In this earlier postI proposed the idea that we should combine the intellect of Steve Jobs, Alfred Adler, Taiichi Ohno and Albert Einstein and ask them how they would redesign the hiring process from scratch. The working title for the design they created is called “The Hiring Encabulator.” But what they actually created was a new Hiring OS that offers every new hire a meaningful job.
For those in the know, an Encabulator is a name given to a fictional device described using technobabble. For example, …
The core innovation of the Hiring Encabulator relies on an inverse transformer architecture with bidirectional career-trajectory embeddings, running through a series of MCP orchestration layers that enable agentic workflow propagation across the entire talent supply chain. The system’s recursive prompt chaining eliminates the need for manual screening entirely — the Encabulator simply knows.
But beneath the silliness lies something more fundamental: philosophy. Four minds across different centuries collaborated to build it — not by writing code, but by seeing what everyone else missed. While the technobabble is just that, their ideas are not.
A New Hiring Operating System: A Philosophical Blueprint
The goal was to eliminate all hiring mistakes while attracting, hiring and retaining stronger people.
That’s 50% of new hires who underperform or quit within 18 months. Gone. The fake resumes. Gone. The 90-day wonders. Gone. Biased interviews. Gone. Not enough strong candidates. No longer a problem.
Given this goal, here’s what our “Fab Four” came up with.
Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple
You built the most valuable company in history. Why join this project?
“Because hiring is a design problem that everyone treats as an engineering problem. They keep adding features. More filters. More automation. More complexity. And the system gets worse.
The ATS is the Microsoft Windows of talent acquisition — bloated, ugly, and designed by committee to satisfy requirements documents instead of human beings.”
What did you contribute?
“The mathematics of simplicity. Everyone thinks simple is easy. Simple is hard. Simple requires understanding the deep structure of a problem so completely that you can eliminate everything that doesn’t matter. The new Hiring OS is based on this principle. Understand everything that matters. Everything else is noise. We eliminated the noise.”
Taiichi Ohno, Architect of the Toyota Production System
What’s wrong with hiring?
“Waste. Muda. Everywhere I look. The industry spends $60 billion annually on a system with a 50% defect rate. And that doesn’t account for resume screening on factors that don’t predict performance. Including this 1% yield into the calculation results in a Sigma below zero.
In manufacturing, this would be catastrophe. In hiring, they call it normal.
“I developed the Five Whys for exactly this blindness. Why do hires fail? Wrong selection. Why? Wrong evaluation criteria. Why? Optimizing for efficiency over effectiveness. Why? Treating hiring as transaction, not relationship. Why? Designing around employer convenience, not candidate careers.
“Five questions. Root cause revealed.
“My philosophy: go to the gemba — the real place where work happens. In hiring, the gemba is not the recruiter’s desk. It is the job itself. What does exceptional performance look like? Work backward from that. Everything else is waste.
“The Hiring OS implements just-in-time talent flow and pull systems. Stop pushing job postings into the void. Let career trajectories pull the right people toward you.
The person who wants what you offer is worth ten who merely qualify.”
Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
Why get involved in hiring?
“Because they keep applying the same flawed logic expecting different results. Screen for skills. Filter for credentials. Rank by experience. Failure rate stays at 50%. They’re solving the wrong equation.
“Before E=mc², physicists treated mass and energy as separate. The equation revealed they transform through c² — the speed of light squared. That exponent changes everything. A tiny amount of mass releases enormous energy.
“The hiring industry makes the same error. They treat motivation as additive: ability plus experience plus skills plus motivation.
They’re doing arithmetic when they should be doing calculus.
“Consider: exceptional ability of 9 with moderate motivation of 1.2 yields 9^1.2 ≈ 14. Good ability of 7 with exceptional motivation of 1.5 yields 7^1.5 ≈ 18.5. The ‘lesser’ candidate dramatically outperforms.
“But motivation compounds. After three years, the gap isn’t 30% — it’s 300%. The industry screens for ability because ability is visible. Motivation is invisible until you know how to look. The Hiring OS knows how to look by examining a person’s trajectory, not their current state.”
Alfred Adler, Founder of Individual Psychology
How does psychology apply to hiring?
“Freud believed humans are pushed by their past. I believe humans are pulled by their future — by goals, by purpose, by what they are becoming. This changes everything.
“Traditional hiring is Freudian archaeology: what skills have you acquired? What have you accomplished? The résumé excavates the past.
“The Hiring OS is Adlerian architecture: what do you want to become? What problems energize you? The career trajectory illuminates the future.
“People who take a job as a step toward their future perform differently than those escaping their present. I called this ‘striving for superiority‘ — not over others, but over one’s former self.
“The critical question traditional hiring ignores: Is this job a career move or a lateral move? A career move represents genuine growth. A lateral move is the same work for different compensation. They predict entirely different outcomes.
“Put a growth-minded person in a lateral move and watch motivation decay. Put them in a genuine career opportunity and watch them transform your organization, because where someone is going matters more than where they’ve been.”
Why They Built It
The hiring industry doesn’t have an efficiency problem. It has a philosophy problem.
This new HIring OS eliminates job postings and replaces them with Career Matrices like the one shown below. This simple model makes résumés obsolete — matching people to performance outcomes. It destroys the ATS — because when you attract the right people, you don’t need industrial-scale sorting.
Use this calculator to determine the waste in your current hiring process.
The new HIring OS synthesizes these insights: Ohno’s war on waste, Einstein’s exponential formula, Adler’s future orientation, Jobs’s design clarity. Yet they all are saying the same: offer people true career moves, not ill-defined lateral transfers.
The prototype is ready for testing.
Submit one open role to our cardinal grammeter intake port and watch the Adlerian-Einsteinian motivation exponent synchronize with Ohnoian waste reduction as Jobsian Reduction Algorithms collapse your candidate field into a coherent eigenstate of actual fit.