The AI Doom Loop Is Real, and the Way Out Is the Oldest Trick in the Book

WIRED just ran a piece that nailed something I have been feeling for a while now. They are calling it the AI doom loop in hiring, and the setup is almost too perfect. Job seekers are using AI to blast out applications that look tailored but are not. Companies are using AI to screen those applications because there are too many to read by hand. So candidates use better AI to beat the screening AI, which means companies need sharper AI to keep up, and around and around it goes. Greenhouse’s CEO Daniel Chait put it about as plainly as you can. Each side has a problem, they are using AI to solve their own problem, and in the process they are making the problem worse for everyone else. More AI use just begets more AI use, and nobody wins.

I read that and thought, yeah, that is not just hiring. That is basically every corner of business right now.

And so here is the thing I keep coming back to. When a system gets this noisy, the signal does not come from a better tool. It comes from a real conversation between two people who actually know something about each other. That is not a nostalgic take. That is the practical one.

Think about what is actually breaking in that WIRED piece. Trust is breaking. Candidates apply and hear nothing back, because their resume got run through a black box they cannot see into. Employers get flooded with hundreds of applications that all look the same, because everyone used the same tools to write them, so they cannot tell who is real anymore. Both sides are drowning in volume and starving for signal at the exact same time. That is what happens when everybody outsources the human part to a machine. You get more noise and less trust, every single cycle.

I have built my whole business around refusing to do that. I do not run searches by blasting job specs into an applicant tracking system and letting an algorithm rank strangers against each other. I pick up the phone. I sit down with people. I ask what they actually want out of their next move and I listen to the answer, not the resume. When I connect a client with a candidate, it is because I know both of them well enough to know it is a fit, not because a keyword match said so.

That is not me being sentimental about the old way of doing things. That is me telling you the old way still works better, especially now, precisely because everyone else is racing in the opposite direction.

Here is the part that I think gets missed. AI is not going anywhere and it should not. It is a genuinely useful tool for a lot of things. But a tool is not a relationship, and a relationship is what actually moves anything forward, whether that is a hire, a partnership, a deal, a friendship. You cannot automate somebody trusting you. You earn that one conversation at a time, over time, by showing up as a real person who does what they say they are going to do.

So while everybody else is fighting an arms race of algorithms trying to outsmart other algorithms, my advice is simple. Build your network like it actually matters, because it does. Call the person instead of emailing. Ask a real question instead of sending a template. Remember what somebody told you three months ago and bring it up the next time you talk to them. That stuff sounds small. It is not small. It is the entire game.

Humans talking to other human beings is what works. It always has and it always will. Every doom loop in every industry gets broken the same way, by somebody deciding to actually pick up the phone.