(2025-01-20) Procopio Hiring Is The Billion Dollar Problem To Solve In2025

Joe Procopio: Hiring Is the Billion Dollar Problem To Solve in 2025. AI is sucking the oxygen out of the room, but another huge opportunity is starting to become clear

A lot of my entrepreneur and investor colleagues and even some of my readers have been asking why I’ve been spending so much time focused on the hiring problem.

I found that I had a hard time hiring people at my tech startup, so I spent a good chunk of the last year diving down the rabbit hole of the tech industry’s broken hiring system

You know what I discovered?
Let me make a long story relatively short.
Hiring is f**ed.* (job market)

the deeper I get, I discover the problem is even bigger than you can imagine. And as a lifelong entrepreneur, I know that the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.
Is fixing the hiring quagmire a billion-dollar opportunity in 2025?

I’ll also tell you why a bunch of plucky startups and entrepreneurs, including me, are already on it.

The Root Of The Problem

One reason why hiring is so messed up is a productivity issue being masked by the battle around RTO (on both sides). Another reason is the corporate fever dream that AI can replace anyone. But for the most part, the various problems are manifesting themselves in AI being thrown at recruiting, and the resulting backlash, a fudging of qualifications and even the use of AI by job seekers themselves.

So this is a huge problem.
Can it be fixed? Absolutely.

Quickly? No. It’s a five-to-ten year journey, but that means if you want to solve it, you need to start now. Or you need a five-to-ten year head start.

So why isn’t LinkedIn solving it? That’s a damn good question.

About three-quarters of the way through this, it became clear to me that the easiest way to solve the hiring quagmire — from a pure problem-solution perspective — was for the incumbents to change what they’re doing.

What’s the success rate for LinkedIn, Indeed, and all the other big job boards when it comes to actually finding jobs? Ask most job seekers and usually they’ll just start swearing.

Ask most HR people and recruiters, but they won’t answer you because it’s made their own jobs infinitely harder.

Ask either side for the reason why it’s this way, and it won’t take long to get to automation, ATS, and AI.

The reason there isn’t a hiring gold rush is because there’s still an AI gold rush. That’s the smokescreen.

I also realized that there were already a number of startups, entrepreneurs, and just plain smart people thinking about the problem and working on a solution.

If it’s easy to win, if you can win in stealth mode, it’s a small idea. If it’s going to be a slog and a battle to win, it’s a big idea.