What happens when someone who has spent their career putting people at the centre of change ends up on the receiving end of it? That’s the question I put to Janet O’Hehir this week. Janet is an organisational development consultant and social scientist whose career runs from emergency services to magic circle law firms, in the UK and her native Australia.
Janet spoke very openly about job hunting through applicant tracking systems. Applications vanish without a word, ghosting has become normal, and the one employer that promised a human would read her CV stood out simply for doing so. I’ll admit her story made me uncomfortable. I’ve been on that side of the process myself, and I’ve also been the one relying on those systems to sift candidates. So we looked at what good would look like. That means starting with the real problem, listening to unsuccessful candidates and recognising that your employee value proposition begins at the very first touch point.
From there we turned to judgement. We talked about why a human in the loop needs the training and authority to push back, and what the ICO found when 30 organisations volunteered to have their recruitment pipelines reviewed. Janet describes her work as living in “the white space between the lines on an org chart”, where people and systems meet. We also got into the pressure on the messy middle of management, the lack of investment in leaders and why every organisation should set a minimum standard of AI skills so that everyone has the same footing.
It’s an honest, human conversation, and I think you’ll recognise a lot of it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Thanks for listening. Stay Sovereign,
