AI Hiring Takes Get Stale, Fast

The 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick, joined by Jeff Smith, and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition hiring space, maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found on Talentinsights.hirewell.com.
This week’s topic. Are you ready, Jeff? Yes. Episode 13, AI hiring takes get stale fast. It’s insane. Yeah. These takes about AI specific to our industry. I feel like they evolve so fast that literally what we were discussing. . We just had an AI episode. It’s like half of it’s obsolete. What’s funny is that I think that we were, for the longest time, we were like, we shouldn’t, we didn’t wanna talk about AI because we felt like everyone was doing it and then we’re like, I guess we should finally put our toe in the water here.
But, yeah. So I, it is funny ’cause I was actually, I asked chat [00:01:00] GPT to make me a list of jobs that AI will create. So in my mind, like net new jobs, what new things are gonna come out that AI will create. So it gave me, this is only a part of the list, but, here’s what spit out AI engineer, regulatory analyst for AI data analyst, AI focused, prompt engineer.
AI interaction designer, ai, product manager, AI ethicist, and like a dozen more like that. What’d you notice on that list there, Jeff? So, jobs that already exist, fam? Yeah. I mean, maybe not the ethicist, but look, we know that no one’s spending money on that shit. No one’s actually gonna hiring an ethicist.
Yeah. That’s what anybody’s spending money on, so, yeah. So what I had was I heard someone talking about, ’cause someone tried to make a take, they’re like, well yeah, it’s gonna create more ’cause they were saying, well, construction jobs for data centers and like nuclear power and like, you know, those things are real.
But I’m like, what? I really couldn’t think of anything [00:02:00] else. Those are like, I had no, nothing else to add on except how many more power plants we really need? And how many, or just people who make this, like if they’re building data centers, they were surely building something else before, you know what I mean?
They’re gonna stop building houses most likely. So. Yeah. Well, yeah, we’re gonna have to maybe miners to find more energy for all the consumption that’s gonna happen. Yeah. I thought this was interesting. We had sourced a blog, it was called, “We Realized Our business Model Is Now Obsolete.” And this was crazy.
A company found that in a blind, test. Patients rated AI therapy and therapists as more empathetic and responsive than human therapists. And the realization which will get to the meat of all of this is, their business model, which in this particular use case, charging for human empathy, literally, like that’s what’s being monetized, was now obsolete.
And then you kind of step away. And the broader takeaway is that, you know, these things that we assume are [00:03:00] uniquely human, like empathy and judgment and altruism and all that stuff, go real dystopian. It might not be. Yeah, I mean, that’s the crazy takeaway. If AI can outperform humans in those like soft areas,
a lot of business models are at risk, and the company’s key learning is you. You can’t just adjust. You have to actually reinvent everything. So we’re gonna go through a few things to consider in all this. Yeah. And also, before we even do that, I don’t wanna mention like that’s why sociopaths have success.
They don’t have any human empty, they just pretend like they do. Just like the computers. This answers the whole like, nice guys finish last, right? Our AI sociopath. Anyway. All right, so first. Hiring takes getting stale fast. You’ve probably heard this one. AI won’t replace name your job title, but a, that person with AI will, so like AI won’t replace software engineers, but a software engineer using [00:04:00] AI will or recruiter or a sales person or whatever.
It’s all nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. I might veer a little bit from you on it, but I agree. Like if we’re doing the blanket, it’s nonsense. Last week, Kashi aired this ad on the NBA finals that was entire, like the whole marketing scheme was that it was entirely, created by AI. And we actually used some of that for our content advantage, but absolute banger.
And it cost them two grand. Yeah. And you’ll say, see like a, you know, a video producer using AI did replace an actual video, producer not using AI, but if you take a step back, pull the curtain back, you’re missing the context of like, that, it literally undoubtedly just cut dozens of people.
Like it’s literally taking away jobs, editing, production, you know, the boom mic guy, like all that stuff. Yeah. And you have to. [00:05:00] And there’s another example too. This is something that came out I think in January, ’cause you have to take into account when you’re eliminating those jobs, it’s also, it’s potentially gonna impact like how much you can charge.
So I think it was the Goldman Sachs CEO who said AI can draft 95% of an IPO prospectus in minutes. So do we really think like market forces of supply and demand? Do we really think someone who creates those drafts is gonna get paid the same for doing only 5% of the work? Or do we really think we need 95% of the people who do that work?
I mean, you can’t have it both ways where these things are gonna kind of keep going. Like it’s obviously, it’s just not tenable that we will need the same number of people. And just because you’re using AI doesn’t mean like, it’s not the person that replaced you, it is the AI that replaced you. Yeah.
We’ll wait till we get to the dumbing down of all product and services later in this chat. Like that’s part of it. Yeah. internally here at Hirewell we said like, Hey, said the same thing. AI won’t replace recruiters. Recruiters using [00:06:00] AI will, and we still believe that’s true. But even that three weeks ago, we feel like it’s outdated.
The reality is kind of shifting from AI as this assistive tool like this will help me organize my day better to a literal full rebuilding of all fundamental workflows. It’s not about humans using the tools to speed themselves up. It’s about humans being replaced by fully automated processing that eliminates the need for any of those tasks altogether.
And I think that was the fundamental misunderstanding about a lot of the things that AI, is people, when they first use chat, GPT, they saw it as another tool they can play with. But yes, that AI tool will make you more efficient. But if you can stitch together multiple tools, you’ve probably heard people talking about agents, but no one really knows what’s an AI agent really like, people who make these things do.
But like the average person, it’s just like, ah, I don’t know. But if you can actually take the entire workflow of how you go about your day and replace that with [00:07:00] AI, you have become literally redundant. And the only thing that could potentially save you, and I want to kind of pivot to the next part of this conversation is like attention to detail in a higher quality product.
But here’s the problem. I don’t think anyone cares about quality nearly as much as everyone says they do. No the consumer behavior model like it, it validates this exactly, which is kind of scary. But bottom line, we’re getting used to shittier service. Since the pandemic, everyone even complains about it.
Not even just AI, like take it back from last 10 years, everything’s gotten worse. Sorry. Yep. Customer service is worse. We go out to eat. We all complain that like service is slower, yada, yada, yada. There’s fast fashion. We buy something, we don’t like it. We buy the next thing on Amazon, there’s a prevailing sense that artificial intelligence will do more work.
So we’ll have more time to make things better. Maybe they’re shittier things [00:08:00] though. That’s the problem. And that’s part of the logic behind why people think jobs won’t get lost. And we just disagree fundamentally. As humans, we get more and more used to. That, that it’s been proven over the last 10 years, we get used to lower and lower quality because access to it becomes intrinsically easier.
All I have to say is Amazon. That’s, yeah. There’s the use case. Yeah. Well, taking it back to like business realm, what happened to your inbox is gonna be what happens everywhere. Like poorly customized clutter and eventually no one’s gonna care. Like. I write a lot. I have, I’ve been published before.
I have friends ask me like, how do you find time to write your LinkedIn post? Or when do you do this? I’m like, I don’t know, man. I just sit down and do it 45 minutes before I hit send. I’ve always been, I’ve just, I’ve gotten good at it. I’ve always had a done is better than perfect mindset. I know fully well
whenever I send something, it’s probably 90% of what it could be, [00:09:00] but it’s not worth my time to spend 10 x the amount of time to get that extra 10% better. Yeah. I kind of take that as like, it’s a LinkedIn post? It’s not that important. It’s like the least important thing that I kind of spend any time on.
But I think the problem is, when we do, when you take more and more important things that are happening in the business world. Things you put in front of clients, proposals. I mean the prospectus thing is a perfect example. Prospectus is, yeah. There’s so many things that actually matter more because they’re supposed to be white glove touch items that when you’re having AI do this, like I think it’s gonna become done is better than mediocre.
Like, here’s what AI and people have in common. There’s the reason why I say this. AI and people both suck at attention to detail. Like you can’t say that we’ll have more time to do things because AI is gonna do the work. Not when those things are paying more time proofreading, because like I care about putting out stuff professionally that isn’t crap.
But even I find proofreading to be the [00:10:00] most boring fucking thing in the world. It’s not like everyone’s gonna have AI do all their work to give them extra time to double and triple check it. We just know that’s not gonna actually happen. So you saying that you are exponentially more detail oriented than me and you’re saying it, so if you go down the ladder, it gets way worse.
And like the amount of proofreading you need to do, double checking the work for anything AI creates is insane. Like, you know, the worst job in the world is the person who has to proofread that IPO prospectus. It’s probably hundreds of pages. Like I would gouge my eyes out, like people are gonna half-ass that job.
Like it’s just not something anyone’s gonna want to do. We’re going through it right now. I won’t belabor it, but we’re going through this right now with some of our internal processes, like, oh, it’s great, but we’re still doing these proofread sessions to make sure that it doesn’t sound like a ghost wrote it.
The bottom, someone’s gotta go through this stuff. Proposals, job descriptions, performance review. Performance reviews. Another great example. Like what? [00:11:00] Yeah. Customer support, articles, contracts, et cetera. Like what happened with your inbox will basically happen to everything like you said. So thirdly.
You know, our real world experience. What have we had happen here? Yeah. So here, here’s our last month or so, internally. So Brian, our head of marketing, he’s fantastic. He’s actually built some software. He’s built some end-to-end modeling of how we can redo parts of the recruiting process.
He’s actually tied multiple systems together. Now, here’s the thing, he’s not an engineer. He’s helped create websites before. He is got a good project management background, but he was able to do this stuff in like 24 hours using AI tools like this. Like he’s probably like,
everyone needs, kind of people like this. And I think that’s, having people with an engineering mindset, with a curiosity use AI tools, not just how they can make their own workflow better, but how they can change an entire workflow to automate processes in an organization. Is really what everyone needs to be kind of [00:12:00] thinking about.
I don’t think that many people out there really do. I think most companies are focused on the wrong things. They’re focused on how can we train our team to use AI tools or which tool should we adopt? But the better question, the better thing they should be asking is like, how do we actually make this so it’s not dependent on individual users becoming more efficient?
How do we make it so we actually like automate an entire process or workflow or their entire job description of what we wanna call it for them? Yeah, I think your point is well founded. The skillset is rare. You know, people who can drive AI transformation is, it’s a small pool of individuals that, here at Hirewell, there might be five, maybe less people like Brian, that can really analyze this stuff and do what he did.

And it’s not that others can’t learn it. It’s, you know, going back to the point, it’s that most just don’t want to, and then to double down on it, most organizations can’t even identify who can. Yeah. [00:13:00] So two sides of this. Now, again, still, I don’t think that many people with that mindset exist. But two, I think that organizations that do identify people like that and realize here’s what we wanna do, they, and taking this back to hiring, they’re gonna do everything in their power to not hire anybody.
Yes. To foresee if they can actually automate their entire organization with AI and automated processes, which yeah, it’s gonna get way worse before it gets better. For sure. Yeah. Anyways, final thoughts? What do you got, Jeff? Yeah. The biggest impact of all of this won’t be a tool or feature. It’s gonna be that business model disruption.
The winners are gonna be companies, folks who can redesign how the work happens, not just simply who can use AI to make their current jobs like marginally faster. For hiring, it means prioritizing, adaptability, experimentation, systems, thinking, and it also means accepting that some jobs and entire businesses won’t survive this.
[00:14:00] Yeah. My final thought, again, just repeating myself here. I think we’re really headed towards an era of more and more things that we see outta companies being more and more mediocre in every aspect. Please, God, please God, don’t make idiocracy a thing. An actual goal, I could be proven wrong in a very short amount of time,
’cause as we said, our takes on AI keep changing. Anyways, yeah, we are short on clock. That’s wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning in to The 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insight series, which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com, as well as YouTube, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify and Amazon.
Jeff, thanks again as always, everyone out there. We’ll see you soon.