Before you hand the keys to AI… read this
Josh Bersin made an interesting case recently for fully automating talent acquisition. His analogy: the self-driving car. We started by automating the driver’s job and eventually realized the goal was never to help the driver. It was to serve the passenger. So we built Waymo.
It’s a clean argument. But it has a flaw.
Waymo works because the passenger doesn’t need to trust the driver. They need to trust the system and arrive safely. Nothing about the ride depends on a relationship.
Hiring doesn’t work that way. The relationship is a significant part of the outcome. Whether a candidate accepts an offer, shows up engaged on day one, and stays through the first year are all shaped by how they experienced the process. Did someone treat them like a person? Did they feel the company was honest with them? Did the interaction give them real information about whether this was the right place?
An automated process can move faster. It cannot do those things.
There’s a quieter question nobody in the automation conversation seems to be asking: who advocates for the candidate?
Speed and quality metrics in hiring measure employer outcomes. Time to fill, offer acceptance rate, 90-day retention. Nobody is measuring what it feels like to be processed by an agent. Nobody is tracking whether candidates came away with accurate information about the job. Nobody is asking whether the people screened out deserved a closer look.
To be clear, AI has a real and useful role in hiring. Scheduling, screening volume, removing some of the human bias baked into resume reviews, and surfacing internal candidates who get overlooked. These are legitimate wins.
The question is where the human stays in the process and why. Some of what makes hiring work is irreducibly relational. A candidate deciding whether to trust a company enough to leave their current job. A hiring manager reading something in a conversation that doesn’t show up in a skills matrix. Those aren’t inefficiencies to be optimized away. They’re the point!
Before you hand the over the keys to the agent, it’s worth asking where you’re trying to get the passenger.