Tracy St.Dic is Global Head of Talent at Zapier, where she's spent the last several years rebuilding hiring from the ground up for an AI-native world. "Slope, not snapshot" is her phrase — she's not interested in where a candidate stands today, she's interested in the angle of their learning curve.

In this episode, Tracy makes the case that most of what companies call signal in hiring is actually noise. Resumes have flattened into interchangeable copy. Applications are increasingly fraudulent. And the traditional recruiter screen wasn't built for a world where the tools themselves change every few weeks, not every few years.

We cover:

• Zapier's AI fluency rubric — one of the first of its kind, open-sourced to the community, and rebuilt from scratch as the bar for "capable" has kept moving

• Why raising the bar meant Zapier also had to raise the level of support, building resources for candidates to close the gap rather than just screening them out

• Ezra, the voice AI Zapier uses for first-round interviews — and the surprising discovery that candidates and recruiters both prefer it to a human screen

• Why an AI interviewer that doesn't interrupt, doesn't show impatience, and never runs out of time zone turns out to be the more humane first conversation, not the less

Everything else is noise. Applications are noise. What's left, once you strip that away, is whether someone is actually climbing — and whether the people evaluating them can see it happen in real time.

Better hiring isn't about finding people who already know everything. It's about finding people on the way up. Tracy makes the case.

Recorded live at Running Remote 2026, Austin, Texas.

Guest: Tracy St.Dic, Global Head of Talent, Zapier | zapier.com | linkedin.com/in/tracy-stdic

Work 20XX explores the future of work, distributed teams, and human performance in the age of AI. Hosted by Jeff Frick.

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