Business · Arizona
AI hiring tools are still the 'wild, wild west,' Phoenix hiring consultant Harry Lakin warns
The Hire Capacity founder told the Phoenix Business Brief that no AI tool has been validated for selection, and that leaders will need more emotional intelligence as AI spreads.
Nov 13, 2026
Employers letting artificial intelligence screen job candidates are trusting a tool nobody has validated for that job, Harry Lakin, founder of the behavioral assessment firm Hire Capacity, said on the Phoenix Business Brief podcast.
"No matter what AI does, an AI is never human, period, full stop. It's code," Lakin told host Bryan Hyde.
His larger concern is validation. Only assessments validated for hiring and selection should be used to make those decisions, he said, and AI tools haven't cleared that bar. "We've seen how AI hallucinates. Do you want it hallucinating on your next VP of marketing? Likely not," Lakin said. "That's too important a role to get wrong with an AI hallucination."
"Maybe someday some agency will say, we have validated this for use in hiring and selection. But right now, it's just the wild, wild west," he said.
Lakin said that while preparing for the interview he asked Anthropic's Claude about the emotional intelligence of AI, and it told him it could act emotionally intelligent but isn't sentient.
As AI takes on more work, Lakin said, the human skills get more important. He pointed to a 2017 Harvard Business Review article, The Rise of AI Makes Emotional Intelligence More Important by Megan Beck and Barry Libert. As he summarized it, with fewer people in the workplace, "leaders are going to have to be more emotionally intelligent to help the people that remain thrive as employees and thrive working with the AI."
Lakin trains leaders on the emotional intelligence model of psychologist Daniel Goleman, which he described as a pyramid: self-awareness at the base, then self-regulation, empathy and social skills. Learning it, he said, is "not hard, but it's the hardest thing you'll ever do."
Self-awareness is where most people fall short, he said. "Most people think they're self-aware," Lakin said. A good behavioral assessment, he said, "starts the process off on the right foot."
Hear Harry Lakin's full Phoenix Business Brief conversation on AI hiring and emotional intelligence.