10
Loading video...
By Katie Warnock
CEO of Staffing Boutique
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
Almost everyone will look for a job at some point, or love someone who is looking for one right now.
A son fresh out of college. A neighbor laid off this spring. A mother trying to get back into the workforce. Every one of them is about to meet a hiring process that has quietly stopped including people.
This week, one of the most talked-about stories on LinkedIn was about Gen Z job seekers who described that process as "impersonal," "humiliating," and even "dehumanizing."
Read More on Leadership Insights
Some walked into offices with printed résumés in hand and still could not reach a human being. If you have spent any time around a young job seeker this year, none of it was a surprise.
...
Machines Talking To Themselves
Here is the loop. A candidate uses AI to write a résumé. She submits it to a job posting that was written by AI. Software screens it before any human sees it.
If she is lucky, she is invited to an interview, and the interviewer is a bot. Then she waits, and nobody ever calls.
AI on one side, AI on the other, and no people in the middle. Everyone was promised efficiency. What we built is a machine that talks to itself.
The numbers back it up. In Resume Genius's 2026 AI Impact on Hiring Report, 87 percent of surveyed U.S. hiring managers said they use AI somewhere in recruiting, and 82 percent said they worry about candidates using AI on their applications.
Employers handed the process to machines, and were then also upset that candidates did the same.
In Greenhouse's 2025 AI in Hiring Report, which included 1,200 American job seekers, 54 percent had already faced an AI-led interview, and 62 percent of U.S. Gen Z entry-level workers said their trust in hiring had fallen in the past year.
This is not just a young people's problem. When qualified candidates cannot get seen, the wrong people get hired, turnover climbs, and seats sit empty.
You feel that in a classroom without a teacher, a caseworker carrying double the cases, and a service that takes twice as long to reach you. Bad hiring is everyone's problem.
The Black Hole
I have spent more than 20 years recruiting people into schools, nonprofits, and public agencies. For as long as I have been doing this work, I have called the careers page on a company's website "the black hole." You apply, your résumé disappears, and no one ever looks at it.
AI interviewing is the new black hole, only deeper. Candidates now record interviews that nobody watches. In many organizations, no one even knows how to pull those recordings up. And who knows where all of that personal information ends up.
I want to be clear: I am not anti-AI. I use it every day, and so does my team. It drafts, it organizes, and it saves us hours of work that never needed a human touch. Every business should be using it.
But hiring is not that kind of work. Hiring is people choosing people. It is judgment. It is reading between the lines of a résumé, noticing what a candidate does not say, and hearing something in her voice that tells you she is the one.
That knowledge comes from years of watching placements succeed and fail. You cannot download it.
I know because we tried.
Lived Experience
This year, I tested an AI interviewing platform for 90 days. It promised to change the face of recruiting, and I was excited. Anything that could make hiring faster was worth a look.
Setup alone ate up close to a month of work hours. Once it was running, the scores it gave résumés and interviews did not line up with what I saw in the same candidates, even when it was measuring them against job descriptions I had loaded into it myself.
The recruiters using it hated it. Within 60 days, I knew it was not for me, and I walked away before the trial was over.
The most surprising lesson was who the bot attracted. The candidates who happily sat through AI interviews were mostly the ones who apply to every posting they see and jump from job to job.
The strong, qualified people I actually wanted were the ones who dropped off. The tool did not just fail to find good people. It pushed them away.
It also took away the part of hiring I believe matters most. A candidate should know a real person will pick up the phone. The moment a bot started running the interviews, that was gone.
So I pulled the plug. Now every candidate I work with talks to a person first.
The Possibilities
Picture two futures.
In the first, employers use AI for what it does well: scheduling, sorting, and drafting. Every candidate who interviews hears back from a person, even if the answer is no.
Hiring managers can explain why someone was screened out. Teachers land in classrooms in weeks, not months. Young people learn that effort earns a response, and they keep showing up.
In the second, the loop keeps spinning. Bots write to bots. The strongest candidates quietly walk away, the ones willing to sit through anything get hired, and turnover eats whatever automation saves.
Nonprofits and charter schools, whose names rest on caring about people, lose that reputation one unanswered application at a time.
Every ignored applicant is also a parent, a neighbor, a donor, or a future hire. And a generation decides no one is on the other side, and stops trying.
We are closer to the second future than most employers want to admit. I have heard the prediction that technology will replace recruiters before.
People said it when online job boards exploded around 2000. Twenty years later, the human side of hiring matters more than ever, because candidates are drowning in automation and starving for a real conversation.
Bring Back the Coffee
So here is what I am asking every employer to do, starting this week.
Apply to one of your own job postings. See exactly what your candidates see, and count how many days it takes to hear from a human.
Put a person on the first conversation. Let AI schedule the call. Let a human have it.
Close the loop with every candidate you interview within five business days, even when the answer is no.
Check the machine. For one month, have your best hiring manager review the candidates your software rejected, and see who you are losing.
And bring back the coffee. Say yes to the informational interview with someone trying to break into your field. If you are the one looking for work, ask for it.
We built this economy on handshakes and second chances, not automated rejection emails. This is America. Use AI for busywork, and put people back in charge of choosing people.
People hire people. That is not going to change.
Katie Warnock is the founder and CEO of Staffing Boutique, a Certified Women-Owned Business that has placed talent in nonprofits, charter schools, and government agencies across the New York metro region and nationally since 2011. All views are her own.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines