Automation

Getting automation right is crucial—but knowing what not to automate is equally important.

Replacing humans with technology is inevitable. Machines excel at precision, consistency, and scale—but not at using experience to shape judgment or intuition.

Some roles depend on insight, nuance, judgment, and perspective—qualities that don’t reduce cleanly to data.

When those are flattened, we lose something irreplaceable: talent, individuality, and the extraordinary outcomes that emerge when the right person meets the right role.

That was once the art of recruiting.

The structure.

The restraint.

The subtle nonconformity.

The energy to stand apart.

And over the past few decades, an entire industry has grown between job seekers and employers: recruiters, reverse recruiters, concierge services, and the slow evolution to gatekeeper—ATS.

There has always been an element of luck in hiring and getting hired. Sometimes your resume reached the right person at the right moment; sometimes it didn’t. That uncertainty was imperfect, but it was natural. It allowed for discovery rather than disqualification.

There was another layer to resumes then—the way they were shaped. Much of what matters in people is communicated indirectly, through care, judgment, sacrifice, and choices rather than text alone.

Automation demands uniformity.

To be reliably processed, resumes must be flattened, standardized, and restricted to formats optimized for scanning rather than expression. In doing so, we lost that higher layer—the one that once communicated the character of the applicant. I remember a hiring manager telling me how, sometimes, before reading a single line of experience, he knew a strong candidate. Something in the structure, the artistry, the care invested in the resume made a connection.

Then, if you didn’t get an interview, it might simply mean the right candidate walked through the door before your resume was ever read.

That was chance—not disqualification by algorithm.

We’re eliminating the human element—transferring a task with the potential for discovery to something that has no capacity for discovery yet. Is it really more important to process every submission if it means missing the rare talent who doesn’t fit the template?

Automation excels at repetitive work—where repetition increases the risk of error. It struggles where insight, connection, and interpretation matter. Reducing people to accomplishments without recognizing the talent and effort behind them misses the point. Talent often lives in the details. Anyone can paint a representation; mastery is revealed in the brushstrokes.

Let’s not sacrifice extraordinary talent simply to move paper faster.

When we optimize only for scale, we lose the fringe—the outliers who ask uncomfortable questions, propose irrational ideas, and discover innovation where none was expected.

Normalization can lead to efficiency, but it has never been the source of progress.

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