The Weekly AI Panic Cycle Is Making Us Stupid

TA professionals must be getting whiplash. One week, AI's going to revolutionize hiring and transform everything we do. The next week, it's overblown and underwhelming. Then we get a class action lawsuit like Mobley v. Workday, and suddenly industry commentators are telling you that AI hiring tools will destroy your career and bankrupt your company.

I'm increasingly convinced this weekly oscillation between promise and panic is making us collectively stupid. We're creating confusion where clarity should exist, missing opportunities while we debate whether AI "works" in hiring.

What frustrates me is that humans have been introducing bias into hiring decisions for decades. But instead of asking whether we can build fairer systems than what we currently have, we're defaulting to fear of any technological assistance at all. The Mobley case is still in the early stages - we don't even know the outcome yet.

Meanwhile, we're treating "AI for hiring" as if it's one monolithic thing that either works or doesn't, when the reality is far more nuanced. What do we actually mean? Sourcing automation? Candidate matching? Interview chatbots? Assessment scoring? Resume screening? And when we say "AI," we could be referring to generative AI, natural language understanding, conversational AI, predictive analytics, robotic process automation, or some combination of these and others.

These aren't just semantic distinctions; they're different technologies and approaches with varying levels of maturity and effectiveness. Asking whether "AI works in hiring" is like asking whether "technology works in business." The question's too broad to be useful.

While we swing between hope and hysteria, we're overlooking something crucial: the technology to completely reimagine how we evaluate and connect with talent already exists. As I wrote recently, much of our TA work involves compensatory activities for fundamentally flawed processes. Yet, instead of using AI to build something fundamentally better, we're trying to make it behave like humans, automating the same old outdated practices.

We're so busy asking whether AI will improve resume screening that we're missing the opportunity to eliminate resume screening entirely. We're wondering if AI can make our interviews more effective, rather than questioning whether traditional interviews are actually effective predictors of performance. We're essentially asking AI to be better at doing things that shouldn't be done in the first place.

The most successful organizations I've encountered aren't getting caught up in the panic cycle at all. They're asking fundamentally different questions and making bold choices. They are scrapping resumes, moving to skills-based hiring, implementing scientifically robust assessment tools, and using AI as a catalyst for change rather than treating it as the solution in itself.

What's really telling is how AI is being successfully utilized in other areas of the enterprise. Marketing isn't trying to get AI to write like Don Draper on a typewriter - they're creating entirely new approaches to customer engagement. Finance isn't automating paper ledgers like it's 1955 - they're building predictive models that didn't exist before. Yet, in TA, we're effectively trying to get AI to replicate the human biases and inefficiencies that have haunted recruiting for decades.

The successful organizations I mentioned understand that real value doesn't come from automating broken processes. It comes from rebuilding talent acquisition from first principles using what we know actually works.

The panic cycle is making us ask the wrong question entirely: instead of "How can AI improve our current hiring methods?" we should be asking, "Which of our current hiring activities actually deserve to exist?"

The real opportunity isn't using AI to do traditional recruiting faster or more efficiently. It's using AI as a catalyst to build something completely different, rather than falling back on the cultural norms of how recruiting has always been done.

So while the conversation swings between AI salvation and AI apocalypse, the real opportunity gets ignored. We already have the technology to rebuild talent acquisition from the ground up, creating assessment processes that are both more effective at predicting performance and designing transparent candidate experiences that respect human dignity. We don't need to wait for a quantum agentic breakthrough or wait months or even years for the conclusion of a legal case to do either of these things.

The reality is that AI is evolving at a ridiculous pace. The same week that brought us the news of the Workday class action also saw Anthropic launch Claude 4, Google announce Veo3, and OpenAI complete a $6.5 billion deal to acquire Apple design legend Jony Ive and his start-up company, IO.

To have any chance of dealing with this insane pace of change, employers need a strategic vision for the future of TA that challenges the status quo and makes recruiting better for everyone.

For TA professionals, this presents a clear choice: you can continue getting confused by weekly shifts between revolution and disaster, or you can start questioning the fundamental assumptions that created our broken processes in the first place. The weekly panic cycle isn't helping anyone, so stop getting distracted by the drama and focus on building the vision of the future your organization needs.

The future won't be determined by whether we can make our current hiring methods slightly better with AI. It'll be determined by whether we have the courage to admit they shouldn't exist at all and build something worthy of the talent we aspire to attract.