The job market has survived worse than AI. (Part 1)

Have you got a touch of AI fear when it comes to your career?

I’ve been hearing a version of this from clients almost every week this year, and I want to address it because I think a lot of what’s circulating right now is panic dressed up as insight. The headlines are dramatic, the LinkedIn posts are full of doom, and when you’re mid-career or mid-transition and you’re reading about thousands of applications flooding every role and algorithms filtering people out before a human even looks at them, it’s hard not to feel a creeping anxiety about what that means for you specifically.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been on both sides of the hiring table for 30 years. I started as a recruiter, spent a decade as a sustainability consultant inside companies like Adobe, Deloitte and WWF, and have spent the last 20 years coaching ESG and sustainability leaders through career transitions. I’ve watched this industry navigate things that looked far more catastrophic than AI at the time, and the professionals who stayed grounded and focused on the fundamentals came through every single one of them.

The job market has survived worse than this. And the people who understood that and stayed resilient and confident, always came out ahead.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a senior sustainability leader who had spent more than 25 years building expertise across global organizations. He'd applied for dozens of roles, secured a handful of interviews, experimented with AI tools, refined his resume countless times and still found himself asking the same question: What am I missing? Six months later, he was no closer to the role he wanted.

What struck me wasn't his lack of experience. It was how quickly the process had made him question the value of everything he'd built.

And honestly, I don't think he's alone.

Like many professionals, he'd started to believe the problem was AI, applicant tracking systems or the thousands of applications showing up on LinkedIn. In reality, the issue was something else entirely. His story had become diluted as he was relying on AI to help him stand out while, at the same time, sounding increasingly like everyone else doing exactly the same thing.

The challenge wasn't a lack of expertise but it was visibility. Helping recruiters and hiring managers see the value he'd spent decades building.

Let me take you back to 2001, when the dot-com crash wiped out thousands of roles overnight. Companies that had been hiring aggressively stopped entirely. I had clients mid-transition who suddenly found themselves navigating a market that had changed completely. The narrative at the time was that it was broken. It wasn’t. It adapted. And the professionals who stayed the course, kept building their expertise and maintained their relationships came through it well, often into better roles than the ones they’d left.

Then came 2008 and the financial crisis was the most significant hiring freeze most people had experienced in their careers. Sustainability and CSR budgets were often the first to be cut. I watched clients panic, scatter their efforts, apply to everything and get nowhere. I also watched clients who stayed focused on what they’d genuinely built, kept showing up for their networks and told a clear story about what they could do, those people moved through it. Not without difficulty, but with intention.

And then, of course, there was 2020. A global pandemic shut down hiring almost entirely for the better part of a year. That was genuinely hard. I won’t pretend otherwise. And yet within eighteen months, sustainability hiring hadn’t just recovered, it had accelerated dramatically as organizations realized how urgently they needed ESG expertise.

Every single time, the professionals who navigated those moments most successfully weren’t the ones with the most polished CV. They were the ones who’d built real relationships, developed genuine expertise and understood how to position what they’d done in the language of what was needed next. That hasn’t changed. It’s just harder to see right now because there’s a lot of noise.

Continue reading in Part 2, where I explore what’s really happening with AI in recruitment and why I believe the fundamentals of a successful job search haven’t changed.