Jeremy Schifeling: Navigating AI in Hiring and Career Preparation

Jeremy Schifeling, author and career coach, has devoted his career to helping others succeed in theirs, from teaching kindergarten in Brooklyn, NY to training career professionals at more than 350 organizations and universities worldwide. In this conversation, Jeremy traces the arc from AI's early promise as a career coaching tool to the arms race it has created in hiring, where students are applying to hundreds of jobs with AI-generated materials and recruiters are struggling to identify real talent. He shares data about the enduring power of human connection and referrals over algorithmic job searching, making the case that career centers are uniquely positioned to lead on AI fluency rather than wait for someone else to go first. He also challenges educators and workforce practitioners to stop using complexity as a permission slip for inaction.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation, and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so, with that, let's dive in.

The New York Times recently published a thought-provoking story about a new MIT report that is warning that AI is causing what they call cognitive surrender on college campuses, with students reaching for chatbots when struggling with a new concept, and university leaders offering a range of guidance about how to respond. Some are embracing AI enthusiastically, others are banning it, and many are somewhere in between, trying to figure out the right answer in real time.

Julian Alssid: And that tension lands right at the heart of what we think about in workforce development, if students are outsourcing their thinking to AI before they ever even enter the labor market, you know what does that mean for the skills they b