(2025-02-26) Procopio Ive Had100 Startup Meetings About How No One Can Find A Job

Joe Procopio: I’ve Had 100 Startup Meetings About How No One Can Find a Job. I just wrapped up my 100th meeting with people from startups and established companies alike, all of whom are trying to solve a massive problem: That no one seems to be able to find a job. (job market)

I noted that, as an entrepreneur myself, I was working on my own solutions to the hiring problem, and that I was already sharing ideas with other people and companies. That opened the floodgates for folks to contact me with their own solutions and strategies.

100 meetings later, I’ve got a lot of notes. I thought I’d start sharing.

AI Is Both Problem and Solution

I can now say with confidence that I can visualize the right answer.
And it includes GenAI.

As AI exists today, up to and including agentic AI, it’s still often terrible at both maximizing productivity and reducing labor costs. In fact, in almost all the recruiting and hiring cases brought to me, it has only exacerbated a lot of productivity and labor issues that were bubbling even before the general public had heard of ChatGPT.

what I will do is lay out solution parts across several posts, based on all the conversations I’ve had — including, in this post, what I know isn’t going to work as it involves AI.

external forces at play here — remote work, AI-inspired mass layoffs, even digital application and interview, to name just a few — that inflate the reach of a job search and thus relegate a return to human screening to an outlier-case solution.

At best, humans can get through 20–30 full initial resume screens in a day before they become just as unreliable as the machines.

Better AI resume screening
I heard this one a lot, because it’s easy. This is just a band-aid

Interactive AI interviews
Just, no. It’s insulting.

AI for job seekers
This is already being done by enterprising “hackers” and all it’s doing is making a bigger mess,

LinkedIn is also working on a suite of AI solutions for both recruiter and job-seeker, and I can imagine it will build on LinkedIn’s role as a social network, a bottleneck awkwardly jammed into the middle of a job hunt.

I think it’s critical to understand why they won’t work. Because you can’t start thinking about what will work until you can overcome those obstacles.