Getting Hired and Hiring Are Both Broken (and the Fix Is the Same)
Business Model Logic
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Getting Hired and Hiring Are Both Broken (and the Fix Is the Same)<br>AI didn’t break hiring. It dissolved the friction that was hiding how broken it already was.
Alex Oppenheimer<br>Jun 01, 2026
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Someone told me a story recently. A remote company ran a candidate through multiple rounds of Zoom interviews, made an offer, and scheduled onboarding. When the person showed up, it was a different guy. He had paid someone else to interview on his behalf, then shown up to collect the job hoping nobody would notice, or simply that onboarding and hiring were handled by different people.<br>My first reaction was that this was insane. My second reaction was that it was completely logical.<br>Hiring has always been a weak signal dressed up as a rigorous process. The case study interview tests preparation, not performance. The behavioral question tests storytelling, not behavior. The technical screen tests a narrow, artificial version of a skill that rarely maps to actual on-the-job demands. We built elaborate rituals around a simple problem we never actually solved: how do you know if someone can do the work?<br>For a long time, the gaps in the system were small enough to ignore. Candidates couldn’t realistically fabricate years of experience. Prep was at least a good proxy for motivation. References, however scripted, at least required real relationships. Work samples took real effort to produce. The friction in the system created a kind of accidental verification.<br>AI and remote work didn’t break hiring. They just dissolved the friction that was hiding how broken it already was.<br>Work samples can now be generated in minutes. Reference calls can be coached to a script. Technical screens can be cleared with a model running in the background. And as the story above illustrates, even the interview itself (the supposed heart of the process) can be outsourced entirely. The deception that used to require a criminal operation now requires a group chat and a Venmo payment. What better proof that interviews are theater than the very fact that people are hiring actors to perform them in their stead?<br>There’s also a version of this that isn’t even fraud, and it’s scarier. Governments with adversarial interests have run organized programs placing workers into remote roles at Western companies, sometimes to extract intellectual property, sometimes for reasons less obvious. The individual hiring manager running a Zoom screen has no real way to know.<br>Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough to people who are living the struggle of job hunting: the hiring manager is dealing with all the same issues. They’re flying blind.<br>When you apply cold to a role with a resume and a cover letter, you aren’t just an unknown quantity. You’re a risk. Your credentials could be inflated. Your work samples could be AI-generated. Your references are people you selected and prepped. Every signal you can send through a formal application process is a signal that is now either easy to fake or impossible to verify.<br>The warm introduction doesn’t exist because hiring managers are lazy, or because the system is rigged by insiders (though it sometimes is). It exists because it’s the only information channel that is genuinely hard to fake. When someone you trust says “I’ve worked alongside this person and they are excellent,” or “I have known this person since they were a kid and I can speak to their character and their work ethic,” those sentences carry information that no resume can replicate. It’s a compressed version of months or years of direct observation, filtered through someone whose judgment you’ve already validated. It’s not a reference from an unknown source. It’s based on shared values and shared history. That’s what a human relationship actually represents. And the transitive property applies.<br>This is why the trickle-down of trust-based hiring isn’t going to reverse. It was always how partners got hired at law firms and executives got placed at companies. Now it’s how mid-level roles get filled too. The pool of candidates who come in warm has gotten smaller relative to the pool of cold applicants, and the gap between the two groups has gotten wider.<br>If you’re early in your career, the credential and the brand are still the ticket that gets you into the room. But the room is the point. Your goal in the first several years is not to accumulate certifications or optimize your LinkedIn headline. It’s to be somewhere that lets people watch you work. Small companies where you’re visible. Teams where you’re proximate to senior people. Projects where your output is legible to someone who might one day say your name in a room you’re not in. The degree signals capacity. The network that forms around your actual work signals character and execution. One of those is hard to fake.<br>This may seem unfair to those brought up in less well-connected circles, and I...