OpenAI, the company that’s blamed for disrupting the job market, just decided to get into recruiting. They call it The Open AI Jobs Platform, and its designed to provide economic opportunity for all.
Interestingly, this is the same language LinkedIn used in March of 2008 when they launched LinkedIn Recruiter. and later acquired Lynda.com to build LinkedIn Learning. In 2008 the big workforce challenge was “digital skills” (which seem quaint now), and today it’s all about AI.
So OpenAI’s Jobs Platform includes a series of AI Certification Programs, designed to help us stay relevant and move to Superworker status.
“Now we’re … offering certifications for different levels of AI fluency, from the basics of using AI at work all the way up to AI-custom jobs and prompt engineering. We’ll obviously use AI to teach AI: anyone will be able to prepare for the certification in ChatGPT’s Study mode and become certified without leaving the app. And companies will be able to make it part of their own learning and development programs.”
In a somewhat odd coincidence, this week we also discovered that the US job market is crashing (only 73,000 jobs created in July, and ADP believes only 54,000 were created in August).
This is the lowest level of job growth since the pandemic, and for the first time in decades there are more people looking for work than there are jobs.
Why the slowdown? For the most part, companies are betting that AI will improve productivity. So that bet, coupled with the uncertainty of tariffs and general GDP slowness, means that almost every company is freezing or reducing headcount.
I’d like to make a few comments on all this activity, and also give you my perspectives on OpenAI’s entry into recruitment.
Yes, The Job Market Is Crashing, But Also Reinventing Itself
By “crash” I don’t mean we’re in a crisis, but for white collar workers it’s very tough finding a job right now. Not only are companies reluctant to hire, we’re all nervous about our own AI skills so there is a lot of fear and uncertainty in the job market.
We call this the Superworker effect (read more here): AI automates many tasks and analytical activities, forcing individuals to upskill themselves to stay current. Those who fail to adapt find themselves out of work.
For businesses this is a bonanza: productivity goes up and hopefully costs stay flat. (It’s not as easy as it sounds: AI systems are not free and it takes months to years for the AI re-engineering to pay off, but benefits are coming fast.)
For job seekers, it means you’re fishing in a pond where expectations are high. Employers want AI-ready workers.
We now use AI-based avatar and content technology for all our courses in Galileo Learn and we see at least a five-fold increase in speed, quality, and user experience. Traditional instructional designers: please don’t apply.
(Check out Galileo Learn if you want to see world-class AI-native L&D with 400+ dynamic courses available now!)
For companies, it’s re-engineering time.
Companies like Micron, J&J, Walmart, IBM, and many others are actively redesigning business functions, and it’s complex, culturally challenging (we call it “dynamic organization design”) and requires prioritization. There are almost too many targets to go after!
Over time, however, as I discussed with Taylor Stockton, Chief Innovation Officer at US Department of Labor (podcast), new jobs are created and companies grow on a new productivity curve.
Then there’s this other issue: a growing shortage of workers.
Fewer people are being born; many boomers have retired; and immigration is slow to zero. This creates a job market where fewer people compete for available jobs, which is particularly difficult for front-line work.
Believe it or not, 70% of US jobs are now in front-line, service, transportation, healthcare, or other “mixed collar” roles. In these segments the hiring market is white hot, and that includes jobs in manufacturing, logistics, hospitality, and many other industries. Here companies can’t find people fast enough.
And this demographic trend will continue. BLS analysis predicts that over the next ten years the US workforce will only grow by 3.1%. This is almost 75% less growth than the 13% workforce growth we experienced over the last decade. So one could argue that productivity and AI are here just in time. (Read more here.)
You can already see the unemployment rate ticking up, despite the lack of job growth.
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Transformation in Jobs Themselves
The next trend involved is the huge transformation in jobs themselves, and this impacts your career, wages, and personal development.
As we detail in our Superworker research, companies will no longer define jobs as a “collection of tasks” or “set of processes.” Now, thanks to AI, many white collar jobs can be defined through their outcomes or accountable results. (We call it “accountability-based org design.”)
As AI becomes both manager (directing your priorities) and agentic tool, professionals will be held accountable for results, not activity. This means all jobs become more expansive and important, forcing workers to focus on prompting skills, learning agility, teamwork, and general business acumen.
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If you were a “video editor” you’re now an AI-supported “video producer.” Editing the video is done by machine: it’s up to you to think through the storyline, the timing, select music, and make the whole thing “sing.” The same is happening in HR jobs (HR business partners, recruiters), Marketing (content and lead generation), Publishing (writers, authors), and all areas of Finance and Administration.
This “accountability-based” job design is what we advise companies to do as they consider task automation. You can task-reduce a job and redefine what someone does, but every few months the AI tool gets smarter, so the “task-list” keeps changing and getting smaller.
Instead we want to design our work around “who owns what part of the business process,” enabling each Superworker (working with their Supermanager), to find the best way to get it done.
This used to be called “Job Crafting:” letting each person decide how best to do their work. Now we’re doing job crafting at massive scale, expecting every individual to figure out how to do their work more productively.
And to enable this bottoms-up productivity gain we need to enable, empower, and educate people about AI. And that’s what OpenAI is trying to do.
Can OpenAI Pull This Off
I’ve been studying HR Technology for 30+ years and many companies have tried to nail talent acquisition. Google Jobs was one effort, and even Facebook gave it a try. It turns out it’s quite complex and if OpenAI wants to do it well they have a lot of work to do.
First, OpenAI has to amass a huge amount of job candidate data (that’s every working-age person in the world). That alone is a massive effort – buying data (listen to my podcast on the People Data Market for more) – and then they have to infer skills, experience, potential, and much more.
All that AI-powered effort has been underway at LinkedIn, Eightfold, Lightcast, Draup, Seekout, Indeed, Ziprecruiter, Beamery, SAP, Workday, and hundreds of others. And what you find is that the sheer size and scale of the problem is daunting. Seekout and Eightfold are very good at finding technical people. Draup can find you bio-medical researchers and robotics engineers. And Indeed can help you find nurses.
I’m not saying OpenAI can’t get this into the market, but I hope they focus their efforts. Not only is the data management (and data collection) massive, they have to deal with bias, trust, and validity – themes which they’ve been able to more or less ignore so far. And the buyers of talent acquisition systems are sophisticated, demanding companies – not individuals who hack around with ChatGPT for personal tasks.
We’ll stay close to them and share what we learn, but I can guarantee that Workday, SAP, (both of whom just acquired talent acquisition companies), Oracle, and all the vendors above are not sitting still. So this may be one of the “good ideas” at OpenAI that demands more product management than they realize. But my mind is open.
AI Agents as Learning Tools
And this gets me to my final point, and maybe the most exciting of all (also mentioned in OpenAI’s announcement): AI Agents as Professional Development Tools.
As we detail in our Revolution in Corporate Learning research, companies need to shift from “job-centric training” to “dynamic self-development” as a learning strategy. If the job tasks keep changing, you as an employee have to learn even faster.
Dynamic learning platforms like Galileo Learn, which now has more than 30,000 users, go far beyond giving you a certification. They become your own personal AI Tutor, answering questions and challenging you every day.
We are two years into this effort we’ve seen it all in reality. When you couple the power of a trusted agent with credential-quality training, interactivity, simulation, and role play, the learning experience becomes magical. This is our vision for Galileo Learn, and we’re already delivering it today.
OpenAI clearly wants to go in this direction, so let’s hope they help us all revolutionize corporate L&D.
We all need a 24/7 learning tutor that knows what we need to learn, teaches us, and coaches us for success. This is how AI will best deliver career success, self-confidence, and economic growth in the future.
Additional Information
Galileo Learn™ – A Revolutionary Approach To Corporate Learning
Can AI Beat Human Intuition For Complex Decision-Making? I Think Not.