The press calls us the "ChatGPT generation." Last year, Shopify grew its intern program from 25 to nearly 1,000 new hires. IBM will triple its entry-level hiring this year. McKinsey wants us. The reasoning: we're fluent in AI.
All of this is true, but mastering Claude prompting won't be our competitive edge in the workplace.
AI fluency is like oxygen: something we take for granted, invisible, rarely discussed because everyone in our generation has it. And when everyone our age can create an impressive PowerPoint presentation in under 20 minutes, the presentation isn't what will get us promoted. It's what we do after handing in the presentation.
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Get notified of top trending articles like this one every week! (we won't spam you)How Recruiting is Changing
The final-round interview at McKinsey now involves new hires using the firm's proprietary AI tools. The partner observes how the prospect interacts with the tool. Then the partner asks the candidate to improvise in real time with follow-up questions. The partner wants to know how the potential new hire thinks and whether they are smart enough to hold her attention.
This second part of the interview is the entire game we're playing now. And some of us have yet to prepare for it.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, a Carnegie Mellon intern described watching another colleague deliver a presentation full of em-dashes — an unmistakable sign of AI use — only to freeze in place when his boss asked a follow-up question. In this same article, one manager says his employees "refuse to pick up the phone and call somebody no matter what," because they would rather use AI to draft an email. These anecdotes are not outliers. They're a pattern that hiring managers are seeing day in and day out.
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Muscle Memory
Every time you use AI, keep these anecdotes in mind. For every hour that you let an LLM draft your book report, write your papers, and solve complex problems, that's one less hour you'll use to develop the muscles that these activities build. Your output might be good enough, but the reps didn't happen. When you step into the workforce (where most of your output will be commoditized by AI), the reps are the only thing your employer will want to pay for.
A recent op-ed in The New York Times argues that the things you might dislike about a job (meetings, presentations, debating, lobbying, and selling) are precisely the skills that can't be automated by AI and therefore the only part of your skill set that’s becoming important. A KPMG director stated he needed "people who have their phone glued to their head, who are everybody's best friend, who are go-go-go." A data scientist said he used to reward "socially awkward nerds" who could grind LeetCode, but now his company screens for whether you can spot a good idea and convince people to support it.
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Your Competitive Moat
This is a big change in the qualities employers are looking for. The tech-savant archetype, which dominated recruiting for the past fifteen years, is now downgraded. Generalists who can read the room, tell compelling stories, and make persuasive sales pitches have the edge.
Soft skills are not really soft. In fact, they're the most difficult skills to fake and the hardest to acquire.
Fortunately, not all of us are missing this point. In fact, it's what is driving the "intellectual influencer" trend, where creators build an audience based on their genuine expertise rather than superficial appeal. It's also responsible for the current entrepreneurship boom. Startup applications at Johns Hopkins rose from 55 to 860 in the last 5 years. A Carnegie Mellon student raised $2 million in pre-seed funding during his very first semester. And according to the career center at Rice, students are taking leaves of absence to start businesses, as past generations did with study abroad. People are figuring out that in a world where everyone has the same AI, the moat has to be you: your taste, your network, your ability to sit in a room and make something happen.
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So what do you do?
Make the phone call. Not because the call is a sacred duty, but because the awkwardness is the exercise. Each time you opt for "generate an email with AI" instead of spending five minutes working the phones, you're taking the easy way out and letting the other muscle weaken. Reverse that ratio.
Build a take. On anything. On everything.
Like the intellectual-creator paradigm, you should be able to hold an opinion with conviction and knowledge, which might become a rare commodity. Read entire books. Make arguments. Be the one at the table with a perspective, not someone whose perspective is built by a machine.
Treat AI like electricity, not a personality trait. It's time to stop performing your AI fluency and let your personality and thought process shine through.
Work the room. The presenting, the negotiating, the closing. These are the parts of the job that are expanding, not contracting, and these are the parts no one will be able to teach you because, as one career coach explained, employers currently suffer from "perfect candidate mentality." They won't train you on the job.
In today's world, many firms could reduce their employees by 30-40% without even noticing. AI provides them with a reason to do so. This is the workforce you are entering. But one thing is for sure: the hiring manager will be asking, whether explicitly or not, "What do you bring to the table that the LLM can't?"
