Is AI hiring your company into oblivion?

It was bound to happen. We were always going to use AI badly before finding its true value in human society.

So yes, the junk is everywhere. Auto-written sludge. Copy-paste thought masquerading as insight. Deepfake giggles. Automated outrage on tap. That’s the obvious misuse: people using a powerful tool to do lazy things.

The part that should really worry us is not infantile random users. It’s the grown-ups in suits.

Case in point. A young adult in the graduate job market right now faces a battle against an algorithm. An increasing number of large firms are outsourcing most of the recruitment process to AI. AI scans the CV or online application, and says yay or nay. AI examines candidates in online assessment centres. AI even runs the first interviews. Stage four or five is where the human applicant might first meet an actual human.

On the surface, it’s smart. It saves time. It cuts headcount in HR. It handles scale. It promises consistency. It feels efficient.

It is also, if left unquestioned, strategically stupid.

Why? Because this whole machine rests on a bad assumption: that there is a definable “ideal” recruit whose presence can be detected by pattern-matching past data and ticking enough boxes. A clean profile. A rounded candidate. A template professional.

That person does not build your future.

I’ve spent decades working with high performers in many fields. The people who move the needle are not symmetrical. They are lopsided. Spiky. Extreme. Brilliant in a few ways; weak, odd, or underdeveloped in others. They are bets, not certainties. You hire them because something in you recognises a spark, not because they score 8/10 on all 27 competencies.

Great teams are not assemblies of clones. They are awkward combinations of very different strengths, held together by a leader who knows how to harness them. The quiet data obsessive and the loud rainmaker; the systems fixer and the story shaper. If your recruitment system is tuned to find only balanced, polished, high-fit profiles, it will quietly delete the weirdos who might have changed your game.

That’s problem one: AI as a filter for sameness.

Problem two is worse: using AI to erase the very roles where humans learn how to be useful.

In many organisations, the first jobs to be handed to AI are the classic junior tasks: basic analysis, simple drafting, low-level support work. On a spreadsheet, that move looks clever. Why hire a bunch of fresh graduates if a suite of bots can do the grunt work faster and cheaper? Entry-level jobs are taking a huge hit.

And that’s another dumbass idea. To see this, run it forward a few years. What will your large organization look like? It will have lots of older folks, lots of AI agents and bots, and very few youngsters. So where do you think fresh thinking, creativity, and innovation will come from? Where’s the pool that will feed your next generation of leaders? Where will dissenting views, new instincts, fresh craft be formed?

Now look at who this new AI-first system privileges.

The students who know how to play the game have an edge. They reverse-engineer filters, tune their CVs with AI, pay for coaching, and present flawlessly to the machine. The quieter ones—the ones who simply worked hard, followed instructions, got the grades, but don’t know how to decorate themselves—fall through gaps they can’t see. Wrong format. Missing buzzwords. Insufficient sparkle. Rejected by an optimizing machine, not a person.

So we end up with organizations that are more homogenous, more performative, more tilted to polish and privilege. And at the same time, we strip away the human apprenticeship that once grew real depth.

Short term, the metrics will look great. Long term, you are engineering mediocrity.

You are building places with fewer true originals, fewer young troublemakers, fewer people who understand the work from the ground up. You are surrounding your tired seniors with neat dashboards and slick summaries instead of messy, hungry humans who ask the awkward questions.

If you are serious about the future of your organization, here’s the uncomfortable check: look at your graduate funnel; look at your junior roles. If AI has made both narrower, smoother, and cheaper, don’t confuse that with progress. You might just be optimizing away the very people who would have saved you.

There are youngsters you’d have hired in a heartbeat had you spent 30 minutes with them. But you may never meet them.

To be clear, AI in hiring is not the villain; lazy design is. Used well, it can widen the funnel and surface unconventional promise; used badly, it just automates your old blind spots at scale.

Recruit fewer youngsters, and use AI to select them as well as replace them, and guess what happens next? Sure, you’ll make more money more quickly, and get bigger bonuses. And then you’ll have a stale and humdrum organization with no way of refreshing itself.

It’s coming. And I’ll try not to say I told you so. 

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

If your process deletes the spiky ones and your structure deletes the juniors, don’t be surprised when nothing new happens.

 

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