Skip to content
man bot
Compare

Technicians and associate professionals · code 3333

Employment agents and contractors

AI can match CVs to vacancies. Persuading a great candidate to move is still recruitment.

Matching jobseekers with vacancies is the one task AI could take a fair chunk of. Finding workers, advising on training and talking to employers are mostly out of its reach.

What they actually do (and what else they get called)

Employment agents and contractors match jobseekers with vacancies, find workers for employers and contract labour for particular projects at the request of enterprises and other organizations including government and other institutions, or find places for jobseekers for a commission. Tasks include - (a) matching jobseekers with vacancies; (b) finding workers for vacant posts against a commission from the employer or worker; (c) discussing with employers the skills and other characteristics required of the workers to be employed or contracted; (d) finding workers with appropriate skills, and undertaking the necessary formalities according to national or international regulations and requirements; (e) ensuring that the employment contracts meet legal requirements and signing them; (f) advising on training schemes. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Employment agent - Job placement officer - Labour contractor Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Careers adviser - 2423 - Occupational analyst - 2423 - Literary agent - 3339 - Musical performance agent - 3339 - Sports agent - 3339 - Theatrical agent - 3339

  • employment agent

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

61 / 100

Mostly holds up against AI

AI can take a few chores off your plate, but most of the day is still yours.

Not the odds you keep your job. It's how much of the everyday work still needs a person, out of 100.

← Robot's turf Human's turf →

The ILO's official verdict: Minimal Exposure

321 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 6 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 39 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 39 = 61.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Minimal Exposure”: A few tasks are affected, but the heart of the job isn't.

This job rates 38.3 out of 100 for how hands-on it is. The score above only looks at AI tools, not robots, but for work this far from the physical that matters less.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Employment agents and contractors 61

v

Go on, try your partner's job. Or your sibling's. We won't tell.

Man v Bot

Where the bot helps, and where the human wins

Bot

What AI takes

The routine stuff. You may not miss it.

  • Matching candidates to vacancies.
  • Screening and shortlisting.
  • Contract paperwork.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Understanding what employers really want.
  • Persuading and advising candidates.
  • Negotiating offers.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • AI-generated applications flooding in.
  • Rules on AI in hiring.
  • Skills-based hiring.

Written by a human, from the ILO's task ratings below. Yes, we see the irony. Read it as one person's take.

Meet your two rivals

They're not the same machine. AI software can only reach the parts of a job done on a screen or in words. A chatbot can't climb a ladder. A robot might, one day, if it doesn't fall off.

The AI

Lives in a screen. Never had to fix a boiler.

Threat level: Medium

51 could do without you

It could take over some of the work, and help with more. It could help with 68 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Lower

38 how hands-on

Not much of this job needs hands, so the robot can sit this one out.

So could a robot do the physical part?

Less than half of this job is hands-on. Robots still matter, but for a smaller part of the work, so we don't sort it any further.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 15 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

38 How
hands-on
15 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Less than half hands-on

The small print

They aren't a robot score, and nothing on this page is. Nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to put a number on it. These are the closest thing we have: how hands-on the job is, and how much fiddly, cramped work it takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

From O*NET, averaged across 2 US jobs .

finger skill 21.4 · hand skill 18.7 · cramped spaces 5.8 · averaged · rule: hands-on under 50

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

The job, task by task

Every job is really a bundle of tasks. Here's this one unpacked, with how much of each AI could do, out of 100. The score is the average, and averages can hide a lot.

AI's favourite task here scores 56, against an average of 39. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 56

    Matching jobseekers with vacancies

    Medium
  2. 41

    Advising on training schemes.

    Low
  3. 36

    Finding workers for vacant posts against a commission from the employer or worker

    Low
  4. 35

    Ensuring that the employment contracts meet legal requirements and signing them

    Low
  5. 34

    Finding workers with appropriate skills, and undertaking the necessary formalities according to national or international regulations and requirements

    Low
  6. 33

    Discussing with employers the skills and other characteristics required of the workers to be employed or contracted

    Low

6 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Sidekick or replacement?

A tool that makes you faster is a very different thing from one that does the task while you watch. Jobs and Skills Australia measured the two separately, which is handy.

AI helps you
68
AI does it for you
51

Sidekick wins, by 17 points.

How good a match is this?

One Australian job matches this one closely, so this is about as reliable as it gets here.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 2231

Meanwhile, in real life…

Everything else here is about what AI could do. This is what people actually did. When they asked Claude for help with this kind of work, did they hand the whole task over, or roll their sleeves up and work through it together?

Tiny sample alert This job makes up 0.03% of all the conversations: a tiny slice. People using AI for a job isn't the same as AI being able to do it.

Out of every 100 conversations

58
42

worked through it together handed it over

The small print

Anthropic publishes this about its own product, and it doesn't feed into any score here. These are people who use Claude, not workers in general, so little use here doesn't mean AI can't reach the job.

These two add up to 100. The bars elsewhere on the page don't, because each is scored on its own, so we don't put them side by side.

observed use Anthropic Economic Index release 2026-06-26, period beginning 2026-05-01 data 0.8-observed-use 2026-05-01 · Anthropic, about its own product

So, should recruitment agents be worried?

Short answer: not much. Some of the chores will change, and good riddance.

Parts of it are changing. Matching jobseekers with vacancies is rated Medium; training advice, finding workers, contracts, formalities and understanding employers' needs are Low. Job platforms and AI matching take on more; relationships and negotiation stay human.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing.

Where this job could lead

None of the new jobs we've written up start from here yet. Could be you're the first. See the jobs AI is creating →

How are the neighbours doing?

There are 82 jobs in the “Technicians and associate professionals” family, averaging 65. This one is below the family average.

Pit this against any other job →