Day 2 – Lunch Keynote – 12:30-1:15 PM
Room: Affectiv
The Hire You’re About to Make Is Based on the Wrong Data
Michael Landers · RizeCon 2026 · Pocatello
As AI enhances what organizations can do, it quietly erodes something else: the human intelligence that makes due diligence on people more than a vibes check. Michael Landers — who has asked the same question to over 125,000 people across 10 years and works with venture capital firms in San Francisco — spent his session showing a room of business owners how badly most hiring and investment decisions miss the actual question, and what a more forward-facing assessment looks like.
The uncomfortable diagnosis: almost every tool businesses use to evaluate people is backward-facing. Resumes, references, LinkedIn profiles, performance reviews — all of it describes what someone has done. But the role you’re hiring for is about what they’ll do next, in conditions that don’t yet exist.
What he covered
AI enhances, HI erodes. Michael’s framing: the laws of the universe say when something enhances, something else erodes. As AI skills expand, human intelligence — sensing, thinking, feeling, reading rooms, intuiting what’s off — starts to atrophy if you don’t deliberately protect it. Balance is the only path that works. The leaders who come to him now aren’t asking for help with technology. They’re asking for help with sensing, thinking, and feeling.
Mental models shape what you see before you see it. Every judgment you make about a person — polite or rude, qualified or not, assertive or aggressive — is a comparison against a mental model you built before this moment. To demonstrate it live, Michael asked the room to name a gesture that means the same thing in all cultures. Everyone guessed. Everyone was wrong. There isn’t one. A thumbs-up is offensive in Iran and Iraq. “Got your nose” is the Korean equivalent of the middle finger. The Greek open-handed stop gesture means “I throw poop in your face.” The point isn’t cultural trivia: it’s that your brain has been filling in answers based on exposure, not evidence. That is exactly what it does when you interview someone.
Assertive vs. aggressive: the difference is perception. Michael asked the room to define the line between assertive and aggressive behavior. The answer he gave after a long pause: there isn’t one. It’s entirely a matter of perception — yours and theirs. One person’s assertive is another person’s aggressive, and the misread can ruin a relationship, a hire, or a partnership without either party understanding what went wrong. When you’re met with behavior you read as assertive, your brain does one thing: engages. That engagement is the signal that determines promotion, sale, and continued working relationship. Knowing how your boss, your customer, and your team each define assertive behavior is information worth building a practice around.
Availability bias and “Paris in the the spring.” Michael showed the room a slide with three phrases: “Paris in the spring,” “once in a lifetime,” “bird in the hand.” Most attendees read them normally. All three had a doubled article — “the the” and “a a” — that almost no one caught. The reason: the brain omits data it has no prior exposure to. You’ve read those phrases millions of times without a doubled article, so your brain supplies the expected pattern and moves on. The same mechanism operates when you interview candidates — the people you’ve seen succeed before shape what looks right to you, rare good hires feel like they’re probable because they’re vivid in memory, and your past exposure limits your imagination of what future capacity could look like.
Ability, capacity, capability — and the critical error between them. Michael’s framework: ability is your skill, the track record on your resume. Capacity is what you can hold right now — how much pressure, ambiguity, and complexity you can carry today. Capability is what will be required of you in the future. The critical error most organizations make: reading current ability as future capability without ever testing capacity. He made it concrete: if you can run two miles and I need you to run two ultramarathons back to back, the fact that you can run is not the relevant data point. The stress points between two miles and two ultras are what determines whether you make it.
Three hiring lenses. Lens one: can you do what you’ve done again? Works if the job is literally the same. Lens two: can you do it at greater scale? You’ve managed 10, we need 100. Still backward-facing, but stretching the frame. Lens three: can you do what you’ve never done before? This is the lens venture capital is actually betting on when they fund founders who’ve never managed millions of dollars or scaled to 100 people. Assessing past ability for this hire is not the right tool. It gets you lucky or it doesn’t.
Three intuition traps. If you trust your gut in hiring, know it can fire on three things that feel like evidence but aren’t. The match trap: this person matches my mental picture of success. That’s familiarity, not evidence — pattern recognition that fires on resemblance, not readiness. The performance trap: they were incredible in the interview. The interview is the lowest-stakes moment they’ll ever face in this role. The job is the actual test. The narrative trap: their story makes sense, it all fits together. A coherent narrative is not the same as structural readiness.
Provide direct experience — to everyone, especially young talent. The most urgent application of everything Michael covered: if you’re working with young employees who are using AI to do the sensing, thinking, and feeling they haven’t yet learned to do themselves, you are building a workforce with limited human intelligence and limited capacity. Give people the direct experience. It’s not replaceable by information retrieval.
What attendees got
A follow-up field note on availability bias and confirmation bias — the two biases Michael named as most critical in talent assessment — was shared via the conference after the session. Michael also launched humanduediligence.com, which he noted he bought the domain for $10 two weeks prior, as a signal of how underserved this category is.
One story that landed
Michael demonstrated the seven-second rule live without announcing it. After covering the dog sounds section — British woof woof, Chinese wang wang, Indonesian gong gong, Japanese wan wan — he asked the room what they could learn from this, then stopped talking. The silence lasted long enough that nearly everyone in the room felt it. When he finally spoke, he pointed out that they’d just experienced the global standard for how long to wait after asking a question. Americans typically wait one and a half to two seconds before filling the silence. Filling it signals discomfort, and customers read that as pushy, not confident. The seven-second pause felt unbearable in the room. It works in the field.
“AI is enhancing skills that erode human intelligence, and if you are only doing HI, you will erode your capacity to work with AI.” — Michael Landers
“Am I assessing what someone has done, or what they can hold? Because you’re going to need them to hold.” — Michael Landers
About the speaker
Michael Landers works with venture capital firms and organizations in San Francisco on human due diligence — the people-side assessment that most investment and hiring processes treat as an afterthought. He has conducted his research exercises with over 125,000 people across 10 years and grew up in Colombia, which gives him firsthand fluency in how mental models differ across cultures. He is the founder of humanduediligence.com.