The Tweet That Launched a Thousand Eye-rolls

A little while ago, I came across a tweet that stuck with me, not because it was insightful, but because it was so familiar:

“More AI trend-spotting stuff…
AI LLM sentence structure, grammar and lack of spelling mistakes can also clearly be spotted.
When you read something a human wrote, you can pick up speech and writing patterns that are unique to that individual.”

This wasn’t a hiring policy. It wasn’t a debate. It wasn’t feedback to a candidate. It was a broadcast, from the managing director of a tiny agency, a small business with maybe three or four staff. But the message wasn’t really about AI. It was about him.

There’s a pattern here. Tweets like this often aren’t about solving a hiring challenge; they’re about signalling superiority. The message behind the message is:

• “I can tell who’s real and who’s faking it.”
• “I expect effort. I’m not like those other managers.”
• “If you want in, prove your worth first.”

I responded, perhaps a bit bluntly, asking whether the goal was to find someone competent or to make them grovel. Because this is the real question at the heart of so many bad hiring processes: are we trying to solve a business problem, or are we trying to feel important?

That’s what this article is really about.
Not that guy, not his tweet, but the whole logic behind it. The way ego, theatre, and distorted values creep into hiring, and how easily we lose sight of the point: find someone who can do the job, and wants to do it.

Let’s start there.

 

Forgetting the Assignment: Hiring Is a Business Process

Before a job is advertised, someone in the business made a decision:

“We need someone to do this job.”

That decision should be grounded in a specific business need, a gap in capability, capacity, or continuity. And hiring, when done properly, is the structured response to that need. It’s not about proving how clever the hiring manager is. It’s not about running a personality contest. It’s not about protecting the sanctity of recruitment from the contamination of AI-written cover letters. It’s about solving a real, operational problem.

The core assignment is simple:

Find a person who can perform the role and is willing to do so for the salary on offer.

That includes a lot:

• Someone must define the role.
• Someone must write it down clearly.
• Someone must describe the business need in terms that a suitable candidate can understand.
• And someone must understand enough about the market to know what kinds of people are likely to apply.

It’s not just about helping the candidate, it’s about helping the business after the hire, too.

Once a candidate becomes an employee, their understanding of the role becomes even more important. They need to know:

• What their responsibilities are (and aren’t).
• What their scope of authority is.
• What decisions they can make on their own.
• Which decisions must be deferred, escalated, or made collaboratively.

Vague or minimal job descriptions, which are surprisingly common, create friction and ambiguity from day one. They undermine autonomy, breed distrust, and lead to endless clarification requests, control loops, and frustration on all sides.

But a well-written JD becomes an alignment tool. It builds trust before the first day. It sets expectations clearly. And trust, once built, becomes a long-term asset, far more valuable than any structure designed primarily for control.

If your recruitment process regularly takes months for roles that should take weeks, something is broken. You’re not scaling. You’re not delivering value. You’re just losing time, and probably good people, too.

 

 

Goal Displacement: When Hiring Becomes Theatre

In organisational psychology, there’s a term for when a process forgets its purpose: goal displacement. It happens when the form of a task becomes more important than the function, when we start optimising for appearances instead of outcomes.

Hiring is especially prone to this. Somewhere along the way, what should be a clear process, define a role, find a fit, make a hire, becomes a theatre of judgment. The job description is vague, the criteria are fuzzy, and the interview is a kind of performance art where candidates are measured on confidence, not competence.

Managers begin evaluating whether they like the candidate before confirming whether the candidate can do the job. They look for “signs of authenticity,” “natural communication style,” or “vibes.” And all of this clouds the real goal: solving a business need.

One managing director put it this way:

“A candidate may submit a well-written CV and then not perform in the interview.”

But this reveals a confusion of terms. Performance is what we want in the job, the delivery of outcomes.
What we often get in interviews is performance in the theatrical sense: scripted responses, confident gestures, strategic storytelling. And ironically, people who are very good at interview theatre are not always the ones who are good at doing the actual work.

In fact, performing for the sake of the interview often undermines what we claim to value: authenticity, clarity, and substance.

This is where humility becomes operational.

Sometimes, humility is simply doing the work properly:

• Writing a clear job description.
• Thinking through actual responsibilities and decision rights.
• Asking straightforward questions about experience and expectations.
• Taking the time to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

That last one, making sure we’re all on the same page, is an underrated act of leadership. It doesn’t signal status; it signals responsibility. It shows a recognition that misunderstanding is common, that clarity is earned, and that trust starts with shared understanding.

Goal displacement creeps in when we start optimising for self-image instead of business outcome. But doing the work, carefully, respectfully, and without posturing, is what builds solid teams and sustainable results. That’s not just humility; it’s good operations.

 

Inventing Unicorn Job Titles: Hide and Seek with Talent

Another way goal displacement shows up is in how roles are named.

In an effort to seem innovative or special, some businesses abandon standard job titles altogether. Instead of looking for a Business Analyst or a Head of Marketing, they advertise for a Futurologist, a Growth Hacker, or a Director of Lights and Magic.

It might feel creative. It might feel unique. But what it actually does is hide your vacancy from the people who can fill it.

Most viable candidates are more or less lateral movers, people doing similar work in other companies, ready to grow, shift industries, or relocate. They’re not hunting for whimsical titles. They’re looking for language that matches their experience and career path.

When you rename a role so completely that it’s unrecognisable, the only way you’ll get the right applicant is by accident.

I remember a telecommunications company, which will remain unnamed, that had a position titled Futurologist. It sounded clever until someone left, and no one knew what to replace them with. The role hadn’t been built to scale or to be replaced; it had been built around an individual. It’s a legitimate role, most often incorporated into a different role, head of Strategy or even Product Director, Managing Director and to a large degree non-executive roles like Product Manager or Engineer. If one googles “Futurologist” it’s something that exists and examples of people who qualify are Herman Kahn and Arthur C. Clarke.

 

That’s a fundamental error.

Don’t create a position for an individual. Create it to meet a business need.

Clear, recognisable job titles and responsibilities help in three essential ways:

1. They help candidates self-select, they know what’s expected.
2. They help your internal systems (HR, payroll, succession planning) operate more smoothly.
3. They help you as the employer clarify what outcomes are required, and who might be able to deliver them.

Job boards and recruitment platforms are built on keyword matching and search indexing. If no one searches for “Wizard of Workflow,” you won’t find a workflow manager. If your job title sounds like a meme, don’t be surprised when it fails to attract professionals.

Creativity belongs in how the job is done, not in whether it can be found.

 

Humility at the Door: What Tone Are You Setting?

We often hear that humility is an essential leadership trait, and for good reason. Research consistently shows that humble leaders foster better team performance, stronger trust, and higher engagement. But in practice, humility is often misunderstood as passivity or indecisiveness or worse, submissiveness. It’s not.

Sometimes, humility just means not making it about you.

It means recognising that the hiring process isn’t a chance to prove your own authority, but an opportunity to identify someone who can help the business succeed. It means treating the candidate not as an outsider being judged, but as a potential partner in shared outcomes.

The tone you set in an interview communicates volumes. A posture of superiority, “Impress me,” “Convince me,” “Justify yourself”, sends a clear message: power is more important here than purpose. That’s not just bad manners. It’s a culture cue.

The interview isn’t just where you assess the candidate. It’s where the candidate assesses the culture.

High-agency, self-aware applicants are likely to withdraw if the tone is condescending or dismissive. If the interview feels like a power struggle, it’s a preview of what daily life in the company might be like, and the people you most want to hire, or should most want to hire, are often the ones least willing to put up with that ethos.

This is where humility becomes practical.
It’s about using your position of authority wisely, to make space for others to show up authentically, and to ensure the process serves the business rather than the ego.

It also means accepting that your perception isn’t infallible. A good candidate might be nervous. A quiet person might be deeply competent. Humility allows for the possibility that you might miss something, and that the right way to surface insight is to ask clearly, listen carefully, and trust the process more than your gut.

In short: if the tone you set in the interview isn’t one, you’d want to be subjected to don’t be surprised when the people you should hire don’t stick around to accept the offer.

It’s also where we need to separate authority from superiority.
Superiority is about hierarchy, “I’m above you, so what I say carries more weight by default.”
Authority, on the other hand, is about relevance, “This is my field, and I speak from skill, knowledge, and responsibility.” A good organisation respects that distinction. A project management director doesn’t tell an engineer how to engineer, and a sales leader doesn’t dictate how the product is priced. People are hired for what they know and what they’ve done, and real authority honours that. Discussions with senior management become, “How do we leverage your skills and mine to implement my strategy.”

When superiority dominates, status games flourish, backbiting increases, power struggles become routine, and teamwork suffers. But when clear, role-specific authority is respected, the value of each person becomes more visible, trust increases, and collaboration improves dramatically. It’s not just more civil, it’s more effective.

This shows up in growth figures, growth is higher, often significantly higher, in businesses where the business goals are the primary driving force. Growth is constrained in businesses where goals that aren’t the business goals have been allowed to become primary. Goals like status and power will cost the business in both growth and margin and many other things.

 

What a Good Interviewer Actually Delivers

Good interviewing isn’t about charisma, cleverness, or control. It’s about getting the right person into the role as efficiently and clearly as possible, for the sake of the business.

That doesn’t always mean finding “the best candidate on paper.” It means finding a capable, motivated candidate who will meet the business’s actual needs, within the constraints of the offer and the timing.

A good interviewer brings focus, empathy, and emotional maturity. And that’s critical, especially in businesses where interview panels are drawn from across departments. It’s often the case that not everyone on the panel is from the same function the candidate is applying to. That’s fine, but it raises the stakes. It means interviewers must know the limits of their perspective and stay aligned on the real objective: mutual fit.

Here’s where the difference between good and bad interviewers becomes obvious:

• A bad interviewer uses the session to signal their own status or intellect.
• A good interviewer uses it to understand the candidate and clarify expectations.

Culture fit is often used as a catch-all, but it shouldn’t mean “Are they just like us?”
It should mean “Can they add to who we are, in a way that strengthens us?”
Tone matters. If your interviews are adversarial, controlling, or condescending, you’re not screening for culture fit, you’re defining a culture no healthy person wants to fit into.

And finally, a mature interviewer knows what not to do.

If you’re not trained in psychology, don’t pretend to assess personality.
If you’re not in the candidate’s field, don’t pretend to evaluate technical depth.
And if you don’t know the role’s core KPIs, don’t fake certainty, ask someone who does.

This is what real maturity in hiring looks like. It’s quiet, deliberate, and oriented toward the long-term health of the business. Not just “Did we fill the seat?”, but “Did we build something we’ll want to keep working with?”

 

The Moral Panic About AI

At some point in the past year or two, using AI to help write a CV seems to have become a moral issue, at least for some hiring managers. Suddenly, the presence of correct grammar, polished phrasing, or a slightly-too-structured cover letter was taken as evidence that a candidate was somehow dishonest or “not really trying.”

The fear isn’t based on capability. It’s not even really about trust. It’s about misunderstanding the tool.

 

What an LLM Actually Is

A Large Language Model (LLM), like ChatGPT or Claude, doesn’t know your work history. It doesn’t read minds, pull secret files, or auto-generate facts about your life. It isn’t a ghostwriter or a digital assistant with a private intelligence brief.

What it does is predict the next likely word based on the input it receives and the patterns it has seen in its training data. If you give it the phrase, “I was responsible for…”, it will finish the sentence based on the tone, structure, and substance it has seen in similar examples.

In short: it’s autocomplete, but much, much smarter.

So when a candidate uses AI to help write their CV, what they’re doing is providing the raw material, their roles, achievements, timelines, and asking the model to help shape it clearly. The result isn’t magic. It’s formatting. It’s structure. It’s a tool-assisted summary of data the candidate already supplied.

If the result is a well-written, truthful CV, the tool has done its job. And so has the candidate.

Using AI doesn’t mean the candidate is lazy. If anything, it means they’re resourceful, and fluent with modern tools. That’s a positive, not a red flag.

 

The Myth of the Magic Prompt

There’s a persistent myth about AI-generated CVs: the idea that a candidate can simply type “Write my CV” into a chatbot and receive a perfect, job-ready document, accurate, impressive, and effortless.

That’s not how it works.

Even the most advanced language models don’t know your job history. They can’t guess your actual achievements. If you want the output to be useful, let alone accurate, you still have to do the hard part:

• List your roles and responsibilities
• Outline your accomplishments
• Explain your experience clearly and honestly

In other words, you still have to write your CV, even if you’re using an AI tool to help format and polish it. And if you’re not working from an existing CV, you actually have to do more work: organise your thoughts, assemble your career chronology, and input all the context manually.

So if a candidate has successfully used AI to produce a structured, clear, and truthful document, they’ve already demonstrated a level of initiative, self-awareness, and communication skill.

That’s not gaming the system. That’s using the tools available to present oneself professionally, the same way people used to ask a friend to “look over my CV” or hire a professional résumé writer.

If someone lies in their CV, the lie is the problem, not the tool.
But if someone tells the truth clearly with the help of a tool, that’s not deception. That’s fluency.

AI doesn’t replace effort. It supports it. And hiring managers would do well to remember that a cleanly structured CV might be a sign of a well-prepared candidate, not a suspicious one.

 

Agency CV vs AI CV: Spot the Double Standard

There’s an unspoken double standard in hiring.

It’s widely accepted, even expected, that mid-career professionals might pay a CV writer or agency to help refine their résumé. It’s seen as a sign of seriousness or ambition. In some industries, it’s practically encouraged.

But if a candidate uses AI to do the same thing, to improve clarity, polish grammar, or organise layout, suspicion sets in. Suddenly, it’s “cheating,” or “inauthentic,” or “not really their work.”

That’s not a principled position. It’s a reflex, one based more on discomfort with new tools than on any meaningful difference in process or intent.

Let’s break it down:

Step	Human Agency CV	AI-Assisted CV
Candidate provides raw material (roles, dates, achievements)	✅	✅
External system refines language and format	✅	✅
Candidate reviews and approves	✅	✅

 

 

What a Good Culture Signals

Everything we’ve covered, job titles, interview tone, CV judgments, use of AI, all of it points to something deeper: the kind of culture you’re creating, whether intentionally or by accident.

A business isn’t just hiring for a role; it’s offering entry into an environment. And everything in the hiring process sends a signal about what that environment is.

If your process is defensive, adversarial, or wrapped in superiority, it tells candidates what kind of leadership to expect. If you obsess over surface polish but ignore clarity and truth, you reward theatre and filter out honesty. And if you treat tools like AI as moral hazards rather than productivity aids, you punish the very fluency you’ll soon ask for on the job.

On the other hand, when you prioritise clarity, humility, role alignment, and truthfulness, from the job ad to the final handshake, you don’t just find better candidates. You attract people who’ll thrive in the culture you’re trying to build.

Culture isn’t built the day someone starts.
It’s already forming the moment they see your job post.

 

 

In Closing: What We’ve Learned and What to Do Instead

This article started with a tweet, but it’s not about one person, or even one bad take. It’s about the deeper dynamics that shape how businesses hire, and what those dynamics reveal about culture, leadership, and priorities.

What Goes Wrong

• Virtue signalling replaces real values with image management.
• Unstructured interviews invite bias and performance theatre.
• Invented job titles make roles harder to fill (Scale) and harder to replace.
• Moral panic about AI confuses tools with truth.
• Superiority posturing alienates strong candidates and corrodes trust.

What Works Better

• Define roles based on actual business needs, not egos or individuals.
• Use structured interviews and real-world tasks to assess fit.
• Choose job titles and descriptions that are recognisable and findable.
• Treat AI as a productivity tool, not a moral test.
• Lead interviews (and teams) with humility, clarity, and respect.
• Recognise that authority is contextual, not automatic, it’s earned, not bestowed by status.

The Real Assignment

Hiring is not a purity test. It’s not an identity screening exercise. It’s not a loyalty ritual.
It’s a practical, measurable process that exists to answer a simple question:

Who can do this job, and is willing to do it for the offer we’re making?

Every distraction from that goal, whether it’s posturing about CV polish or power games in the interview, costs time, energy, and, often, your best candidates.

If you want to build a team that’s smart, trustworthy, and capable, then act like a business that deserves them.