If you want to understand the current anxiety about AI and hiring, you have to go back—oddly enough—to a moment long before AI ever showed up. There was a quiet shift in recruitment that most of us missed. It didn’t happen with a policy change or a cultural movement. It happened inside inboxes and HR dashboards.
Over the past decade, employers sought efficiency by removing themselves from the earliest part of the hiring process. They replaced the handshake with a filter, the conversation with an algorithm, the first impression with a keyword scan. The CV became the currency, and the humans handling it drifted further and further away.
Candidates responded in the only way people ever do when a system grows opaque: they adapted. They learned the rules of the machine. They tweaked phrasing, reverse-engineered job ads, rearranged experience to suit whatever the software seemed to prefer. It was a game no one admitted they were playing, and everyone quietly resented.
Then AI entered the scene, and something fascinating happened. Jobseekers automated the very parts of the process that employers had already automated. The playing field didn’t tilt — it blurred. Suddenly every cover letter sounded like it had been written by the same ghostwriter. Perfect grammar, flawless structure, impeccable polish. A sea of excellence so uniform that excellence became indistinguishable from mediocrity.
This is the irony: we didn’t lose meritocracy because of AI. We lost it when we removed the human texture from hiring. AI simply stepped into the silence we created.
So the solution isn’t to build better detectors or invent another layer of screening. It’s something far simpler. It’s to reintroduce the very thing we eliminated: the person.
This is what WatchAndLearn.io gets right. Not by adding cleverer automation, but by restoring the moment of human encounter we’ve somehow convinced ourselves we don’t have time for. A 60-second video note — a small, almost trivial thing — gives us what 600 words of AI-polished prose cannot: presence.
Presence is hard to fake. It’s the cadence of a sentence. The way someone pauses before answering. The spark in their eyes when they talk about something they care about. You can automate language. You cannot automate sincerity.
And here’s the twist: early video doesn’t accelerate the arms race. It stops it. When you watch someone explain how they solve a problem, you’re not evaluating prompt engineering. You’re meeting a mind.
Video screening rebalances what hiring lost:
-
It surfaces the people buried under identical applications.
-
It reveals potential where CVs reveal patterns.
-
It reduces the quiet biases that creep in when decisions are made from paper alone.
-
It gives under-represented candidates space to be seen rather than sorted.
-
It lets trust form earlier — which is when trust is most meaningful.
We tend to think the path to fairness lies in better systems, more data, more complexity. But sometimes fairness comes from subtraction, not addition. From removing the layers that obscure judgment rather than building new ones to correct it.
For decades, hiring has drifted toward distance. WatchAndLearn.io nudges it back toward proximity. Not by returning us to the past, but by restoring what was sensible about it — the idea that merit begins with meeting the person, not their paperwork.
A fairer system doesn’t need to be a bigger system.
It just needs to be a more human one.