Tech Companies Are Vibe Hiring Now
Hiring Remains Broken Because No One Wants To Fix It
I’ve spent the last 12 months putting time, money, and knuckle-scraping effort into the big, hairy problem of hiring — or more specifically, the complete lack of hiring.
I’ve seen the symptoms surfacing for years, first from the hiring side of the table. Then I started personally coaching and advising friends and colleagues impacted by mass layoffs, and was perpetually gobsmacked by the hoops they were required to jump through — and the obvious misses happening on the hiring side because of those hoops.
I started writing about it, and a groundswell happened. Then people started reaching out to me on all fronts — from corporate CEOs to recruiters to more than a dozen entrepreneurs already trying to crack this hiring nut. It looked like a solvable problem. A billion-dollar solvable problem.
So I rolled up my entrepreneurial sleeves and started attacking the problem myself, with time, money, connections, and tech. That was nine months ago, and it’s been a daily exercise of waking up every morning and trying to push over a brick building with my bare hands. I know it’s not going to move an inch, but here we are, so let’s get to pushing.
Hey, where did everybody go?
If it’s any consolation (it’s not), I learned a lot. My conclusion is that hiring isn’t going to be fixed. Not any time soon. And the reasons can all be gathered under the umbrella that there are too many people who don’t want it fixed.
Now, there are more than a dozen individual reasons under that umbrella, some of them more controversial than others. But here are the top three, the ones that aren’t completely political or unavoidably financial.
Vibe Hiring
As someone who has been involved in the evolution of today’s AI for 15 years now, I can say with much confidence that the worst thing AI did to jobs was to reinforce the idea of human productivity as a linear equation.
In other words: Add resource X, expect an increase in output of Y.
If a company operates under that notion long enough, they stop hiring for talent and they start hiring for the human equivalent of compute. That’s essentially where we are.
This linear productivity equation turns the talent value proposition on its head. Instead of searching for employees who offer value far greater than what the company pays them, they’re instead searching for employees who can produce a steady, consistent return for a steady, consistent salary.
I call this “vibe hiring.” And I want the credit for that term. If a company is not hiring for talent, it’s hiring for this vague notion of fit, which always turns into, “this person won’t rattle any cages or cause much fuss.”
We know it ends up that way because the same productivity equation has always been a factor at the largest tech corporations, out of a misguided inevitability as the organization becomes too decentralized to manage effectively from the top down. But now the new productivity equation has seeped its way into the management chains themselves.
The result is a constant search for automatons, employees who can manage their cog in the machine without making much noise. Executive leadership comes up with the ideas, turns those ideas into mandates, the employees feed it to the machine, the machine produces optimal results.
This is working fine. Why fix it?
Gatekeepers and Googlers
I’ll get the most pushback for this one, but believe me, I’ve talked to enough HR people who, in honest moments, will tell me what’s really going on behind the curtain.
HR departments, talent acquirers, and recruiters have been decimated for far longer than the rest of the tech industry. AI came for them first, and automation platforms before that. Fold in reason Part 1 above, and they’re now HR platform superusers, executing what the machine tells them to do — in most cases, a machine making initial screens using AI.
Dreary.
So what do you do when your job becomes gatekeeper? You protect the shit out of that gate. But conventional wisdom has this wrong and has everyone angry at recruiters for the wrong reasons. This isn’t gatekeeping as a power move. It’s gatekeeping as a survival move.
“I’m not looking for talent who can help us succeed,” a seasoned HR executive told me, “I’m looking for talent who won’t lead us to a quarterly miss on the bottom line.”
So right now, talent isn’t being hired, it’s mostly being exchanged between big public and unicorn tech companies. Googlers jump ship for Amazon. Amazonians leave the ranch for OpenAI. OpenAIers go to Anthropic. And Anthropods eventually head back to Google.
And if it doesn’t work, it’s like “I don’t get it. He was former Google. I don’t know why he didn’t work out here. Must be something personal.”
This is working fine. Why fix it?
Doomscrolling
There’s money to be made off this new wave of the long-term unemployed. As crazy as that sounds.
The model of traditional recruiting, being paid when the candidate is hired and performs well for an initial period — that’s all but dead too. The new model is: How many choices can the recruiting software put in front of the customer?
So let me pull from my product bag of dusty quotes: “Customers don’t want more choices, they want more confidence in the choices that are put in front of them.”
Unless you’re a gatekeeper.
Anyway, this is also happening at recruiting websites, which are now the business equivalent of social networks, which value engagement far more than results. An educational institution doesn’t really want you to stop learning. A weight-loss company doesn’t really want you to lose weight. A job search website doesn’t really want you to find a job.
Because you’ll go away.
But it’s not you they’re devaluing. The job-seeker will always be there for them. The problem is the more jobs they fill, the fewer jobs get posted. That thinking is wrong, it’s defeatist, especially long term. But in the short term, it looks like a pyramid scheme that actually never runs out of greater fools. The same job posts just keep showing up and never getting filled.
This is working fine. Why fix it?
Ultimately, It’s Still a Tech Problem
And that kills me. I can’t help but feel that these are all still symptoms.
See, my solution was a tech solution. It wasn’t at first, because I wanted that healthy skepticism to play itself out. But what I realized is that the tech we have in hiring was developed during a period of and under the thesis of traditional hiring — when talented people showed up in fewer numbers for jobs that were relatively plentiful, and hired under the notion that they would bring more value than their cost.
Now that we’ve slid off that road, we’re stuck in the mud, and we can’t stop the tires from spinning.
But that value prop equation is still true — and in my research and development, I interfaced with a lot of sharp entrepreneurs who believe just that. I’ll be curious to see if someone finally picks it up and runs with it.
One thing I am sure of, however, is it will take a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of connections and a lot of tech. I’m just ready to admit that it will take way more than I have. But I will keep exploring, so now would be a good time to join my email list and follow along.
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