Insights on the world of work | Insights on the world of work

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine you've just hired someone exceptional: smart, fast, tireless, available around the clock, and good at a wide range of tasks. The new hire does not know your business yet. They will need direction, context and for you to tell them what good looks like. But the potential is obvious, and that's exactly why you brought them on.

How would you work with them?

You wouldn't hand them a manual and walk away. You'd invest time upfront and explain your clients, your processes, your standards because you understand that the return on that investment compounds. You'd treat them like a colleague, not a piece of software.

That's the mental model that changes how you think about AI.

Alter Your Language

Maggie Zhu People Partner at Anthropic

At Anthropic, Maggie Zhu, People Partner, describes how this language is beginning to shape the way her own team works: "We refer to Claude very much less like a tool. It's spoken about fondly as a member of the team. 'Have you thought about whether Claude can just do that?'" That shift in language, from tool to teammate, isn't cosmetic. It reflects a fundamentally different relationship with the technology, and a fundamentally different return on it. Zhu also noted what that relationship has done to individual capability.

"Every individual's impact has changed a lot. What one person could do before means something very different now." In a staffing firm where one recruiter's productivity, one account manager's client relationships, and one leader's market insight are the business, that’s not a small thing.

Cybernetic Teammate

A 2025 Harvard Business School field study found that AI functioning as a collaborative thought partner rather than a task executor produces meaningfully better outcomes. The researchers called it the "cybernetic teammate" effect, and their top recommendation was straightforward: Teach people to manage their relationship with AI, not just their prompts. Brief, hands-on sessions that frame AI as a collaborator rather than a search engine dramatically improved results.

Purdue University psychologist Alexandra Harris-Watson has been studying how this shift plays out in the workplace: "People are increasingly conceptualizing AI as a teammate, a mentor, a coach, and a coworker." Her research found that when people extend that social framing to AI, competence drives trust and trust drives use.

The Growth Conversation

The staffing industry has never been short of smart people.

What it has often been short of is time.

Time to research markets
Time to write compelling outreach
Time to analyze which clients are most worth doubling down on
Time to coach junior recruiters at scale

A well-briefed AI colleague doesn't solve all of that. But it puts a capable thinking partner in the room for all of it. The staffing industry is built on human relationships, deep market knowledge, and the judgment that comes from years of experience. AI as just another tool has always felt like a poor fit. Tools are interchangeable. Tools don't help you grow a business. But a brilliant new colleague one who needs your guidance to get going? That's a different conversation entirely.

LinkedIn projects that 65% of the skills needed to do most jobs will have changed by 2030. The staffing firms that grow through that shift won't necessarily be the earliest adopters of AI. They'll be the ones that figured out the right relationship with it and stopped waiting to feel ready before they started.

You already know how to onboard great people. Start there.