AI impact on Ireland's job recruitment emerges with routine production roles being absorbed

Demand has shifted decisively towards strategy and project management. 

Professional employment market closed 2025 on a stable footing, with hiring activity easing seasonally.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping roles across Irish businesses rather than removing them outright, but it is changing who gets hired and at what level, according to Morgan McKinley Ireland.

In its quarterly employment monitor, the recruiter said the marketing sector in Ireland has seen one of the clearest examples of AI-driven displacement with content writing increasingly deprioritised as AI tools absorbed routine production work. They said some candidates reported that they were required to justify the value of human input over automation during hiring processes. As a result, content-focused and junior roles continued to contract, while demand shifted decisively towards strategy, performance marketing, and project management capability. 

"Increased candidate availability intensified competition and compressed salaries, signalling a structural reset rather than a cyclical slowdown, with graduate pathways narrowing outside large, well-resourced brands," Trayc Keevans, Global Foreign Direct Investment Director at Morgan McKinley, said.

Their analysis based on job vacancies and newly registered candidates found that graduate intake levels with firms became more diversified in the fourth quarter as automation and AI reduced the need for lower-value transactional roles in professional services firms. It also accelerated the shift towards systems expertise, analytical capability, and commercial insight across a broader range of sectors.

Despite the changes in AI, Morgan McKinley said the professional employment market closed 2025 on a stable footing, with hiring activity easing seasonally in the final quarter while remaining broadly consistent with the same period last year. 

While professional job vacancies declined by 11.9% quarter on quarter, they were just 1.9% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2024.

They said new candidate registrations rose 4.3% quarter on quarter despite a modest rise in the unemployment rate to 5%, suggesting a shift towards more intentional job search behaviour rather than labour market stress.

"The Irish labour market has entered a more disciplined and mature phase. Employers are not pulling back, but they are being far more deliberate about where they hire," Ms Keevans said.