Careers Are Becoming More Squiggly. Hike Is Being Built for That.

Careers stopped being ladders a long time ago. AI is about to make that impossible to ignore, yet most career tools still have not noticed.

The Ground Can Shift Before You See It

Somewhere right now, someone who has been good at their job for years is starting to notice that the market has quietly begun valuing something else.

Their applications receive fewer replies. Their salary stops moving. A role they could once have done in their sleep is suddenly described in words they do not quite recognise.

Nothing has gone wrong with them. The ground has shifted under their feet, and nobody tapped them on the shoulder to tell them it was coming.

I have been thinking about that person this week after reading the “We Must Act Now” letter. Signed by more than 200 researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates and executives from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, it warns that AI could reshape the labour market faster than people, companies or governments are prepared for.

Normally, I am cautious about predictions like this. There is a lot of noise around AI, and barely a week passes without someone claiming that half the workforce is about to vanish, usually while selling something connected to AI.

This felt different.

What struck me was who was raising the alarm. Some of the economists now sounding it had spent years dismissing these very fears. The claim was not that every job would disappear. It was about the pace of change, and whether people would have enough time to see it coming and prepare.

The Bigger Opportunity Is Staying Valuable

It made me realise that the bigger opportunity for Hike is not simply helping someone secure one job. It is helping them stay valuable as work changes around them.

I have worked in recruitment for more than 20 years, and careers have never been the tidy ladders we like to pretend they are. Choose a profession, gain experience and keep climbing until you retire.

In reality, people move sideways. They follow a good manager, get made redundant into a new industry, become parents, burn out, start businesses or realise that the career they chose at 21 no longer suits the person they have become.

Careers are already squiggly. AI is going to make them even more so.

AI Will Change Roles Before It Replaces Them

The real question is not which jobs AI will replace. It is how roles will change, and which capabilities will become more valuable as technology takes on more routine work.

A role can survive while the skills required to perform it change completely. A task that took years to master can become easy almost overnight, while other capabilities grow in value when combined with judgement, relationships and experience earned the hard way.

Spot the shift early, and you can start building meaningful experience before everyone else catches up.

Career Support Usually Arrives Too Late

Most people have no reliable way of seeing these changes as they happen. They find out after the market has already moved, usually the hard way.

That is also when most career support arrives.

A job board waits until you start searching. A CV writer waits until you need a new CV. A training platform waits for you to choose a course. A coach is often called in once you are already unhappy or unsure what to do.

Everything in the system is reactive. It waits for the crisis and then helps you clean up afterwards.

Hike Can Tap People on the Shoulder

I believe Hike can work the other way around.

Over time, it should build a genuine understanding of what someone has actually done. Not simply their job titles and duties, but the problems they solved, the decisions they made, the people they influenced and the outcomes they delivered.

At the same time, it should watch the market. It should see new skills emerge, established capabilities become standard and unexpected paths open between roles that once appeared unrelated.

Bringing the two together could show someone that a capability is becoming increasingly important in the roles they want next. It could reveal that their experience already transfers into an adjacent career, or that they are closer to making a move than they think.

Most importantly, it could do this before they are forced to act.

That is what we mean when we talk about Hike tapping someone on the shoulder. It is not a generic notification about the changing world of work. It is something specific, timely and genuinely useful to them.

In an AI World, Proof Matters More Than Polish

That evidence matters more, not less, as AI becomes better at producing polished language.

Almost anyone can now generate a convincing CV, application or professional profile. But that does not help an employer understand who can genuinely do the job. It simply adds more noise.

Hike should not help someone sound better. It should help them prove what they have genuinely done.

From One Job Decision to a Lifelong Career Journey

Today, Hike begins with the most immediate version of that question: does this job actually fit me?

People waste enormous amounts of time applying for roles without knowing whether they are competitive or how to make the strongest possible case from their experience.

But any single job is only one point on a much longer journey.

Each time Hike helps someone assess a role or build their evidence, it understands them a little better. Over time, it can move beyond showing them whether one job fits. It can help them understand which directions are becoming realistic and what they should start doing now to be ready.

A Career Is Too Important to Manage Reactively

Nobody knows exactly how quickly AI will change the labour market. Some predictions will prove overblown. Other changes may arrive sooner than we expect.

The point is not to frighten people or pretend that we can name every job that will exist in five years.

The point is that waiting until your role changes before thinking seriously about your career is becoming a genuinely risky way to manage your working life.

We started Hike by asking whether a job fits. The bigger opportunity is to help people navigate the whole squiggly journey of their working lives.

So let me ask you: is your career still a ladder, or has it already gone squiggly?