ExpandIQ

What is your AI skills slope? Most hiring managers are still asking if candidates use AI. Zapier is asking something harder. Are they still getting better? For two years, I've been placing AI-native talent inside VC and PE-backed SaaS companies. The biggest mistake I see? ➡️ Treating AI fluency like a checkbox. ➡️ A tool on a resume. ➡️ A yes/no screening question. But the real signal isn't the tools. It's the slope. ✅ Are they still getting better? ✅ Are they building systems or just prompting? ✅ Do they own the output or just generate it? Zapier built this into how they hire. Their internal AI fluency rubric evaluates candidates across three levels: Capable: "I use AI to operate at a meaningfully higher level." Adoptive: "I orchestrate AI and build systems that elevate how I work." Transformative: "I re-engineer how work happens." Capable is the new floor. Transformative is the new ceiling. The framework is public. https://lnkd.in/gwEgW5jQ

The candidate who asks the best questions in the interview is almost always the best hire. In an AI-first world, this gap only widens. Anyone can get answers. Very few people know what to ask.

The hidden cost of a bad hire just got 10x more expensive We’ve always known bad hires are expensive. The old formula: 1–3x salary. Lost productivity. Recruiting costs. Team disruption. But that never told the full story. AI is amplifying output across every organization. The best performers are getting exponentially better. The wrong hires are becoming exponentially more dangerous. Because in an AI world, a bad hire doesn’t just underperform. They scale their thinking across the business. In a manual world, bad hires created additive damage. In an AI world, they create multiplicative damage. That’s the shift most companies are missing. https://lnkd.in/gcxhXQyz

The Human Premium For decades, people could go online to get fitness information, but still hired personal trainers. Why? The human premium. Having someone push and motivate you is key. With AI, there will come a day when people pay more to see a human doctor. Not because AI got it wrong. Because they need to look someone in the eye when they hear the answer. Some decisions carry too much weight to feel anonymous. A diagnosis. A career move. A bet on the next leader of your business. These aren't information problems. They're human moments. Presence, accountability, and genuine investment in an outcome; those don't get automated. The human premium isn't nostalgia. It's what people reach for when the stakes are real.

Every transformational shift in labor history had an early window. The people who moved first captured disproportionate value. Every single time. The printing press didn't reward the best scribes. It rewarded the first printers. The railroad didn't reward the best horsemen. It rewarded the first engineers. The internet didn't reward the best retailers. It rewarded the first builders. AI, as it relates to talent, is no different. That window is open right now for AI-native talent, the operators, leaders, and builders who aren't waiting to understand AI perfectly before they start using it to work differently. I see it in every search I run. The candidates pulling away from their peers aren't the most credentialed. They're the ones who moved six months ago while everyone else was still debating whether to move at all. And the companies winning the talent war right now aren't offering the most comp. They're offering the most compelling answer to one question: What will you be able to do here that you couldn't do anywhere else? This window will not be open for long. History is very clear about what happens to the people who wait for certainty before they act.

The best employees of the last decade were specialists. The best employees of this decade are multipliers.

Unemployed and building beats employed and coasting. Being laid off is hard. There's no reframe that changes that. But what happens in the 90 days after, that part is yours to write. The candidate with a gap who spends that time building something just sent hiring managers a powerful signal about how they operate. And I don't mean building a startup. ➡️ Sales: Built a ChatGPT prompt that researches a prospect, pulls their pain points, and writes a personalized outreach in under 5 minutes. ➡️ Customer Success: Created an AI workflow that reads a customer's support history and drafts a proactive check-in email before churn signals appear. ➡️ Operations: Built a repeatable AI process that takes raw meeting notes and outputs a structured action item summary, owner, and deadline every time. ➡️ Marketing: Created a content system where one interview transcript automatically becomes a LinkedIn post, email, and blog outline. ➡️ HR: Built a candidate scoring prompt that reads resumes against a job description and returns a structured assessment in a consistent format. ➡️ Finance: Created an AI template that takes monthly actuals and auto-generates a variance narrative ready to paste into the board deck. It doesn't need to be game-changing. It doesn't need to win a hackathon or impress a technical founder. It just needs to show a hiring manager one thing: ✅ That you are adaptable. ✅ That you are willing to learn. ✅ That when the world shifted, you didn't wait for someone to hand you a playbook, you wrote one yourself. That's what becoming AI-native actually looks like. Not a certification. Not a job title. A pattern of behavior visible in the work you did when nobody was watching. If you're in a gap right now, this is your moment. 1. Pick one problem you know deeply from your last role. 2. Build something small that solves it. 3. Show your work. Highlight it on your LinkedIn + resume. The candidates who use this moment will look back and realize the gap wasn't the setback. It was the separation. #layoffs #aitools #careerdevelopment #jobsearch #ainative

Great recruiting isn't matching. It's making a prediction about human behavior in a future context that doesn't exist yet. ✅ Will this person thrive under this manager? ✅ At this stage? ✅ For this product? ✅ With these teammates? ✅ 18 months from now? No model, no matter how sophisticated, can fully answer that. Because every combination of human, role, team, and moment is unique. ➡️ A great recruiter reads what isn't on the resume. ➡️ They hear what's behind the answer. ➡️ They notice when hesitation matters. That's the judgment layer. And it's the part of the loop that can't close. https://lnkd.in/gceJgKNk

In 5 years, companies will report two headcount numbers. 1. Biological Employees 2. AI Agents The ratio of humans to agents is going to become the defining org design question of the next decade.

Want a resume that stands out in 2026? Minimize or delete the "responsibilities section," and lean into a more "leverage resume format." Responsibilities tell employers what you did, but rarely what resulted from it. Hiring managers now ask: "What changed because you were there?" Not "What were you responsible for?" Responsibilities = you did the thing. Leverage = it kept working after you left. Here's how to prove leverage on your resume: 1️⃣ Leverage Created ❌ "Managed a team of 5 CSMs" ✅ "Built AI triage system: 5 CSMs now handle 12 accounts (was 5)" 2️⃣ Systems Built ❌ "Created email templates" ✅ "Automated onboarding: 45 days → 30 days (still running 2 years later)" 3️⃣ Velocity Gains ❌ "Improved team efficiency" ✅ "Shipped 25% more features per sprint (same team size, new workflow)" 4️⃣ Measurable Impact ❌ "Supported sales team" ✅ "Cut sales cycle 17% (90 → 75 days via ROI calculator I built)" 5️⃣ AI Application ❌ "Proficient in ChatGPT" ✅ "GPT-4 for customer replies: 45min → 12min per ticket" We're entering the leverage-worker era. Your value isn't the tasks you complete; it's the systems you build that multiply output. Leverage leaves evidence. Responsibilities don't. Most resumes still look like the knowledge-worker era: titles, tenure, tasks. The ones that stand out prove you create force multipliers, not just execute work that AI can now do. ***One more thing: If you're not using/testing AI tools yet, that's fine, but get started. Even a resume section called "Currently Experimenting With" shows hiring managers you're engaged, not resistant.