The Final Countdown: 5 TA Trends For The End Of The World - Part II

Trends shaping the future of talent acquisition

In the first of this predictions post (which, of course, was serialized because it’s really long, but worth the read, albeit I’m a bit biased. Click here for Part 1, in case you missed it), I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole about recruitment technology, and proffered some prognostications on the future of TA technology that were, I’ll admit, a bit cynical and depressing for most people.
 

That’s what happens when you use the apocalypse as an extended metaphor, but I think it’s actually apropos. I mean, anyone who’s read the Book of Revelation knows that the end of days is accompanied by the appearance of signs warning of the approaching end times. Recruitment technology, similarly, has evidenced the sort of sweeping, foundational, and cataclysmic change that suggest that while the world might not be ending, the world of talent acquisition just might be.

In the second part of this post, I’ll illuminate some of the signs that I see as harbingers of the seismic shifts signaling that the recruiting rapture might very well be upon us (coming soon to a sandwich board near you). In the previous post, we took a look at how tech has fallen on its SaaS, leading to diminishing returns and increasing commoditization.

And while we love to say that tech is only as good as the people using it (cute, but untrue), we also looked at the fact that those people are becoming increasingly less competent and more reliant on automation and algorithms than common sense, intuition, and situational awareness. You know, the stuff that used to separate the really good recruiters from, well, the other 99% of talent acquisition practitioners out there.

In this post, we’ll be taking a look at the final 3 horsemen of the hiring apocalypse: the rise of the machine swarm and the increased omnipresence of fraud that’s the inevitable consequence of what’s fast becoming a decentralized and desolate future for both the humans we hire and humanity as a whole. The rise of technology and the decline of humanity are inexorably intertwined - and for evidence, look no further than these final three TA trends…

Trend 3: The Rise of the Machine Swarm

I read Ender’s Game when I was young and copied a technique young Andrew Wiggin used to calm himself because I hadn’t yet read Dune. I would play doubles in my head.

2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048… you probably have that game on your phone.

It’s fun to have the power of 2, but it gets scary when you to go the power of 10. Was it Einstein or Lincoln who had that cool Instagram post about compound interest being the most powerful force in the universe? It was Einstein, dummy. They didn’t have Photoshop when Lincoln was alive.

I kid because I’m terrified. Compounding is the process where replication takes a product, no matter how trashy it is, and quickly grows to insurmountable troubles. Or is that tribbles? That was a good Star Trek episode, but imagine if these Tribbles were copies of your work product generated by an AI. Or followers on the new Twitter or TikTok videos created by AI using your cloned voice and rocketing you past Ariana Grande overnight. What if the traffic to your website increased 10x fold one day, and by the end of the week, your traffic was up by 10,000,000 folds?

That’s seven generations by the way. It’s about three and a half years of computer progress. Do you think any system you use can handle that level of traffic? Recently a publishing company stopped taking submissions because too many dudebros decided to use ChatGPT to write terrible sci-fi novels in the hopes of getting $500-$1000 a month in side hustle income. AI writing has been around for some time, but the publicity behind ChatGPT brought out the worst kinds of people. They shut down a company and drive out human creators to make a few bucks on something they didn’t care about. And because of compounding, that effect is coming to everything you use.

All written social media is about to be swamped by low quality posting. It’s inevitable. It’s already happening, with fake bot networks writing and clicking and mimicking real people to get a fraction of a cent in advertising (multiplied by millions). It’s like 1,000,000 Richard Pryor but the only thing they are lighting on fire is the paychecks of human writers, influencers, and social media mavens. Don’t laugh - that’s not a good thing, because once again, too much traffic floods the zone. We used to do that by hand in the old days of SEO - push out bad news with good or more to the point, boring news that drowned out bad news. Now we live in a world where large tech companies decide what you get to read, but there are a few ways to route around that damage with your own platforms.

With compounding - every channel for human information is going to be swamped. You’ll never trust anything you see, read, or hear again. Voicemails from your grandmother? Cloned. Speeches from a politician? Deep faked. Texts from your bank? Not your bank. Video interviews offering fake jobs? We’re a half step away from that and sophisticated people are already falling for it. And don’t forget the Only Fans girls replaced with AI pictures and chatbots (pssst. They’re already chatbots. They don’t want to talk to you Arnold - they just want your money). I fear for the influencers, who without any real skills and a brief taste of fame in their late teens, won’t be able to do anything. Have you seen what money does to NFL and NBA players? And those people actually have talent! The influencers can’t pivot to real estate and mortgages, which are sinking faster than the, well, they’re sinking fast.

Stop saying that’s a good thing. The point is that in addition to the nonsense that will be wiped out - the good stuff will be gone too. How will you know that anything not in Meatspace is real?

That’s not my point. My point is that trash, like a million copies of Nickelback’s greatest hits, is going to remind you that AI isn’t programmed for you. It will grow and duplicate, and crowd out all of your communication channels. The future of the world is not a boot stamping on a human face, it’s a casino-level cacophony of notifications on your phone driving you mad while you try to remember if it was your LastPass or your Quicksilver card that gives you 2X the points if you pre-order in the drive-thru.

Compounding is the greatest danger to the modern world because humans can’t comprehend what big numbers really mean. If we did, the US wouldn’t be 30 Trillion in Debt, while complaining that you could work from the time of Christ to today and still not make enough as Jeffrey, Jeffery Bezos.

Trend 4: Greater Supply than Demand Equals Fraud

I don’t want to say anything negative about my ex-wife, but her favorite quote was the one about the bank robber who robbed banks because that’s where the money is.

You don’t have to be a Nassim Taleb fan to understand that if the reward is large enough, fraud is going to enter the picture. Logically, we should all get it, but no one wants to hear about any kind of fraud because if there is a fraud, then, logically, something has to be done about it. Isn’t that the whole point of Somebody Else’s Problem? Anyone who notices is definitely dangerous, or maybe they mistook Scott Adams for Douglas Adams. No relation.

There’s a wonderful collection of short stories called The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction, which proves that religion and science can get along, at least in fiction. In the future, automation gives everyone everything they need. The economy has to keep going, so the poor, who now have all they need, have to consume, while the rich live the lives of simple peasants. One day, a poor corporate schlub comes up with the idea of robots consuming the excess, and his plan quickly moves him up the social ladder.

He was blackout drunk when it happened. When he finds out, he’s terrified of his fraud being exposed. The kicker - it is a fraud, but it was genius! He saved the economy using bots to consume a surplus. See where I’m going with this? When supply is greater than demand, prices are supposed to drop. But that hurts software people. What’s the harm in letting your programmatic system absorb some of that excess supply and harmlessly divert it into the hands of Sokovian hackers? Are you telling me Ultron doesn’t get to wet his beak?

The problem with internet fraud isn’t that it cheats people. That’s scary, and not fun, but it’s the ability to scale that is so terrifying. I’ve been assured by top people (Top. People) that companies have it all covered, but when I drink with cyber security professionals, they turn into Russian scientists in 1980s movies, ranting about conspiracies and the porn habits of executives. Honestly, if you want a good time in Chicago, build a pub crawl and do some live doom-scrolling with IT security people. They know how bad it is, but fraud is held at bay because smart criminals know that pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered. When Compounding overwhelms the cyber defenses of the world, fraud becomes as regular as Longshoremen unloading freighters before the arrival of the Container. It becomes impossible to track because of the sheer volume of it, like an angry army of Ralph Nader clones filing tens of thousands of arbitrations because a software company’s incompetent lawyer thought banning class actions had no downsides.

Come on - that’s a multiple callback good enough to get into Season Six of Arrested Development when it moves to Tubi.

Fraud doesn’t even have to be ubiquitous to overwhelm a lot of small industries and be a nightmare for the larger ones. Think of that publishing company, and now think of what happens if agents were paid $10 a submission and their contracts stated it was due on delivery. I fear for job boards in my industry. We don’t have the money to fight off the bad guys. What am I going to do for a side hustle without my $40 a month coming from FaxRepairJobs.com?

Trend 5: The Decentralized Human Future.

Where does that leave us? Should we all turn Amish? Should we drug ourselves and sink into Virtual Reality while we wait for the machines to turn us into batteries?

No. We’ll abandon the “progress” we made and live simpler lives. Face-to-face communication, handshakes, and shared experiences will be the new currency. No more Yelp reviewers demanding free dessert for a good review. No more Tik-Tok Brain. No more HoldMyCosmo or cat videos or 1970s jokes retold on video with the wrong punchline by 12-year-olds.

Progress is not a thing. Kipling would tell you it’s a Copybook Heading, but the new BARD tells you Kipling isn’t on the approved list. You can’t read Heinlein because the WEF bought the rights and erased it off your Kindle.

Your experiences and your close relationships and your verifiable friends are the way forward. The tech that decentralizes mass media will make it impossible for governments and media and entertainment to command your attention without your explicit say-so, but it’s up to protect what makes you human until we reach that point.

Humans are weird. We break things. But we’re magnificent. And we care about fixing other humans and their problems.

The promise of Singularity was a seamless integration of tech and work. It’s not there. Like libertarians who just don’t get the power of an ax to your debate opponent’s head, the transition between the software economy and the AI economy is not going to be an easy one. If done wrong, it won’t ever happen.

Fight it. Fight it with love, care, concern, flaws, and human genius. AI doesn’t have to rob you of your humanity. Only you can do that, pretending to be a machine when you’re a human being.

Automation is a good servant but a bad master. Learn that lesson now, or the Gods of The Copybook Heading will limp back up once more.

Author Bio

Jim Durbin is the Managing Principal of Respondable, a recruitment consulting agency in Dallas. TX. With over 20 years of experience in improving talent acquisition, he's worked in all four major categories of recruiting, pushing the boundaries of better hiring and better technology. He's been known as the Indeed Whisperer, the Social Media Headhunter, and just a guy in the Stetson. His background includes digital and social marketing, programmatic advertising, headhunting, AI, media, and technology. He's trained over 10,000 recruiters to be better sourcers, and currently is engaged in developing the next generation of recruitment marketers.