The public conversation about AI and work has split into two noisy camps.
On one side: AI will steal every job. On the other: AI will make us superhuman.
And nowhere is that brokenness more visible than in the job hunt. In 2025, the average job seeker submits anywhere from a few dozen to well over 200 applications to land a single offer, and in tougher markets that number can climb into the high hundreds. Cold online applications convert at well under 2%, which means that for 98 out of 100 clicks into a portal, nothing happens on the other side.LinkedIn+3Career Agents+3The Interview Guys+3 What was supposed to feel like matching talent to opportunity now feels, for many people, like feeding résumés into a slot machine that rarely pays out.
Recent candidate-experience research shows that a large share of applicants never hear back at all: roughly a third report being ghosted by employers, and many assume they’ve been rejected if there’s silence for more than a week or two. Around 40% of unemployed job seekers say they haven’t had a single interview in the past year, despite actively applying. It’s no surprise that more and more people describe the process not just as slow or inefficient, but as dehumanizing, a system that feels like it’s working against them rather than for them.
Companies like FirstWork, which builds AI infrastructure for frontline hiring, were born out of this exact dysfunction not to reinvent HR, but to repair the operational plumbing that made HR impossible to do well.
Most people think of HR as “people operations.” In reality, HR functions much more like infrastructure, closer to logistics, energy grids, or undersea cables than to office birthday calendars.
And this is especially true in frontline and blue collar hiring, which accounts for over 40% of the U.S. workforce.
In this world, HR isn’t a quarterly planning exercise. It’s a movement. It’s throughput. It’s dozens of small decisions – all time-sensitive, all compliance-bound, all interdependent. And because the rules and regulatory demands grow every year while the underlying systems stay the same, the slightest deviation creates a cascade.
A missed credential here. A background check that takes 72 hours instead of 12. A workflow in one system that can’t talk to another.
What looks like a small delay at the front of the process becomes a week of lost work or lost pay at the end of it. It’s the administrative equivalent of an air-traffic-control meltdown: one delayed plane, one misrouted pilot, and suddenly twenty flights behind it are late (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/duffy-says-he-would-shutter-us-airspace-if-he-thought-it-was-unsafe-2025-11-03/) because everything is running on tight margins built on human coordination.
We’ve normalized it. We expect paperwork to take weeks or months, even though we know, empirically, that the underlying tasks could be completed in days. But when systems are stitched together instead of built for coherence, a single form submitted incorrectly doesn’t just slow someone down. It ripples through the entire workflow, touching recruiters, managers, compliance teams, and ultimately the worker who can’t start their job on time.
The system isn’t just slow. It’s brittle.
The people inside the system absorb the shock. They’re expected to keep everything moving, catch every edge case, and ensure nothing breaks in an audit. It’s an unforgiving environment that asks humans to behave like machines, perfect precision, zero drift, while simultaneously requiring empathy, context, and judgment.
And this is the part of the AI conversation that rarely gets airtime: A huge portion of modern work is not creative or relational. It’s administrative.
It’s trendy to talk about AI replacing executives and creatives. But the first jobs AI is actually automating are the ones no one wanted: the forgotten plumbing behind every hiring decision.
The Human Cost of Administrative Gravity
As a staffing lead from a global agency put it: HR isn’t stressed because humans are complex. HR is stressed because the system is.
HR teams work inside a maze of fragmented documents, legacy tools, siloed data, and region-by-region regulations that change faster than software updates. Policies shift quarterly. Each state has its own rules. Tools are patched but rarely rebuilt.
What should be a relational job becomes a reactive one. On paper, the role requires machine-level accuracy:
Did the ID expire? Is this certificate valid? Does this person meet the right-to-work rules for this region?
In practice, the same role demands deep empathy: Is this person anxious? Do they understand the process? Did they lose hours waiting for our system to catch up?
The whiplash between those two modes is what drains people.
And the data backs it: HR teams spend over half their time on repetitive administrative tasks: verifications, paperwork, payroll reconciliation. Invisible labor that compounds into burnout.
This administrative gravity quietly eats away at the humanity of the profession.
AI’s Real Role: Restoring the Human Parts of Human Resources
The fear is that AI will replace people.
The reality is that AI is replacing the parts of the job that were never human to begin with.
- Identity checks. Reference Reviews
- Prior Work Experience Validation
- Right-to-work verification.
- Credential confirmation.
- Compliance tracking.
These tasks don’t require nuance. They don’t require interpretation. They don’t require empathy. They require consistency, and consistency at scale is something machines are designed for.
When AI handles that layer, the human parts of HR: conflict resolution, culture building, talent development, and trust finally have space to breathe.
AI here isn’t an overlord. It’s a structural correction.
It takes away the decision fatigue and the constant vigilance demanded by fragmented workflows. It lets HR professionals spend their attention on work that makes workplaces healthier rather than work that keeps systems from collapsing.
As one recruiter told me:
“In the very first pilot, an onboarding flow was reduced from 10 days to just 7 minutes—with 98% accuracy by incorporating AI. That single improvement alone delivered $36,000 in savings in the first year, while also creating a smoother, more positive experience for candidates.“
If anything, AI isn’t replacing HR. It’s giving HR its job back.
What Happens When the System Finally Works
- In a functioning system, hiring doesn’t stall for weeks.
- Managers don’t lose candidates to delays.
- Candidates don’t start their first week already frustrated.
- Companies stop bleeding money through friction.
- Purpose becomes operational.
And when the underlying infrastructure becomes reliable, people move faster and with more clarity. The humanity of work is restored not by removing humans but by removing the noise between them.
This is the shift we rarely talk about when we discuss AI: not efficiency, not automation, but the return of dignity to processes that have eroded it for years.
The Philosophical Bow
Work has always depended on invisible systems. When those systems break, we blame the people caught inside them. When they work, we don’t notice them at all.
AI’s quiet contribution may end up being its most profound:
relieving humans of the parts of work that should never have required humans in the first place. Not to replace us, but to return us to ourselves.
