Most hiring today is optimized for speed, not fit, and that is why both companies and candidates are frustrated. In this episode of Localization Fireside Chat, I sat down with Josh Hill, co founder of Super Hired and senior HR leader at Tier 11, to unpack why recruitment has become an AI driven mess and what it would look like if we rebuilt it from first principles. Josh’s path into HR is not conventional. He started his career as an infantry officer in the Australian military, studied business and human resources, and eventually moved into marketing and people leadership at a US based agency. That mix of operational discipline, behavioral insight, and commercial thinking shaped how he sees the modern workplace. He argues that the core failure in hiring is that companies treat it as a filtering exercise instead of a matchmaking one. Candidates are reduced to keyword loaded resumes and companies are reduced to vague job descriptions. AI now sits on both sides of that broken system, with candidates using bots to generate applications and employers using bots to filter them, resulting in machines talking to machines while humans are left out of the conversation. Josh believes hiring should start with context, not speed. A candidate is not just a set of skills. They have social, emotional, and functional needs from work that change over time. A company is not just a job title. It has team dynamics, culture, leadership styles, and shifting business realities. When those two sides are not deeply understood, every hire becomes a gamble. This is why Super Hired begins by slowing everything down. Before posting a role, they spend time discovering the business, the team, and the work product being offered. Work, Josh explains, should be treated like a product that people choose to subscribe to. Just like Netflix or any subscription service, employees engage with work because it delivers specific outcomes for them, such as income, purpose, autonomy, growth, or security. Those drivers differ for every person. When companies understand what people are actually hiring their job to do for them, they can design roles that attract the right talent instead of misleading everyone involved. Josh also introduces the idea of talent density, a concept popularized at Netflix. Increasing the concentration of capable, aligned people inside a business has a direct impact on customer outcomes, innovation, and performance. A single great hire can lift an entire team, while a poor hire can poison culture, slow execution, and destroy trust. Hiring is therefore the most powerful lever a founder has. Yet most companies treat it as a transactional process driven by applicant tracking systems and resume filters that strip away context. Josh explains why resumes are a relic of the industrial era and why they fail to capture the messy, collaborative reality of modern work. Leading a complex project, navigating stakeholders, or operating inside a startup requires far more than what a list of past roles can show. Real understanding only comes through conversation and discovery. Super Hired is building both a service and a technology platform to bring this depth back into hiring. They help companies decide whether they even need to hire, uncover what the role truly requires, and then market the position honestly and transparently to candidates. Their approach is deliberately polarizing. If a role is not right for someone, they say so. That honesty builds trust and leads to better matches. Josh also makes it clear that people unsubscribing from a job is not a failure. Just as customers cancel subscriptions when a product no longer fits their needs, employees leave when their work product no longer matches their lives or goals. The job of leaders is to listen continuously, understand when gaps are emerging, and either redesign the work or accept that the relationship has run its course. The biggest danger Josh sees in the market is companies using AI to accelerate a broken process instead of fixing it. Without first principles thinking and deep human discovery, AI simply makes bad hiring faster and more expensive. The future of recruiting, he argues, belongs to organizations that treat people as customers, work as a product, and hiring as the most strategic decision they make.
Watch the full conversation https://youtu.be/d0MDDz7CN70
Localization Fireside Chat
Unscripted. Unbiased. Unfiltered.
https://www.l10nfiresidechat.com
Robin Ayoub 
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