We will see the biggest gold rush in online recruiting in the next 12 months.

At this point, you are probably wondering if I took my medication this morning, given the dire state of the job market.  

Don’t worry, I'm still sane; I'm just looking at the data and what's happening in the world. 

Here is the story: 

CEOs are in a bizarre spot right now:

1. They are constantly bombarded with LinkedIn posts from shallow influencers, claiming AI can automate this and that
2. Vendors are showing promising, controlled demos, which make it seem as if “agents” can suddenly do the job of whole teams.
3. The board members or shareholders, who are generally incapable of differentiating between snake oil and genuine technology, are bombarded with messages of layoffs “due to AI,” which are then passed along to company management.
4. The world economy and geopolitical situation are relatively unstable, and many economies are in recession (hello, Germany, time to wake up). 

So, if you are a CEO of a business and you want to keep your job and position your company as successful, you can only do one thing:

Stop hiring, firing people, and claiming that this is due to AI efficiencies, hoping for the best. 

The promised AI efficiencies are largely illusory.

Implementing and deploying successful AI systems to production is a meticulous process that typically spans years in established companies. Having specialized in this field since 2014—first in a corporate setting and then as a consultant since 2019—my perspective stems from hands-on experience rather than marketing hyperbole.

So, when you reduce the number of workers in a company and require them to use AI daily in their work when it doesn't make sense, you make them less efficient. 

However, the work is still there; there are just fewer people, and less time for them to work on their daily tasks. As a CEO, you have tasked them with writing useless prompts for GPT to summarize emails and generate lengthy reports from bullet points. 

The employees are afraid for their jobs and don’t want to be part of the subsequent layoffs, so they keep quiet and try to do the best they can. 

This process continues for a while without any immediate issues. But at some point in time, the core competencies of your company are being hurt. You probably decided to try some agents in customer support, so your clients are starting to be unhappy. Your internal KPIs are starting to show issues. Your workers are beginning to burn out and complain. Who wants to work out in a setting where they are overworked and constantly have to fear that they will be automated? 

You have failed for Big Tech's narrative. 

Welcome to the age of CEO’s AI Delusion. 

The Silicon Snake Oil Syndrome. 

You have successfully become part of a corporate theater where executives cut staff under the guise of AI efficiency while actually creating more inefficiency and burnout. 

It's a perfect storm of technological hype, market pressure, and economic anxiety leading to poor decision-making disguised as innovation.

You know who already went through this? 

The beloved Klarna, the company that received so much media attention with their fake, blatant promises of automating their staff. 

Here is Klarna’s NPS in the past 18 months. Notice how hard it crashed?  

They are now hiring again because their AI Strategy failed. This was a PR stunt to increase the company's chances of a successful IPO after it lost 80% of its past valuation. 

Make no mistake – the same is going to happen to all companies claiming layoffs due to “AI” efficiencies. These efficiencies were never there in the first place. 

How do I know this, besides Klarna, you ask? 

Very simple. 

Here are the statistics on open roles in Big Tech. Notice something? 

 Not yet? 

Look closer. Here is a hint: ChatGPT was released in November 2022.  

Notice how the number of open jobs started dropping since mid-2022? ChatGPT was not released at this time. 

The drop in hiring occurred because of year-long overhiring following the end of the subprime crisis, a period of zero-interest-rate-fueled growth and free money after Covid. 

It had nothing to do with AI or efficiencies and started 6 months before ChatGPT was even released. 

Not to mention that the first version of ChatGPT had minimal business impact.  

But notice something else – since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, Big Tech has been constantly adding new jobs.  

Today, May 9^th, there are 237K open jobs, up from 168K in Q1 2023, the absolute ATL. 

This represents a 41% increase. 

What is happening? 

Why is Big Tech increasing its open jobs amidst a gold rush of AI automation?

Well, after a cycle of overhiring and layoffs, it is time to start hiring again—the same old game.  

And now, the CEOs of the companies I outlined above will also start following, because their AI initiatives are likely to fail. Their internal processes will collapse, and customer satisfaction will start dropping, just as it has with Klarna. 

Big tech has already anticipated this, and they are swooping up talent at discounted prices.

Or in the words of the great Jeremy Irons playing John Tuld in "The Margin Call" there are three ways to win in this business:

• be first
• be Smart
• or cheat

Big tech was first.

First, firing people from the most significant wave of overhiring in the history of the corporate world.

They are the first to swoop in and acquire talent at discounted prices, now that the job market is in decline.

And the rest of the businesses worldwide will, of course, be too late to the trend, but they will restart hiring.

Recruiting budgets are expected to increase again, and we can anticipate a new recruitment surge. 

Ensure your business is positioned correctly.

The only question is whether job seekers will trust employers again.