“What is it that is going to fix the job market we are in?”
This is the question I was asked at a cocktail party Friday night by a tipsy C-suite executive who was going on and on about how his HR department was failing him.
I know I am not alone in feeling like leaders in HR have it almost as hard as teachers did when they suddenly had to go virtual during Covid.
The entire landscape changed. Volume exploded. Expectations shifted and spiked simultaneously. Tools showed up that promised efficiency but demanded a completely new way of working. Overnight, HR teams were expected to evaluate people faster, with more data, under more pressure, and with less margin for error.
I took a deep breath and replied, “I get your frustration, Mike. But I think HR teams are dealing with two to three times more applicants than a few years ago, while nearly every company has added AI to their hiring workflows. That is not a simplification at first. It is a whole new approach, and clarity has not kept up with complexity. HR is not failing you; it is a system changing faster than people can adapt to it. You cannot automate your way out of an unclear mission. If leaders get clear, HR will become your superheroes.”
He paused. Took a sip of whatever was in his glass. And then, in a way that told me he had actually heard something, he said:
“So, what would you recommend I do first?”
Well, let me tell ya…
The job market did not break because AI showed up. It got complicated when AI emerged, and most organizations are redefining what they are actually hiring for.
Think about what AI did to the volume side of the equation. When applying for a job takes twelve minutes instead of forty-five, more people apply. When a candidate can tailor a resume to a job description in seconds, every resume looks more qualified. When AI is screening on the other end too, the filtering is faster, but the criteria being filtered for is still whatever was in the job description, which in most companies was written two years ago by someone who has since left, edited by HR to be legally compliant, and approved by a hiring manager who skimmed it.
You put a high-speed tool on top of a low-clarity foundation and you do not get better hiring. You reach a faster state of confusion.
That is the job market we are in. And the leaders who are going to come out of it well are not the ones who buy better tools. They are the ones who fix the foundation before they turn the tools on.
Finding clarity is not a vision statement or a rewritten job description and it definitely is not just a better recruiter.
Clarity is a leader being able to answer, in plain language, three things: what problem this role needs to solve, what kind of thinking it requires to solve it, and what does the person who fails in this role look like, and why do they fail?
Most leaders can answer the first one loosely. Very few can answer the second one specifically. Almost nobody has taken the time that is necessary with the third one at all.
But here is what happens when you can answer all three.
Your job description stops trying to attract everyone and starts speaking to the ideal someone. The screening criteria your HR team uses is specific enough to actually screen. The interviews get shorter and more useful because both sides know what they are evaluating. The onboarding is better because expectations were clear before the person started. And six months in, when you look at the hire, it looks like the decision you intended to make rather than the closest. This is what can happen when the mission is clear enough to operationalize.
Here is the thing I did not say to executive Mike: A lot of leaders are unclear about what they need because getting clear requires admitting that the org chart they built does not quite match the strategy they are actually running. That the role they are hiring for exists because someone left and they have not stopped to ask whether it should be rebuilt or reimagined or whether the work should live somewhere else entirely.
An amiable executive team, and solid communication processes can lead to rapid refinement and clarity that makes your organizations thrive as others struggle to find the right hire and even to survive. But it does require brutal honesty that is timely and that can be hard at the pace we are all rolling forward in the AI age.
The organizations that do this well bring someone into the conversation who can ask the questions that are too close to home to ask from the inside. Someone who can sit with a leadership team and say, without agenda: what are you actually trying to build here?
If you are a leader who has ever felt the way Mike felt, here is the most direct thing I can offer.
Before your next hire, before your next search, before you brief your HR team or engage a recruiter or post a description, sit down and answer these three questions out loud.
What specific problem does this role need to solve in the next twelve months? What pattern of thinking does this role require? And then the third one, the one that reveals the most: what does the person who fails in this role look like, and why do they fail? That negative space is almost always clearer and more actionable than the positive description, and it is the question that nobody asks until after the wrong hire is already six months in.
Answer those three questions well, and HR stops sorting through ambiguity and starts doing the precision work they have always been capable of. The tools do what they were designed to do.
That is how you fix the job market you are in, Mike. Not with a new ATS. Not with a different agency. With clarity sharp enough to actually use.
This is the work that changes the game and the outcome. Because you cannot automate your way out of an unclear mission.
But when the mission is clear? Everything can become a lot easier to achieve.
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