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#192 - What Changed In You
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Two days into my first job as a recruiter, I sat on a big, open floor of connected desks, with phones buzzing nonstop.

One of the partners at the firm came up to me, unprompted. He’d moved from New York to open the San Francisco office, and is probably the person I learned more about recruiting from than anyone.

Without greeting or segue, he launched in:

Then he paused, looked me in the eyes, and added:

I nodded. Three great questions. Can't use them. Got it.

Only, I remember thinking: you just asked me those questions verbatim. Two weeks ago. In our interview. 🤷🏻

What he was really testing

It took me a long time to understand why those questions worked. Not the surface-level answers. The real ones.

What my colleague was probing was whether someone could look back at who they’d been and explain how they’d changed. Could they narrate their own transformation?

High school to university is one of life's great forced transitions. Just about everyone goes through it. Nobody comes out the same as they went in.

His questions were a test of metacognition: can you see yourself changing? Can you talk about it with candor?

If you can, that’s a great sign. It says you can recognize when the environment shifted -- and understood how you adapted.

If you can’t? That’s a sign, too.

The oldest algorithm

What I didn’t appreciate, on that open floor, with that phone tethered to my ear, was that my colleague was tapping into something much older than recruiting: human psychology.

We are, at base, group animals. For as long as we’ve been around, we’ve had to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. Who gets a place around the fire.

For most of human history, these weren’t theoretical decisions. Letting the wrong person in didn't mean a performance improvement plan, or low morale.

If I let you in and you didn't pull your weight, it was a threat to my survival.

So, over time, we had to evolve sharp, fast instincts to read people and to answer one question above all others: can I trust you?

Thousands of years later, those instincts still dominate. They shape how we evaluate strangers, especially when the stakes are high. And hiring is one of the highest-stakes choices we make at work.

Every interview, beneath the behavioral questions and the scorecards, is really asking: can I trust this person to do the job, and to adapt as the job evolves?

Because, yes, I'm assessing for fit. But every half-aware hiring manager knows that "the job" will look different in six months. They're not just hiring for what the job is, but for what it might become.

And the best test of whether someone will fit that future role is evidence that they have navigated change well in the past.

Most interviewers couldn't tell you that's what they’re filtering for. But it’s the subtext of every interview and judgment call we make on a candidate.

My ex-colleague’s taboo questions were just a shortcut.

194% more questions, 0.36% more action

If the trust algorithm has always been running, why does it matter more now?

Because the rate of change has gone through the roof. AI is the fixation, but the seismic shifts transcend any one tool.

This study analyzed over a million job postings between 2022 and 2025 and found that AI skill requirements jumped 194%. But the actual composition of those jobs -- the work itself -- changed by 0.36%.

So companies are screening for AI fluency at nearly 200 times the rate they’re redesigning the work around it.

They're not just looking for technical skills. They're looking for a proxy. They’re hiring for what AI fluency signals: adaptability.

Steve Cadigan, who built LinkedIn’s early talent organization, calls it someone's “AQ”:

That 194% spike is the trust algorithm, searching for evidence of AQ before companies even know what the work will become.

The new currency

The data show the market reaching for adaptability before it has fully redefined the work. Aditya Agarwal helps explain why.

Agarwal spent the first phase of his career as an engineer and engineering leader. In this piece​ he begins with a eulogy, almost, for his long-time coding craft. But true to his own argument, he doesn't linger there. He pivots from mourning an old version of himself, to "sprinting towards a new one."

Then he names the deeper shift in how talent gets evaluated:

That's the shift.

It’s not about your age, your title, your credentials, or your years of experience. It’s about understanding and articulating your relationship with the change that's surrounding you.

The new tell

My ex-colleague’s questions worked because the transition from high school to college is unavoidable. Everyone goes through it. Everyone changes.

But it’s not the only transition we've all been through. COVID was too. It was a hard, complex, shared experience. All of us changed: how we lived, how we worked, how we led, and how we coped.

And now, there's AI.

AI is just the latest, loudest proving ground. It's a shared, global "transition moment" that allows us to see who's responding.
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And unlike those older questions, this one is fair game as a test of adaptability. The question being:

Can you tell me how you're changing? Can you describe how these shifts are shaping how you work, think, and learn? Can you see the change in yourself?

We're all living through this. What we're doing in the face of it says a lot.

Locate yourself in the change

So. Hiring has always been a trust exercise. Adaptability has always been a key signal. And in this moment of accelerating change, it’s crowding out many other traditional criteria.

The question is: how do you become aware of your adaptability? How do you surface it, first for yourself, and then for others?

One way is through story. In fact, stories are about transformation. We're as hard-wired for them as we are for trust, and it's not a coincidence.

But this is not story as performance or theater. It's story as sense making; a way of understanding your own transformation. A way to locate yourself in the middle of the flux.

It can be as simple as:

• I was X.
• Then Y happened.
• Therefore, I’m now Z.

That's a story, my friends.

X is your old baseline: the skills and mindsets that used to work. Y is the catalyst: the moment you realized the world had changed. Z is the integration: the new version of you that has adapted.

But this isn't just a great way to answer an interview question. It's a way to own your narrative. It proves to the listener that you're not just a passenger in your career. You include them in your journey, and build trust.
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You can work on this yourself, and start simple: write down who you were eighteen months ago, what changed around you, and one thing you do differently now.

That's the exercise: see yourself in the change. Name it to yourself. Then to others.

This is me. Right here. In the flux.

To be clear: the change we're swimming in scares me, folks. I write to understand it, but also to cope with the uncertainty it makes me feel. I wonder how to keep up.

But then I realize: keeping up isn’t the goal. It can’t be. The goal is to keep moving, to keep curious, and to know I’m doing something through the change -- even if I don’t know how it turns out.

I was a recruiter. Then a recruiting leader. Then a content creator. Then a community builder. Now a career strategist. And I sprinkle a layer of AI-savvy across all of that.

What does that make me?
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I don’t know yet.

I just know I can articulate the changes. That I’m many things I wasn't before. That there aren’t many others with my collection of hyphens. And I’m as curious as anyone to see where it all goes.

I’m betting. I’m moving. I’m learning. I’m trusting the remix. And that’s the story I’m writing right now, however unformed.

What’s yours? What’s the transition you’re in the middle of? And how are you changing because of it?

Thanks for reading and exploring with me – and have a great end of the week! 🙏

Aki