What If We Asked AI to Design the Best Hiring System from Scratch?

 

Not tweak the current one. Not optimize it. Start over.

No legacy ATS workflows. No "we've always done it this way." No vendor influence. Just this question: given everything we know about talent markets, organizational science, and what actually predicts someone's success a year into a job – what would the ideal hiring system look like?

That's the experiment. The results will be discussed at this week's "Moneyball for HR!" prime time event (February 26th at 1 PM ET Zoom) or LinkedIn Live.

Here's the Challenge

Before our session, I'm asking every participant to take the nine requirements below, paste them into the AI system of their choice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, whatever you prefer – and ask it to design the optimal hiring system from scratch. Then come to the session ready to share what your AI came up with.

The prompt:

"Using the nine requirements below, design a hiring system from scratch that operates as a true business process – one that is accountable, objective, predictable, measurable, repeatable and cost-effective compared to current practices. Explain your reasoning for each design choice and cite the research that supports it."

The Nine Requirements

1. Focus on attracting the best talent for staff and management roles recognizing that the strongest candidates are not actively looking and change jobs based on career growth opportunities, not job postings. The goal is to raise the level of talent companywide.
2. Embed how research shows the best hiring managers actually find, evaluate and hire the strongest talent and develop them to succeed. Use What the World's Best Manager's Do Differently as the baseline but revalidate these findings.
3. Ensure the system is more legally defensible than traditional hiring by anchoring every screening and evaluation step in job-related criteria consistent with EEOC Uniform Guidelines, Griggs v. Duke Power principles, and local, state and Federal labor laws.
4. Use best organizational development science to predict post-hire success using multi-trait, multi-method assessment approaches considering the work of Paul Sackett, Todd Rose, author of The End of Average, and Tom Janz, the founder of behavioral event interviewing. Again, validate common benchmarks to ensure their findings.
5. Conduct a proper job analysis that accurately reflects the open role and the factors most likely to affect post-hire performance and engagement.
6. Redesign the apply process so that candidates demonstrate their competency through a structured self-assessment against the actual requirements of the role, making the application itself an initial evaluation. The purpose is to minimize reliance on costly upfront screening while giving candidates enough information about real job expectations to self-select appropriately.
7. Achieve more Win-Win Hiring outcomes where success is measured on the first year anniversary date, not the start date, considering performance, job satisfaction and manager assessment of growth trajectory.
8. Design the employer value proposition and sourcing approach based on how the best people prefer to find new jobs and what they need to see and learn in order to consider a new opportunity a career move.
9. Design an onboarding program that ensures the new hire is fully engaged and performing at a high level throughout the first year based on Gallup's Q12 engagement survey.

What I Expect Will Happen

When 50 or 100 people independently ask different AI systems the same question, the answers are going to converge. Not because the AI has been told what to say, but because the underlying research points in the same direction. And that convergence is the conversation — what does it mean when an unbiased system, reasoning from first principles, designs something fundamentally different from what most companies are doing today?

Then try this prompt:

How well does Performance-based Hiring meet these requirements? Be cynical in your assessment and as part of this compare what you know about (company's) current hiring system and major HR tech tools against these same findings.