Every previous wave of automation left a ladder to climb. This one is taking the bottom rungs away while people are still reaching for them. Chris Simmance, author of The Next Rung, on what that does to digital hiring, and why it makes a good recruiter harder to replace, not easier.

Start with Tom. He’s a composite, but you’ve met him. Marketing graduate, 2:1 from Bristol, forty-three applications over seven months. Six interviews, no offer. The part that matters isn’t the rejection count. It’s that one of the agencies he’d have walked into three years ago had quietly cancelled the junior role before it was ever posted. He wasn’t turned down. The rung he was reaching for had been taken away while he was still writing the covering letter.

That’s the bit the unemployment figures never catch. A role that doesn’t get filled looks the same as a role that never existed. And right now, across digital, a lot of the roles that used to sit at the bottom and in the middle of the org chart are quietly not existing.

The playbook that always worked, and why it’s broken

Here’s the thing people reach for when you raise this: we’ve been here before. Looms, spreadsheets, the internet. Every time, the machines took some jobs and the economy grew new ones. Factory workers became service workers. Service workers became knowledge workers. There was always a next rung to climb onto.

That absorption mechanism is the whole reason previous automation waves ended in more employment, not less. It rested on three things happening at once. New kinds of work got created. Demand expanded so there was more to do. And the skills people already had transferred to the new roles closely enough that they could make the jump.

What’s different this time is that AI isn’t a narrow tool that automates one task and leaves the rest. It’s a general substitute for the kind of work a huge slice of digital professionals actually do. So all three pillars are going at the same time. The next rung isn’t waiting to be climbed. It’s being automated in the same breath as the current one.

And the work it takes first isn’t the work people assume. It’s not the creative spark or the client relationship. It’s orchestration. The coordinating, the interpreting, the translating. The person who pulls the dashboard into a deck, who chases the platform update into a strategy tweak, who sits between three tools and four people and keeps it all moving. That was never the glamorous part of the job. It was most of the job. In a digital agency it’s the account manager, the reporting analyst, the PPC coordinator, the person who builds the forty-two-slide monthly. The dashboard interprets itself now. The deck writes itself from the data. Which means the role built around producing it starts to thin out from the inside, sometimes before anyone gives it a name.

This is not “hiring stops”. It’s “hiring changes shape”

If you recruit for a living, none of this reads as good news at first. Fewer roles, hollowed-out briefs, salaries quietly landing ten per cent under where they were. But the conclusion most people jump to, that hiring dries up, is the wrong one. Hiring doesn’t stop. It narrows, and it changes what it’s actually looking for.

When a machine can do the task-level execution, you stop hiring for task-level execution. There’s no margin in paying a person to do the thing the tool does in six minutes. What you can’t buy off the shelf is judgment. The commercial instinct to know which six minutes of output was wrong. The relationship that keeps a client through a bad quarter. The person who can hold ambiguity and make a call without a template. Decision-making, adaptability, commercial awareness, the human capabilities that don’t come from a certificate. Those go up in value precisely as the credentialled, process-heavy stuff goes down.

Which is where the market gets awkward. Most job specs are still written for 2019. Most CVs are still optimised for those specs. Both sides are pretending the ground isn’t moving, matching yesterday’s keywords to yesterday’s roles, and wondering why the good hires feel harder to find. The tragedy isn’t that skills become worthless. It’s that everyone’s still advertising and applying for a role that the technology has already started to eat.

Why the recruiter gets more valuable, not less

Here’s the part worth sitting with if your business is placing people. When credentials commoditise, trust networks become the scarce resource. Anyone can write a job spec now. A model will draft you a decent one in thirty seconds. What a model can’t do is know, from actual relationships built over years, which specific human can do the work that’s left when the orchestration is stripped out. Who has the judgment. Who’s the person a nervous client will keep in the room.

That’s not CV matching. That’s navigation. And it’s exactly the thing a specialist recruiter with a real network does that a job board and an algorithm can’t. The value was never in the keyword search. It was in knowing the people. As more of hiring gets automated at the admin end, the human end, the read on whether this person can actually carry the role, is what’s left standing. If you’ve built a network in a niche, that network is appreciating right now, even if it doesn’t feel like it on a quiet Tuesday.

I should be straight about where I’m sitting while I say all this. I build AI tools that do some of the displacing, so I’m not lobbing this over the fence. I watch it happen in my own products and in the agencies I advise, where the honest recommendation keeps coming back as “you need fewer people.” So take the next bit as coming from someone inside the machine room, not the balcony.

What to actually do about it

For employers: stop hiring for the tasks and start hiring for the capabilities that survive the tools. Build lean teams where a small number of strong people run AI-augmented workflows, rather than large teams doing work the workflow now does itself. But watch one trap. If you cut the entry pipeline to zero because juniors “don’t add margin any more,” you starve your own future seniors. The junior role isn’t just cheap labour, it’s how people become the judgment you’ll be desperate to hire in five years. Someone has to be standing on the lower rungs for anyone to reach the top ones.

For candidates: position, don’t optimise. Optimising a CV for a role that’s being automated is polishing brass on a sinking process. The better move is to become the person the client trusts and the team can’t run without, to own something rather than just execute it, and to get genuinely good with the tools instead of being replaced by them. The competencies that survive are the human ones. They’re harder to fake than a certificate, which is the whole point.

None of this arrives with a headline. It’s a quiet squeeze, role by role, spec by spec, mostly under the official numbers, and it’ll be tolerated right up until it isn’t. Tom didn’t get a redundancy letter. His rung just wasn’t there. The recruiters who see that clearly, and build around the human capabilities rather than the vanishing tasks, are the ones who’ll still have a business worth having when the rest of the market finally works out what’s been happening.

Chris Simmance is the author of The Next Rung, a book about AI, displacement, and what happens to the career ladder when the bottom rungs come away. He builds AI tools and advises agency owners, which puts him closer to the problem than he’d sometimes like.