It's time to introduce more friction into hiring
When AI raises the floor, you need new ways to spot the ceiling
I’d been weighing the merits of investing in a freelance designer to craft a set of blog graphic templates for hiretruffle.com. Something reusable. On-brand. Polished. The kind of work that once required careful briefing, iteration, and a little bit of aesthetic conviction.
But then I came across Napkin.
The app’s premise is deceptively simple: enter a line of text, get a clean, well-designed graphic in return. I tried it. It worked. It was good enough. And just like that, the decision was made for me. I wouldn’t be hiring a designer after all.
Before any designers take offense: this isn’t a dismissal of the craft. I still believe in deep, expressive design, especially when the work calls for it. Custom illustrations. Interactive experiences. Narrative-driven visuals that stretch beyond the grid. There’s a time and a place for all of it.
But this moment didn’t need that. What I needed was a fast, scalable way to translate thoughts into visual language. And now, a tool could do that. Competently. Consistently. Without human involvement.
What struck me wasn’t the convenience, it was the shift.
Where once a designer’s eye was essential for even modest digital polish, today a well-built app meets the baseline expectations of most audiences. The visual bar hasn’t disappeared. It’s just been automated down.
And it’s not just design. The same shift is happening everywhere, including hiring.
The illusion of effort
Just as design tools let anyone produce visuals that pass as professional, AI now lets jobseekers generate résumés, cover letters, and even interview scripts that hit the expected notes.
You don’t need to be a strong communicator, you just need the right prompt. You don’t need to know the company, you just need a browser extension that fills in the blanks.
At a glance, everything looks better. More polished. More “aligned.”
But polish is not the same as intent. Fluency is not the same as depth.
When the outputs become indistinguishable, what we're really evaluating is the performance of systems that are templated, automated, and optimized; rather than the person behind them.
And as hiring teams try to keep up, they’re deploying their own automation: résumé screeners, asynchronous interviews, game-based assessments, scoring algorithms. More layers. More tech. Less friction.
Everyone is automating against everyone else.
The downward spiral of reciprocal escalation
This isn’t just speculation. It’s playing out in real time. Sarah O’Connor recently captured the tension in The Financial Times, describing the AI arms race in hiring as “a huge mess for everyone.”
She’s not wrong.
What began as an effort to scale became a system of mutual distrust. Employers optimized for efficiency by automating the front-end of the process to save time. Candidates responded with AI tools of their own, trying to reverse-engineer what the machine wanted to hear.
The result is a hiring process where both sides are speaking past each other. Sounding more competent, but feeling less human. Recruiters complain of copy-paste answers, impossible pipelines, and an uncanny sameness in every application.
Candidates describe a sense of being reduced to inputs, boxed into automated flows, and ghosted at scale.
Easy apply is too easy
We’ve removed all the friction. And in doing so, we’ve removed the texture.
One-click “Easy Apply” buttons let candidates fire off applications without pause, reflection, or relevance. Job boards reward volume because volume looks like engagement. More candidates. More activity. More dashboards to show the hiring team.
But volume isn’t value. A flood of indistinguishable applications doesn’t help you make better choices. It just overwhelms your ability to discern.
When every résumé looks clean and every cover letter reads like it was polished by a ghostwriter, hiring becomes a matter of triage, not curiosity. A sorting problem, not a discovery process. And discovery, real discovery, requires time, context, and human attention.
In trying to scale hiring, we’ve ended up sanding it down. When you sand wood, you remove friction. But you also remove grain. Smoothness is not always clarity. Sometimes, it has unintended consequences.
So what now?
The answer isn’t to throw out AI. Nor is it to return to pre-digital rituals out of nostalgia. Technology, when applied well, can reduce bias, unlock access, and accelerate timelines. But not every part of hiring should be optimized for speed.
Instead, we need to reintroduce thoughtful friction.
Friction that filters not by keywords, but by curiosity. Friction that makes you pause before you apply. That makes you reflect before you respond. That invites (not forces) a candidate to show who they are, rather than what they’ve copied.
We need to build systems that reward coherence, not fluency. That surface originality, not repetition. That let humans listen again, instead of skimming for patterns the machine tells them to find.
That might mean structured over freeform. It might mean new tools entirely.
But the principle is the same: stop overvaluing the easily faked. Start designing for the harder-to-fake moments. The ones that reveal thinking, judgment, vulnerability, surprise. Human moments. It’s at the core of what we’re trying to do at Truffle.
When the floor is raised by automation, the ceiling gets harder to see
The hiring process has never been more sophisticated, more scalable, or more efficient. And yet, the most common feedback we hear from employers is still: I don’t know who to trust.
That’s the paradox. The better the system gets at creating the illusion of fit, the harder it gets to recognize the real thing.
AI raised the floor. But the ceiling is still out there.
And if we want to spot it, we need to stop designing systems that only reward the surface and start building ones that help us see what’s above it.