I’ve been thinking about what it feels like to be back on the job market after years of being the one doing the hiring.

Having spent 5.5 of the last 7 years on the hiring side — and 4 of those as the final decisionmaker — I’ve led dozens of hiring processes. I’ve hired across disciplines, including design roles that are often misunderstood, undervalued, and cut first in engineering- or product-led orgs that don’t really understand the full depth of what design includes. Even when you explain it. Even when you show it.

Now, on the other side again, I’ve been using the job search as a kind of A/B testing lab. Messaging, tone, structure. What resonates where. What gets traction and what gets ghosted. But we’re doing all of this within what I’d call an algorithmic interregnum — a liminal period where AI is increasingly involved in the hiring process, but nobody’s quite willing to say it out loud.

And I don’t mean ATS. I mean AI agents interceding between the person and the process. And we’re all still writing resumes and cover letters as if a human is going to read them. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.

It’s a black box.

Having been in that decisionmaker role, I know how messy it is on the inside. And I’ve always had a lot of empathy for job seekers. I always wanted to hire more people. But hiring is bound by so many things that are outside your control, especially in the public sector or anywhere that budgets are tight and roles are squeezed. And even in the best-case scenarios, hiring design is rarely treated as a strategic function. You’re often stuck trying to make the case for the role itself before you can even begin to assess candidates.

But beyond that — stepping back — I think we’re overdue for a broader reckoning.

We need interoperability standards for how people apply for jobs. It is completely chaotic to ask people to write for interfaces that may or may not connect to humans. Or may connect to humans through a parser. Or through an LLM. Or through some recruiter dashboard that flattens their whole story into three data points.

Most people don’t know which one they’re interacting with, and they’re burning hours trying to optimize across all of them at once.

And look, I’ve always known how unfair it is. How much job searching relies on timing and luck and entropy. But being back in the mess myself, I keep thinking that if you’ve been one of the people in the room with power over hiring — especially VP-level or execs — you’ve got an obligation to say something. To push back. To design better systems.

No, we can’t hire everyone. Nor would we want to. But we can treat people better in the process. We can recognize that the interface is the interview now. And if you’ve been paying attention to how interfaces mediate other types of interactions — buying, scheduling, communicating — then it’s not a stretch to think about how hiring gets reshaped the same way.

The harms are subtle, but real. The distance from human interaction. The opacity of the process. The total lack of feedback. The amount of work that goes into applying, often for zero return. I know people who’ve been searching for a year or more and they’ve done everything right. This isn’t about not trying. This is about systems that don’t work.

And when leadership shrugs and says “there’s nothing we can do,” that’s not realism. That’s abdication.

We built these systems. We can unbuild them. Or at least, we can design them to be less cruel.

Drafted while listening to Papercuts — “Batholith”