Somewhere between the “AI revolution” and the “future of work,” companies collectively lost their minds. In a frenzy to look innovative and data-driven, they handed over one of their most critical human functions—hiring other humans—to algorithms that can’t even explain their own decisions. The result? A beautiful mess of corporate self-sabotage wrapped in buzzwords, dashboards, and digital hypocrisy.
Let’s start with the basics: AI-driven recruiting was sold as the solution to inefficiency. In reality, it relieved recruiters from the one job they were actually supposed to do—thoughtfully evaluate people. Yes, the same recruiters who, historically, already struggled to tell a high-impact professional from a high-gloss résumé. Many lacked deep industry knowledge or even a basic understanding of the roles they were filling. But now? They’ve been replaced—or worse, upgraded—with software that can skim résumés faster, make fewer thoughtful judgments, and rank people based on keyword density rather than competence. Bravo.
And as if that wasn’t absurd enough, the other side of the equation—the job seekers—caught on quickly. Enter platforms like Jobhire.ai, automating the entire job application process. Need a résumé? AI writes it. Need a cover letter? AI drafts it. Need to apply to 300 jobs before breakfast? AI handles it. Suddenly, every candidate is armed with a tireless digital army spamming the same half-plausible applications across every job board in existence. Just watch how these platforms ridicule and water-down greatness and the very purpose of LinkedIn – true human interaction, networking and collaboration!
The result is the ultimate dystopian talent marketplace:
- Quality has been replaced by quantity.
- Gaming the system has become the system.
- Being selected depends less on your expertise and more on your ability to out-AI your competition.
- AI bots now compete against AI bots, while humans watch from the sidelines pretending this is “progress.”
- The number of unqualified applicants sneaking through the cracks has skyrocketed.
- The number of highly qualified ones getting filtered out has plummeted.
- And yes, the overall quality of hires—the actual people walking through company doors—has dropped like a stone.
Recruiting mechanisms, talent evaluation, and even the recruiters themselves have de-evolved. Companies are now running fully automated hiring systems that don’t know the difference between a world-class professional and a well-formatted hallucination.
This, my friends, is not innovation. It’s an infinite loop of corporate cannibalism—a self-perpetuating downward spiral where human intellect is devalued and replaced with mechanical mimicry. AI selects the wrong candidates, companies hire mediocrity, mediocrity trains the next AI, and the system becomes dumber with every iteration. Welcome to the Darwin Award of talent management.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2017, an article titled “You Get What You Ask For: Agile Coaches or Centaurs?” exposed how careless hiring practices had already started polluting the talent pool long before AI got involved. Companies were already hiring “Agile Coaches” who could parrot frameworks but couldn’t actually coach teams—because job descriptions were written by people who didn’t understand the craft. That was the warm-up act. Now AI has turned that isolated dysfunction into a global epidemic.
The AI Hiring Loop: Humanity Optional
- Companies delegate judgment to algorithms to save time.
- Candidates delegate effort to algorithms to save time.
- AI systems optimize for volume because that’s what they were told to do.
- Recruiters drown in noise and lean harder on AI for help.
- Everyone forgets what good looks like.
- Repeat ad infinitum.
This is how human-intellectual assets decay—quietly, systematically, and with PowerPoint approval. Every cycle strips away more nuance, more insight, more authenticity. Before long, “talent acquisition” becomes a parody of itself, where the best algorithm wins and the best human loses.
And who created this monster? Not small startups. Not independent freelancers. It’s the large corporations—the same ones preaching “human-centric innovation” while outsourcing humanity itself. They engineered this dysfunction by obsessing over scalability, speed, and cost efficiency, ignoring that some functions are sacredly human.
Hiring is one of them.
No AI, however sophisticated, can read between the lines of a résumé and detect integrity, grit, or the spark of potential. No algorithm can replace intuition, curiosity, or contextual understanding of human capability. These are HI—Human Intelligence—functions, and the longer companies pretend otherwise, the deeper they’ll sink into mediocrity.
So here’s the call to action:
If companies truly care about quality, expertise, and long-term growth, they need to reclaim hiring from the machines they built. Bring back thoughtful review, expert judgment, and genuine human connection. Stop measuring hiring success by how many applications were “processed” and start measuring it by how many great humans were discovered.
Because if we keep letting AI do the hiring, soon it’ll be the only one left qualified for the job.