What happens when AI changes the job you built your identity around? ft. Jack Lawrence

What happens when AI starts changing the work you have spent years getting good at? In this episode of The Future Is Human by Mews, host Ella McCann-Tomlin is joined by Jack Lawrence, Principal Recruiter for Executive Search at Mews. Jack has spent 12 years in recruitment, five of them at Mews. He has seen the hiring bar rise, roles blur, product builders replace old trios and AI move from a helpful tool to something that changes the whole shape of the job. Through this conversation, one thing becomes clear: The dialogue can no longer be about software. It has to be one of identity, discernment, community, speed, bias and the human interaction we should refuse to automate, even if we could.

There is a funny thing that happens when you do a job for long enough - at first, it is just what you do. Then, slowly, it becomes part of how you explain yourself.

Take Jack Lawrence, Mews’ Principal Recruiter for Executive Search, for example. One day, he went from being “Jack who does recruitment” to “Jack the recruiter.” And, that matters because AI is now changing the very work recruiters, engineers, product managers and people teams have built their identities around.

In this episode of The Future Is Human by Mews, host Ella McCann-Tomlin talks with Jack about what it feels like to work inside that shift and some of the most important questions we need to confront head-on.

What You’ll Learn:

How a job slowly becomes part of your identity
Why Jack still sees recruitment as deeply human work
How Mews’ hiring bar has changed as AI reshapes roles and expectations
What the product builder model reveals about the future of specialism
Why AI can widen opportunity, but also quietly reinforce bias
How speed creates mistakes in hiring, even when nobody intends to exclude anyone
What “human discernment” really means in AI-era work
Why Jack would refuse to automate candidate conversations
How community and in-person connection are becoming more important, not less

Tune in for a conversation about the work we can redesign, the tasks we can automate and the human parts of our jobs that still need a person on the other side.