be deliberate about where the human touch belongs.

Here are the three principles we live by – and, at the end, how your business could win a completely free hire at MAD//Fest this July.

1. Let AI handle the noise, not the judgement

AI has a brilliant role in modern hiring: clearing the noise. Parsing hundreds of applications, handling the basics, scheduling, surfacing patterns a tired eye would miss at 6pm on a Friday. That frees your people up for the work only they can do.

The mistake is letting the machine make the call. An algorithm can tell you who matches a keyword. It can’t tell you who’ll thrive in your team, or who interviewed nervously but will be brilliant in the role. Keep AI on the admin. Keep humans on the decision.

2. Screen for the things a CV can’t show you

A CV tells you what someone has done. It rarely tells you who they are, why they move, or whether they’ll fit. The best hires are almost never the best CVs, they’re the right people, and you only find them by screening properly.

It won’t show you someone’s drive, their resilience, the determination to keep going when a project gets hard, whether they’ll show up on time every day, or the flair they’ll bring to a brief. Those things only reveal themselves face to face, when you can read between the lines and get under the bonnet of who a person really is.

That’s where structured, consistent screening earns its place. It’s more effort than scanning a document, and that effort is precisely the point. It’s where the human touch does the decisive work.

3. Treat candidates like people, start to finish

Every candidate is a person who has chosen to spend their time on you. Reply to them. Tell them where they stand. Give feedback when you can. How you treat those who don’t get the job says as much about your business as how you treat those who do, and word travels.

That’s the human touch in its simplest form: remembering there’s a human on the other side of every application.

Win a free hire for your business

Get those three right, and technology gives you more time for people, not less. That’s worth celebrating, which is exactly what we’ll do at MAD//Fest this July.

As the Official Talent Partner, we’re bringing back the ever-popular whack-a-mole, with magnums of wine for the daily winners. But this year we’ve raised the stakes. For the first time ever, we’re giving away a completely free hire.

Play, enter the draw, and one lucky business will walk away with a hire fully sourced, screened and placed, at no cost to them. Give us the brief, we’ll find your person.

And make no mistake, this is a serious prize. It saves thousands in recruitment fees, and the right hire won’t just pay for itself, they can bring many times that back in revenue and momentum. That’s the real value of getting talent right.

Come and find us on our stand, have a go, and let’s talk about what the human touch really means for your next hire. We can’t wait to see you there.