Four Ways AI Boosts Hiring Instead Of Killing Jobs

Elton Chan is the Co-Founder of Second Talent, a solution that connects global tech leaders with AI-native engineering talent across Asia.

I’ve become a little suspicious of the idea that AI automatically means fewer hires.

A few months ago, one of our clients was planning to hire eight engineers. They introduced AI into the development process, found they could get the same work done with five and cut the requisition. Then those five started getting through work faster than expected. By June, the company was asking us to hire 11.

It sounds contradictory until you look at what the company did with the capacity it created. They started taking on work that had previously been too expensive to justify, and that created demand for more people.

I’ve seen versions of this in several parts of our hiring work.

1. Freed capacity gets spent, usually within two quarters.

I’ve stopped believing companies simply bank the efficiency.

When a team gets more productive, the conversation usually moves to the work they couldn’t justify before. Maybe there was a market they wanted to enter but couldn’t staff properly, or a product that kept getting pushed back because engineering was already at capacity. Sometimes it’s a customer segment where implementation costs made the economics difficult.​

We’ve seen this with clients after their engineering teams became more productive. Work that had been sitting on the roadmap gets picked up, customers who weren’t previously viable become worth pursuing and that creates demand for people outside engineering, too.

A company might need fewer engineers to maintain what it already has and still end up hiring more people because it can now do things it couldn’t afford to do before.

2. The demand has moved into the business as well as the technology.

The technical candidates we work with are increasingly bringing domain knowledge into AI projects, and that’s becoming more valuable as companies put AI into existing parts of the business.