By Rick Devine, the recruiter who introduced Tim Cook to Steve
As a young sales engineer who arrived in the Silicon Valley in 1982, I was inspired by Steve Jobs philosophy about computers. He once described them as a bicycle for the mind, a tool to help people be more productive, to be better. Steve never described computers as something that would replace people.
Hasn’t technological advancement always been this way? Henry Ford, when asked by a farmer why he should buy an automobile, said to do what you do better. This could have meant checking on the cows, moving hay, picking up supplies etc. Every innovation Steve Jobs introduced was the same. He described the device as a way for people to be happier and more successful. Like the way he described the iPhone as the internet in your pocket.
Today, we talk about the impact of AI, including replacing people, which must be scary to many. The industry has a new buzz word, Agentic Workforce, bots that would replace people. I wonder how Steve would have responded to this? I suggest he would have been skeptical, and counter this with a vision of technology empowering people to more productively interact with others and to build relationships. Anyone who has called a company customer support line and interacted with an IVR system, wishing for a real and empathetic person to solve their problem, knows what I am saying.
When I was recruiting for Steve, he described what he needed at Apple to move the then troubled company forward. Steve described the work, the skills and expected me to find them while he focussed on the fit, the chemistry, the humanity. This experience inspired me to build a network that leverages AI to help people validate their work experience and skills so they can be discovered, like I did the old fashioned way with Tim Cook.
If employers want to leverage AI to move their recruiting agenda forward, they should focus on how it can help them discover skill relevance so they can focus on building more human relationships, not replace them.
Steve would have liked that.