Future of Business is a new PSM series featuring perspectives from professors on some of the key questions shaping the future of business, management, organizations, and work.
The first article in the series addresses the question: Are Companies Hiring for Jobs That Won’t Exist in Five Years?
Professor Virginia Drummond, PhD, who teaches Strategic Management and Human Resource Management at PSM, examines whether current recruitment strategies are preparing companies for the way jobs and work are changing. She considers whether organizations are hiring for specific roles and temporary competencies rather than for the broader capabilities employees may need in the future.
Are Companies Hiring for Jobs That Won’t Exist in Five Years?
Article By Virginia Drummond, PhD
Professor of Strategic Management and Human Resource Management at Paris School of Management
Every recruitment strategy carries an implicit bet on the future, and most companies are placing that bet badly. They speak the language of agility: Adaptability, non-linear careers, “growth mindset”, while their hiring machinery quietly does the opposite. Recruiters are AI tools such as: Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and algorithmic screening tools filter candidates against yesterday’s keywords, penalizing precisely the atypical trajectories that tomorrow’s uncertainty will reward.
The OECD’s recent work on algorithmic bias in recruitment shows how convincingly a backward-looking filter can misread a forward-looking candidate: We are, in effect, driving into fog using the rear-view mirror.
Another illusion is more subtle. Confronted with generative AI, many organizations have rushed to invent brand-new job titles, some are funny or even poetic: prompt engineer, AI trainer, AI compliance auditor, AI Agent Orchestrator… I could name lots of these new terms, that pop up every minute, as though naming the disruption were the same as absorbing it.
PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer and Gartner’s technology-trend reporting both note how quickly such roles are already being redefined or folded into broader functions. As models grow more capable of self-correction, the specific technical gesture of “prompting” may not outlive the decade that invented it. Hiring heavily for these transitional competencies repeats an old managerial error: recruiting for a task rather than for a capability.
A more useful question for us than “which jobs will disappear” may therefore be: “whose activity will remain occupable?” Sant’Anna’s (2026) recent work on occupability argues that the real fracture in contemporary work is not between jobs that survive and jobs that vanish, but between activity that retains an institutional place: recognized, addressable, collectively discussed, protected, and activity that persists without one.
A person can keep a job title while losing the mediations that make that work sustainable: An identifiable interlocutor when an algorithm decides, a collective space to debate what quality means, a narrative thread connecting past experience to future possibility. Five years from now, the harder HR question will not be which roles still exist, but whether the humans performing them can still be recognized, answered to, and protected inside increasingly automated systems.
This is where Hamel and Zanini’s (2020) so-called,”Humanocracy”, becomes more than a slogan: It names the deliberate choice to build organizations that liberate human judgement rather than standardize it away. The competitive advantage of the next five years will belong less to the most technically fluent hire than to whoever can orchestrate hybrid intelligence, pairing AI’s speed with human intuition, ethical judgment, and a contextual reading of organizational life that no dashboard can supply.
HR leaders should act on three fronts: audit recruitment algorithms for what they silently exclude, redesign job descriptions around adaptable capability rather than static task lists, and ask not only what candidates can do, but where, within the organization, their activity will still have a place once the tools around it have changed twice over. Hiring for the present is easy. Hiring for a habitable future is the harder and has now become an unavoidable task.