Howdy All!
There's a piece of economic theory rattling around my head that might apply to us in the future. Especially if you've been reading the doom takes about AI replacing us.
It's called Jevons' Paradox. And it's the counterargument to AI will replace recruiters.
Here's the short version.
When things get cheaper, we use more of them. Not less.
In 1865, a British economist called William Stanley Jevons noticed something weird. Steam engines had become dramatically more efficient. Less coal needed per unit of work. The logical assumption was that England would use less coal overall.
The data said the exact opposite.
More efficient engines made coal-powered work cheaper. That unlocked entirely new applications that were previously too expensive to bother with. New industries. New use cases. Demand that didn't exist at the old price point.
Total coal consumption soared.
That's the paradox. When the unit cost of a fundamental input drops far enough, total consumption goes up, not down.
One more example to hammer it home, because this one's almost funny.
The price of light fell 3,000 times over two centuries. You'd expect people to use roughly the same amount of light and pocket the savings.
Per-capita consumption of light rose 13,000 times. Total consumption rose 40,000 times.
Nobody looked at cheap light and said "brilliant, I'll use the same amount." They lit up everything. Streets, stadiums, screens. The demand was always there. Cost was the constraint.
Now apply it to recruiting.
Job boards made posting jobs and finding candidates dramatically cheaper than newspaper classifieds. The prediction: fewer recruiters needed. The result: the US staffing and recruiting industry grew to $220 billion by 2022.
LinkedIn gave recruiters access to hundreds of millions of passive candidates. The prediction: recruiters will find people so easily they won't need as many of them. The result: an entirely new job category called "sourcer" was invented. Recruiter headcount expanded.
AI sourcing tools now. Same prediction. Same pattern emerging.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 6% growth in HR specialist roles — the category that includes recruiters — from 2024 to 2034. Faster than average. Roughly 81,800 openings per year over the next decade. After AI tools are already widely adopted.
What this actually means for you.
Three things.
1. Stop preparing for a world with less recruiting work.
The macro data doesn't support it. Every technology that made recruiting cheaper made it bigger. The energy you're spending worrying about whether your role exists in five years — redirect it into positioning yourself for the version of the role that's expanding.
2. Figure out what's "coal" and what's the "new application."
The coal is the stuff getting cheaper. Sourcing names. Writing boolean strings. Drafting outreach. Screening CVs. Scheduling. These are the tasks where AI is collapsing the unit cost.
The new applications are the work that only becomes possible because the basics got cheap. Strategic workforce planning conversations. Multi-market talent intelligence. Advising hiring managers on whether they actually need a hire at all versus a contractor, an internal move, or automation.
When sourcing took 80% of your time, you had no capacity for any of that. When AI handles sourcing, you do. That's the Jevons shift. The total demand for recruiting work goes up. The composition changes.
3. Become the person who directs the agents. Not the person who does what agents do.
The recruiters who struggle will be doing what AI does cheaper. The recruiters who thrive will be doing work that only became possible because AI made the basics cheap.
Think about what happens when you hand a hiring manager a tool that maps an entire talent market in 30 minutes instead of three weeks. They don't say "brilliant, we need fewer recruiters." They say "can you also map these five adjacent markets? What about compensation benchmarking for this new geography? Can you build a pipeline for a role we haven't opened yet?"
Cheaper inputs create more demand.....hopefully
Luke Update
Next month I'll be in San Fransisco for the AshbyOne conference. If you are in SF the week of May 5th, hit me up!!
Well... that's issue sixty nine! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.
I'll see you next week!