The Simple Investment of Human Attention

This might sound antiquated, even contrarian, but I want to talk to a person for menial customer service issues.

Bonus points if that person is knowledgeable, happy, genuinely wants to talk to people, and can actually solve my problem. But even if it takes longer, and even if it adds to the total cost of the services I'm paying for, I want to talk to a human.

It doesn't matter how good an AI agent gets. When an organization lets me talk to a human, that organization is investing in the long term.

Attention is the scarce resource

Human attention is in short supply these days. We're surrounded by endless, mindless content engineered to drain it. We navigate automated answering services that are somehow getting better and more frustrating at the same time. (How is that even possible?) And the list of things we can outsource to a bot keeps growing: lawyers, lovers, eldercare robots.

The result is that genuine human attention, the kind where someone listens to your specific problem and works with you to solve it, has become rare. And rare things are valuable.

Why human recruiters outperform automated hiring

I see this play out every day in the job market, especially in school district hiring.

Our organization works with school districts and youth organizations across Minnesota, Massachusetts and Arizona to recruit support staff: paraprofessionals, nutrition services, custodial, and transportation roles. These are some of the hardest positions to fill in K-12 education, and the staffing shortage in these roles is not going away on its own.

While other companies race to automate every step of the hiring process, we employ local, knowledgeable, and (hopefully) happy humans to talk to candidates. Real conversations. Thirty minutes at a time.

We've done it over 30,000 times.

And we're still hiring recruiters, by the way.

Candidates notice the difference. A person who took the time to talk to them, learn their story, and answer their questions is a person they trust. That trust carries through the entire hiring process and into the job itself. It shows up in offer acceptance rates, in retention, and in the way candidates talk about your organization to their friends.

This is also one of the biggest reasons candidates ghost employers. Nobody talked to them. They applied, got an automated text, took an automated assessment, and never heard a human voice. Walking away from a robot is easy. Walking away from a person who invested 30 minutes in you is much harder.

The simplest innovation available

If your organization is struggling to hire, try this: talk to people. Anyone. Candidates who applied. Candidates who ghosted. Employees who left. Employees who stayed.

It's a simple innovation. It costs a lot in the short term. It pays off in the long term.

Frequently asked questions

Should recruiters use AI to screen candidates?

AI can help with sourcing, scheduling, and administrative work, and we use it for those things ourselves. But the screening conversation is where trust gets built, and that's the step worth keeping human. Automating the one moment a candidate decides whether they trust your organization is a false economy.

How long should a candidate screening call be?

We've found 30 minutes is the right length for a screening conversation. It's long enough to learn a candidate's story, answer their real questions, and assess fit honestly. Anything shorter tends to become a checklist read aloud, which candidates can get from a form.

Why is it so hard to hire school support staff?

Paraprofessional, nutrition, custodial, and transportation roles compete directly with retail, warehouse, and gig work, often at similar pay. What school districts can offer that those employers usually don't is meaning, community, and a human hiring experience. Districts that automate away that human experience give up their biggest competitive advantage.

Does talking to candidates improve offer acceptance rates?

In our experience, yes. Candidates who have a real conversation early in the process are more likely to accept offers, more likely to show up on day one, and more likely to stay. The conversation is where a job posting becomes a relationship.