I believe the uncomfortable truth that drives highly-incentivized hiring is twofold: 1. There are many more qualified candidates than jobs. That happened with

I believe the uncomfortable truth that drives highly-incentivized hiring is twofold: 1. There are many more qualified candidates than jobs. That happened with outsourcing and remote, well before AI. That makes hiring errors are mostly undiscoverable. 2. Chemistry matters -- a lot -- in working together, leading to premiums for connections and a bias towards mutually-beneficial referral networks, which makes performance evaluation very difficult. (Objective standards tend to make success game-able, particularly with inside knowledge.) Desperation is not pretty, opportunity distribution is far from optimal, and teams are rarely open and objective about membership.