I love learning about history. One of the many rabbit holes I've jumped down has to do with pirates operating in the Caribbean several hundred years ago. The game changer for battles on the seas relied on the advent of gunpowder for cannons and small arms and the other side was that the pirates had to be skilled with swords. Swords and gunpowder overlapped simultaneously. This required incredible leadership of strategies to conquer the foe or die in mile deep water.
Some cultural changes virtually happen over night. We've lived through two of those: COVID and AI.
COVID changed the workplace for many professionals in a flash. Office collaboration was replaced by home-office virtual meetings and so many adopted the convenience to conducting their business minus the normal human interaction. Professional jobs became a daily checklist with little "quality control". Performance became a self-driven responsibility possibly with a performance review sprinkled in once or twice a year (or never). Most people considered this a blessing.
And how about those in charge of hiring for their companies. Same situation. Manager needs a new person and relies on HR to search out candidates.
In the meantime, AI quickly advanced and clever developers were able to integrate automation technologies into the professional world. For so many professionals, tasks such as burning through an inbox awaiting responses were all completed in a flash with a couple keystrokes.
On the recruiting and HR side, having a super smart computer evaluate candidate resumes was simply too much temptation in the hiring world. Candidates filling out applications now see the full brunt of AI communicating with AI making decisions on interviewing.
The upside that COVID and AI have offered is one of personal convenience. COVID demonstrated that many companies would tolerate masses of remote employees untethered to conduct business as they see fit. AI has replaced "menial" tasks and sometimes hard work to offer a vanilla (just enough) responses to tasks leaving the professional unbothered by the output.
Your automated, sketchy, pleasant, thin, and obvious brainless response for an application to a new job most likely was never reviewed. The same system we rely on to give us quick answers to basic circumstances is now the same system that categorically ignores your efforts to find a new job.
We're clever humans. We'll figure this out.
