The end of the ‘good enough’ worker

I watch about a thousand companies make hiring decisions in real time as the CEO of Paraform, the world’s largest recruiting marketplace. The pattern I’ve seen over the last 18 months is so consistent that it’s no longer just a trend. The standard story about AI and jobs is that automation is hollowing out entry-level work, but that’s not entirely true. What I’m seeing is more consequential: Artificial intelligence is making “good enough” workers redundant, while the remaining demand is concentrating around a much smaller group of exceptional people, and the gap between those two groups is widening faster than most leaders realize. Our data shows the top 12% of candidates we surface now capture more than 25% of all offers extended, and the top 10% of engineers we place earn roughly three times what the bottom 10% earn for nominally the same title. Both gaps have widened sharply over the past year. Companies aren’t hiring fewer people because they’ve run out of work, but instead because they’ve decided the marginal good-enough hire isn’t worth what they used to pay for it, and the exceptional hire is worth substantially more. Two years ago, fewer than 4% of engineering roles offered $300,000 or more at the top of their salary band. This year, that share is over 21%. One in five engineering roles is now competing at a level that, until recently, was reserved for the rarest hires. “Staff engineer” and “member of technical staff” postings have grown faster than any other engineering title. Roles paying $400,000 or more, which barely existed two years ago, now appear weekly. A founder I work closely with cut his head count targets by 60% last quarter after seeing four engineers using AI produce more output than a team of 10 had the year before. He used the budget from those eliminated roles to increase compensation for the engineers he retained and the senior talent he still wanted to hire. More leaders are star