TL;DR
- Production has been getting cheap in waves: code, research, decks, analytics, and now enterprise operations and design. Each wave hits a different category of knowledge work.
- The selection side, the function that decides who gets hired to do that work, has not caught up to any of the waves so far.
- "Hire for taste" has been said so often it has stopped being strategy and become signaling. The interview loop is the honest signal of what a company actually believes.
- Production is testable in an hour. Judgment is testable over months. Every piece of the modern hiring stack is built for the hour.
Two of us write this newsletter, alternating Sundays. Every now and then, the shape is call and response: one week someone lays down a theme, the following week the other tries to answer. When that happens, most weeks the response is modest, because most weeks the news does not hand you a gift. This week was generous. Salesforce and Anthropic, forty-eight hours apart, shipped announcements that could have been written inside last week's essay.
Last week we called enterprise complexity what it is. Dried spit with a budget. The residue of humans trying to coordinate through systems too dumb to hold a clean shape. We pointed at workflows, integrations, approval theater, reconciliation teams. That was the obvious list. It is set out in full in Enterprise Grade is Dried Spit With A Budget.
The less obvious item on the same list is your hiring function. This week's news exposed a problem that was already there.
Production has been getting cheap in waves
For five years now, production has been getting cheap in waves. Copilot and then Cursor and then Claude Code made code cheap to generate. Deep research products made information synthesis cheap. Gamma and its cousins have made decks cheap to draft. Natural-language queries made ad-hoc analytics cheap. And in two announcements forty-eight hours apart, Salesforce said the same thing about enterprise operations and Anthropic said it about design.
Both announcements are vendor plays as much as concessions. Headless 360 is arguably Salesforce locking in its place in the agentic stack as much as it is admitting the UI was scaffolding, and Claude Design's onboarding quietly absorbs your design system into Anthropic's. Those plays are real. The common admission underneath them is also real.
Each wave hits a different category of knowledge work. Each wave makes the production side of that work meaningfully cheaper to run. The selection side, the function inside every company that decides who gets hired to do the work, has not caught up to any of the waves so far.
"Hire for taste" is a tell
An executive somewhere, with feeling, says some version of production is cheap now, we will hire for taste and judgment. "Hire for taste" has been said so many times in the last year it has become a tell. When a sentence is that universal, it has stopped being strategy and become signaling. The interview loop is the honest signal of what the same executive actually believes.
The research is decades old
The awkward part is that the research on hiring well is decades old. Meta-analyses going back to Schmidt and Hunter’s 1998 work in Psychological Bulletin keep arriving at the same finding. Unstructured interviews, which still run most senior hires at most companies, are among the weakest predictors of job performance in common use. Resume experience is worse. Structured, scenario-based interviews work measurably better. Almost nobody runs them. We built Vina, our AI-assisted hiring agent around that gap two years ago, and the gap is still there. What the latest waves have done is make ignoring it expensive.
The structural rub
Here’s the structural rub. Production is testable in an hour. Judgment is testable over months. Every piece of the modern hiring stack is built for the hour. Portfolio reviews reward the candidate who can produce a polished artifact. Take-home assignments reward the candidate who can ship. Coding panels reward the candidate who solves a contained problem under time pressure. The ATS scores for keywords that prove the candidate did things. Whether those were the right things to do is invisible to the scoring.
None of that machinery will change quickly. ATS vendors sell to HR leaders promoted on cost-per-hire and time-to-fill. Recruiters are comped on closes. Hiring managers are measured by how fast they staff their requisitions. The whole structure optimizes for throughput. Throughput is the thing that just got automated.
What will actually happen
What will actually happen over the next eighteen months is that companies will keep hiring for production capacity, because that is what their pipeline rewards. They will get frustrated when those hires cannot tell them what to build. They will blame the hires. They will do it again. A smaller number of companies will notice the mismatch and start redesigning interviews. A smaller number still will succeed, because redesigning an interview is cheaper than redesigning an HR function with fifteen years of hardened habit around it.
Hiring is only one example
Hiring is just one example of the thing. Performance review cycles are another. Career ladders. Job architectures. The quiet machinery by which companies decide who does what and for how much. Every one of them was built when production was the scarce thing. Every one of them is still running on that assumption. Every wave makes the assumption less true. Headless 360 and Claude Design are this week's two loudest examples. The list is getting longer. The same inertia, seen from the deployment side rather than the hiring side, is the subject of The Two Million Dollar Shrug.
Last week we said the ant colony is not destiny. Neither is any of the playbooks that built it. The hard part of the AI transition is this quiet inventory of management systems that were built for a different set of constraints and are still running on inertia.
Where Moative fits
Moative builds Vina, an AI-assisted hiring agent aimed squarely at the selection gap described here: structured, scenario-based evaluation rather than another resume filter tuned for throughput. The wider work is the same shape. When we sit inside a company's workflow, the constraint is rarely the model and usually a management system built for a scarcity that no longer holds, which is as true in healthcare revenue cycle management as it is in hiring. The useful question is not how to add AI to the current design, but which parts of the current design existed only because production was expensive.
Frequently asked questions
Are unstructured interviews a good predictor of job performance?
The meta-analytic evidence has consistently placed them among the weaker predictors in common use, well behind structured, scenario-based interviews. They remain the default for most senior hiring, which is the gap this essay is about.
What is a structured interview?
One where every candidate is asked the same predetermined questions, usually scenario-based, and answers are scored against a defined rubric rather than an interviewer's overall impression. The structure is what produces the predictive power; the same questions asked casually do not.
Why do companies say they hire for judgment but test for production?
Because the hiring machinery is built to measure what can be measured in an hour. Portfolios, take-homes and panels all reward visible output. Judgment shows up over months, and nothing in a standard loop is designed to observe it.
Does AI change what companies should hire for?
It changes what is scarce. When code, decks, analysis and now design and operations get cheaper to produce, production capacity stops being the binding constraint and the ability to decide what to produce becomes it. The hiring process has largely not moved in response.
Why is HR slow to change hiring practices?
Because the incentives point at throughput. HR leaders are promoted on cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, recruiters are paid on closes, and hiring managers are measured on how fast requisitions close. Nobody in that chain is rewarded for a slower process that predicts better.
What should a company change first in its hiring process?
The interview itself, because it is the cheapest piece to redesign. Same scenario-based questions for every candidate, scored against a rubric agreed in advance. Changing the surrounding HR function is a much larger project and is not a prerequisite.
