A conversation with Bonnie Dilber, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Zapier, on why the job market isn’t broken, how AI is already conducting interviews, and what most job seekers get wrong about their own competitiveness.
From the Classroom to the Talent Chair
Bonnie Dilber has spent the better part of two decades helping people find their footing. She started as an eighth-grade English teacher through Teach for America, moved into coaching and developing teachers, and eventually found herself drawn to the part of management she loved most: hiring. That instinct led her to tech, and today she serves as Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Zapier, where she leads recruiting for a fully remote company of around 850 employees. She also has nearly 500,000 LinkedIn followers who tune in for her unfiltered take on the job market, recruiting, and how AI is changing both.
When I sat down with Bonnie for an episode of Transform Your Workplace, she gave me a sober look at where the labor market actually stands, what’s driving the dysfunction, and how artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping the entire hiring experience, from both sides of the table.
The Job Market Isn’t Broken. It’s Misaligned.
One of the first things Bonnie pushed back on was the narrative that the job market is uniquely terrible right now. “We actually don’t have a significantly lower number of jobs available than we used to,” she told me. “We just have more and more people competing for a pool of jobs that is relatively stagnant.”
There are, in fact, plenty of jobs. Healthcare, education, construction, and the trades are actively struggling to fill roles. The problem is that the jobs people want, particularly in tech, HR, and white-collar professional services, aren’t being created fast enough to absorb everyone who wants them. And a significant portion of those candidates were pulled into those fields during the 2021-2022 hiring boom, when low interest rates and post-pandemic investment created a surge of roles that were never really sustainable.
“A lot of people broke into tech for the first time, worked for two years, got laid off,” Bonnie explained. “Now they don’t have enough experience to be competitive, but they’ve tasted that life, that salary, the remote flexibility, and they want it. And I don’t fault people for wanting those things. But I don’t think the system was ever actually equipped to support that many people in those roles.”
What she’s describing is less a broken job market and more a workforce planning gap, a structural mismatch between where people want to work and where the actual demand is. For anyone early in their career, she offered a pointed piece of advice: be thoughtful about what field you’re entering, because saturated markets punish newcomers first and hardest.
The Myths That Job Seekers Keep Believing
Bonnie is candid with her audience in a way that not many people in recruiting are, partly because she has enough distance from the traditional gatekeeping mindset and partly because she genuinely wants people to succeed. One of the myths she finds most persistent is the idea that applicant tracking systems are automatically filtering out candidates before a human ever sees their resume.
“I’ve used 10-plus applicant tracking systems, all the best-in-class ones,” she said, “and none of them have this functionality.” The frustration candidates feel is real, but the source of it usually isn’t a robot discarding applications in the dark. “There are real issues,” she acknowledged. “But don’t blame machines for the poor decisions or poor systems of humans.”
The harder truth she delivers to job seekers who’ve been searching for months is about self-assessment. Most people, she says, are not accurately gauging how competitive they actually are. “People think, ‘I’m smart. If given the opportunity I know I could figure this out.’ And they’re forgetting that the company probably has 500 applicants who already have the exact experience they’re looking for.” The moment is not ideal for bold career pivots into already-crowded fields. If someone is determined to make a change, Bonnie’s advice is to look where there’s actual job creation and to start somewhere smaller, a local business, a government office, a nonprofit, somewhere more likely to train and invest in someone willing to grow into a role.
Her own career transition into tech took years longer than people might assume. She applied for private sector jobs as early as 2014 and got no interviews. It wasn’t until 2021, when the market was hot and she had built enough of a network to get referrals, that she landed two offers from tech companies. “It has to be lined up,” she said. “Your experience and the job market.”
How AI Is Actually Being Used in Recruiting
The part of our conversation that surprised me most wasn’t about what AI is doing to the job market, but how rapidly Bonnie and her team at Zapier have integrated it into the actual mechanics of recruiting.
She described a layered approach. On the back end, automation handles the operational handoffs so completely that when a hire is made, the recruiter is essentially done. “Once someone clicks ‘hire,’ you never have to do anything else. Zapier takes them, plugs them into the HR system, sets off all their onboarding, and their tech is ordered. A human is not involved in any of that.” For the recruiting process itself, AI tools handle sourcing, flag candidates who haven’t heard back, identify closing risks, and now even conduct interviews.
That last one is worth pausing on. Zapier uses an agentic AI screening tool that conducts verbal interviews with candidates who fall into what Bonnie calls the “bubble” category: people with potential, but enough question marks that a recruiter might have simply rejected them a year ago for lack of bandwidth. “Now we can give them an agentic interview,” she said. “The AI agent asks questions, does follow-ups, knows the rubric, and it’s really good.”
She tested the tool herself, deliberately gave bad answers, and found that it pushed back appropriately, asking for more specifics and pressing on vague responses the way a strong interviewer would. Afterward, recruiters can listen to the recording, review a transcript, and see how the candidate stacked up against the role’s criteria. Candidates can opt out of both the AI interview and the recorded human interviews with no penalty, and the majority who participate in the agentic screener report that it exceeded their expectations.
“I think people don’t always understand that their choice wasn’t between a human interviewer and an AI one,” Bonnie noted. “It was usually between this or a rejection.”
What’s Getting More Complicated
For all the efficiency gains, Bonnie was equally candid about what’s gotten harder. Because so many job seekers are now using AI to write and polish their resumes, a lot of applications have started to look and sound the same. That means recruiters are spending more time doing something they rarely had to do before: validating whether the person behind the application actually is who the resume says they are. “Are the job titles the same? Are the companies the same? Is this even a real person?” This issue adds a new layer of routine scrutiny.
Zapier has fraud detection built into its applicant tracking system that checks things like how old an email address is, whether the applicant is using a VPN, and whether their location matches what’s on file. Remote companies, she noted, are especially vulnerable because they’re less likely to require an in-person meeting at any point in the process.
The volume of applicants has also paradoxically made it harder, not easier, to hire quickly. “There’s a disconnect where job seekers think, ‘You’ve got thousands of applicants. How has it been six weeks and you haven’t hired anyone?'” she said. But from the employer side, fewer open roles means higher selectivity. Hiring managers who might have moved quickly in a hot market are now more deliberate, convinced they can find exactly the right person because the talent pool is so large.
The Bigger Question: Who Gets Left Behind?
When I asked Bonnie whether AI is leveling the playing field or widening inequalities, her answer was honest: probably both. The people most likely to benefit from AI in the job market are the ones who aren’t just using it but building with it. The ones who are designing agents, creating workflows, and training tools to do increasingly sophisticated work. Those are the people who will have outsized value going forward, and right now, that group skews heavily male.
“Women are using AI at far lower rates than men,” she said, “and they’re playing a much smaller role on the building side.” That’s a problem, she argued, not just for individual career prospects but for how the technology gets shaped. “If you want to support having it regulated and used in ways that are ethical and make society better, you have to first be a super user of the product. Otherwise, your voice isn’t going to have a seat at the table.”
She made a similar point about HR professionals. It’s a field that tends to be risk-averse by nature and, she suggested, is at risk of falling behind precisely because of it. The opportunity is still there to get ahead of this, to become genuinely fluent in these tools rather than just adjacent to them. But that window won’t stay open indefinitely.
Where This Leaves Us
Bonnie’s perspective is notably free of either panic or hype. She doesn’t think AI is going to eliminate hiring or replace the human judgment that underlies it. She also doesn’t think the job market is uniquely cruel right now or that candidates are helpless victims of broken systems. What she sees is a period of genuine structural change that rewards people who are honest with themselves, adaptable in their approach, and willing to get their hands dirty with new tools rather than waiting to see how things shake out.
For job seekers, that means doing an honest assessment of how competitive you actually are in the fields you’re targeting, looking for opportunities in areas where jobs are actually being created, and leaning into AI not just as a resume polish tool but as something worth understanding at a deeper level. For hiring professionals, it means staying curious, building things even when they don’t work the first time, and recognizing that the function is changing fast enough that waiting for certainty is its own kind of risk.
“You have to go through those periods to learn the technology,” Bonnie said. “Same as any other tech.” That’s probably the most practical piece of advice in all of it. The learning happens by doing, not by watching from the sideline.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.