A short excerpt from a YouTube conversation ("Combating The AI Labor Slinky") in which Precursor Ventures and another speaker discuss hiring-cycle dynamics: firms underhire during downturns and later struggle to promote or grow leadership talent (the "donut hole" problem), with examples like Klarna and consulting firms during COVID. The exchange uses the "slinky" metaphor to describe hiring overcorrections.
So we have these donut hole classes that are just really small and we don't have the people we need to promote into leadership. And I wonder if something similar will happen, which is, you know, we've already seen Klarna backtrack a bit. Will people say, wow, like for a few years we underhired and underinvested in people. And now that we need those people, you can't go back in time and grow them.
You would think that in so many cycles that this has happened to large companies. I've seen in Covid for every consulting company, they stopped hiring and they went to this massive hiring because they had too many projects to be able to service. And so they overhired and they had to cut people back again. You would have imagined people to understand how a slinky moves. They.
