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    Your Brief Says "AI Skills". SEEK Says That Phrase Is Doing Almost Nothing

    08/09/2026
    Your Brief Says "AI Skills". SEEK Says That Phrase Is Doing Almost Nothing

    SEEK's July Employment Report has a line most hiring managers will miss if they only read the national ad decline.

    Job ads that reference AI skills rose 94.1 percent over the year and 2.8 percent in the month. They now show up in 3.7 percent of New Zealand ads, against 2.1 percent in Australia. Inside that category, the fastest-growing ask was not "can use ChatGPT". It was AI ethics and governance, up 368.8 percent year on year. Agentic AI rose 118.6 percent. Generative AI rose 77.0 percent.

    Those are SEEK's numbers, not ours. The recruitment read is simpler: a lot of organisations have moved from dabbling with tools to needing people who can supervise, govern, and ship AI work. The briefs we see have not always caught up.

    What a vague AI line does to your pile

    Underutilisation sat at 13.8 percent in the June 2026 quarter, which is 440,000 people. Stats NZ. In a market that crowded, "AI skills required" invites almost everyone who has ever opened a chatbot, and it still fails to describe the person you actually need.

    That is not a criticism of your last ad. It is what happens when a new skill category grows faster than the language used to hire for it. We wrote last week about how to get a usable shortlist when everyone is applying (https://findrecruitment.co.nz/insights/how-to-get-a-usable-shortlist-when-everyone-is-applying). This is the AI-shaped version of the same problem.

    SEEK also notes where those AI mentions concentrate: 16.7 percent of ICT ads, 9.2 percent of marketing and communications ads, and 8.2 percent of consulting and strategy ads. Outside those pockets, the phrase is still rare. If you are hiring in ICT, marketing, or strategy in Auckland or Wellington, you are competing in the loudest part of that shift.

    A five-question brief before you post

    Worth doing with the hiring manager before the ad goes live, not after CV number 80.

    1. Name the work, not the buzzword. "Own the AI use-policy and model-risk checklist for a customer-facing chatbot in a NZ bank" will pull a cleaner pile than "strong AI skills". The first one is a job people can match themselves against. The second is a magnet for noise.

    2. Say which AI you mean. Ethics and governance, agentic systems, generative tooling, data science, prompt design for a specific stack, or change management around adoption are different roles. SEEK's growth rates are not interchangeable. Pick one primary and one secondary. Put both in the first five lines.

    3. Split must-haves from nice-to-haves, and mean it. If they cannot do the job without hands-on experience governing generative tools in a regulated environment, that is a must-have. "Curious about AI" is not. Mixing the two is how a strong governance person gets parked behind someone who listed Copilot on a CV.

    4. Say what evidence you will accept. A shipped pilot, a policy they wrote, a model they evaluated, a vendor they selected, a risk register they own. In this market, evidence beats adjectives. Candidates who have done real work can point to it quickly. Candidates who have not will struggle with a concrete ask, which is useful.

    5. Say contract or permanent in the first line. We are still seeing contract demand pick up in tech and digital delivery, especially in financial services and professional services, while permanent headcount stays more cautious. If the AI work is a six-month build, say so. People can self-select, and you get a pile that matches how you are actually hiring.

    Two knockout questions that usually help

    Keep them must-haves only.

    • "Have you owned AI ethics, governance, or model-risk work in a live product or regulated environment in the last two years? If yes, name the product and your part."

    • "Have you shipped or evaluated an agentic or generative AI workflow that other people now use? If yes, what broke first and how did you fix it?"

    Neither question is designed to trick anyone. Both are designed to separate people who have done the work from people who have read about it.

    What "good" looks like in the first 48 hours

    A good AI brief in this market still gets plenty of applications. By the end of day two you should be able to name a handful of people you would interview, and a clear reason the rest are out. That is a usable shortlist.

    If the pile is still shapeless, it is usually one sentence doing the inviting. Replace "AI skills essential" with the actual work. That small change has a lot of leverage.

    We have written separately for candidates about getting noticed by AI screening tools (https://findrecruitment.co.nz/insights/how-to-get-noticed-by-ai-screening-tools). Hiring managers sit on the other side of that pipe: clearer briefs help the right people recognise themselves, and they save your team from reading CVs that were never going to convert.

    If you want a second pair of eyes on an AI-related brief before it goes live, or you want to know how similar roles are actually filling in Auckland and Wellington right now, get in touch with the Find team.