Every few decades, a part of human infrastructure quietly breaks and gets rebuilt by technology. It happens slowly at first. The old way starts to feel a bit creaky. Then someone builds something new. It starts out worse, clunky, even ridiculous. And then, almost imperceptibly, it becomes better. Eventually, it
Hiring may seem like a simple act - evaluate a candidate, match them to a role, and extend an offer. But underneath this human-led process is a set of decisions that are remarkably hard to automate. We’re not just matching resumes to job descriptions; we’re asking a fundamentally
The biggest illusion in hiring is that it’s about resumes, interviews, or even skills. It’s not. It never really was. Hiring is about trust - and trust emerges from two fundamental signals. I like to call them the explicit signal and the implicit signal. Every hire that’s
Origins We didn't always hire like this. In the industrial age, work was visible - on factory floors, in physical outputs, in repetition. You didn't interview a blacksmith or a machinist. You watched them work. Judgment came from evidence. Then came the knowledge economy. Work became
The old way of hiring is collapsing. We built decades of infrastructure on top of a flawed assumption: that a 30-minute conversation can predict someone’s long-term impact. It can’t. Yet, most companies still hire this way - asking rehearsed questions, taking guesses based on resumes, and hoping for
If you’re being honest, you probably know this already: humans are bad at hiring. Not just occasionally, but systematically, repeatedly, and sometimes even proudly. Despite decades of practice, billion-dollar HR software, psychometric tests, interview panels, and gut-feel “culture fit” instincts, we still routinely make the wrong bets on people.
Signals For decades, we've relied on proxies. Resumes. Referrals. Polished interviews. These were our best guesses about someone’s potential. A list of experiences, a few references, a good chat - that was enough to make a six-figure bet. But the reality is, proxies are bad predictors. Talking
Interviews are a 100-year-old ritual. 2 strangers, 30 minutes, 20 rehearsed questions. Both pretending to be someone they’re not. And we call that hiring? The most high-stakes decision in a company - who to trust with your work - is made in the least reliable way. Gut feel. Culture
The next good search is NO SEARCH (google → chatgpt) The next good programming is NO PROGRAMMING (vscode → cursor) The next good driving is NO DRIVING (drivers → waymo) The next good __ (so many things) would truly be transformed by AI Agents. The next good recruiting wouldn't just be faster