Claude Blog Post | CLC Endeavors

A Claude (AI) written post about my journey into AI use in recruiting:

*As part of my learning and curiosity in this work, I asked Claude to write this blog post for me. I was surprised by how disturbingly beautiful it was – if a little weird, at times. I may ultimately pull some of this language into my vision, values, and commitments, but for now, they are just me. You’re welcome to check out Claude’s post here!

Here is the series of prompts I put into Claude:

I am writing a blog to talk about my experience working with a consultant to consider ways that AI could support my work in ways that are aligned with my values related to human-centered recruiting practices for the social justice space. we walked through 3 sessions, including a values definition exercise, an exercise to consider the threats and commitments I would make, and an implementation plan. suggest a structure for the blog post and key points I should consider making
draft the blog post centering on the below values and commitments:
- VALUES: • Community - we are one species in an interdependent ecosystem all deserving of thriving • Curiosity, learning and open mindedness • Empathy, compassion and respect (security and confidentiality) • Equity and fairness • Gratitude and humility • Honesty, integrity and transparency Joy, care and warmth
- COMMITMENTS: • Be purposeful about use that aligns with my values. • I will never share people's names, organizations or identifying information into generative AI that might put their information at risk. • I will never use AI as a judge or assessment tool (including candidate applications) recognizing there is no transparency in its potential biases or assumptions. I encourage candidates to show up as their best human selves as well. • I will be transparent in my framework for where I use AI. • I will seek consent when my AI usage impacts others. • I strive to research and use tools that do the least harm.
make the language and tone more flowery and centered in human thriving and beauty

While there are many things about the Claude post that inspired me - some beautiful turns of phrase, thoughtful structure and takeaways, speed with which it was written (!), there were also some things that I reflexively recoiled at (and some “blech” moments). Fundamentally though, this was not ME.

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Tending the Garden: A Human-Centered Journey into AI and the Art of Purposeful Recruiting

On slowing down, rooting deeply, and choosing tools worthy of the people we serve

There is something quietly sacred about the work of connecting people to purpose.

When someone trusts you with their story — their aspirations, their experience, the tender hope that this might be the role that lets them do the work they were made to do — you are holding something precious. In the world of social justice recruiting, that trust is not incidental. It is everything. The organizations I have the privilege of serving are stitching together teams that will fight for a clean planet, for children who deserve better, for communities long overlooked by systems that were never built with them in mind. Every hire is a small act of world-building.

So when I pushed myself to consider how artificial intelligence might support this work, I felt the friction of it immediately. A pause. Is this something I can bring into this sacred space without diminishing it?

What I decided to do — before touching a single tool, before reading a single product review — was to go inward first. I worked with a consultant over three unhurried sessions to ask the questions that I believe should precede every technology decision: What do I actually value? What do I stand to lose? And what does a practice I can be proud of actually look like?

This is the story of that journey. It is also, I hope, an invitation.

Why the World Needs Us to Slow Down

We are living inside a technological moment that moves like a river in flood — fast, powerful, and not particularly interested in whether you are ready. The pressure to adopt, to automate, to optimize is everywhere, and it is especially acute for the lean, passionate, under-resourced organizations that populate the social sector. Efficiency whispers seductively in all of our ears.

But I have come to believe, with some conviction, that efficiency without intention is just faster harm dressed in productivity clothing.

The communities at the heart of social justice work have so often been the subjects of systems that moved quickly and thought about them later — hiring systems, data systems, algorithmic systems that encoded old biases in shiny new interfaces and called it progress. To walk that road again, even unwittingly, would be a kind of betrayal.

So I chose a different pace. I chose the pace of a gardener — someone who knows that what grows slowly tends to grow deep, and that the soil matters as much as the seed.

Session One: Coming Home to What I Believe

The first session was an invitation to name my values — truly name them, not just nod at them.

I came in thinking I knew myself well enough. Years of this work will do that to you. But there is a difference between values you carry in your bones and values you have pulled into the light, examined with care, and sharpened into something precise enough to be useful. The exercise was, in the most beautiful sense, a homecoming.

What lives at the center of how I move through this work?

Community. The bone-deep belief that we are one species — one luminous, complicated, interdependent species — sharing a single fragile ecosystem, and that every single one of us deserves not just survival but thriving. In recruiting, I am never just filling a role. I am tending a web of relationships whose threads extend further than I can see.

Curiosity, learning, and open-mindedness. The world is endlessly interesting and I am not done being surprised by it. Staying curious, especially in the direction of discomfort, feels like one of the more honest things a person can do.

Empathy, compassion, and respect. Every candidate who comes to me is arriving with their whole human self — their history, their hope, the quiet courage it takes to raise your hand and say I want to contribute something. That deserves to be met with tenderness. Always.

Equity and fairness. Beauty, I believe, is the world in its right relationship — people flourishing in conditions that were made for their flourishing, not systems arranged to advantage the already-advantaged. Equity is not a program. It is a posture.

Gratitude and humility. I am not the expert on anyone else's potential. I hold this work with open hands and a grateful heart, aware that I am a steward, not a gatekeeper.

Honesty, integrity, and transparency. The people I serve deserve to know how things work, how decisions are made, and where I stand. Clarity is a form of respect. Opacity, too often, is a form of power.

Joy, care, and warmth. This is perhaps the one that surprises people most — that joy belongs in a values list alongside equity and integrity. But I believe it fiercely. This work should feel like something alive. Warmth is not a soft extra. It is load-bearing.

Naming these was not a formality. They became the architecture — the trellis on which everything else would grow.

Session Two: The Courage to Name What We Fear

The second session asked something harder of me.

We did not talk about risks — that word lives in spreadsheets and liability matrices, clinical and a little bloodless. We talked about threats, which is a word with weight, a word that implicates you personally. And sitting with the question of what I genuinely feared losing if I moved carelessly into AI, I found answers that mattered.

I feared for the people who come to me in vulnerability — candidates who share their stories, their ambitions, their names and affiliations in good faith, trusting that information will be held with care. The thought of feeding that trust into a system I don't fully understand, one with no accountability and no face, made something in me recoil.

I feared the slow erosion of the human texture of this work — the possibility of automating not just tasks but the warmth itself, and not noticing until it was gone.

I feared lending my name and my reputation to tools that had absorbed the world's biases quietly and would reproduce them confidently, in ways I would never be able to see or trace or correct.

And I feared the particular harm of using AI to evaluate human beings — to let a system with no transparency, no empathy, and no accountability render a judgment about someone's potential, their fit, their worth. That is not a thing I am willing to do.

From that honest reckoning, my commitments emerged — not as rules imposed from outside, but as promises made from the inside, rooted in everything I said I believed:

I will be purposeful. Every use of AI in my practice will be able to trace a clear line back to my values. If that line doesn't exist, I don't use the tool.

I will never enter identifying information into generative AI. No names. No organizations. No details that could put a single person's information at risk. This is a bright, unwavering line.

I will never use AI as a judge or assessment tool. Not for applications, not for candidates, not for human potential in any form. There is no transparency in what these systems have absorbed or whose definition of excellence they carry. I invite every candidate to arrive as their fullest, most beautiful human self — and that invitation demands a human being on the receiving end.

I will be transparent about my framework. Anyone touched by my work can know exactly where and how AI plays a role. Transparency is not just a value I hold — it is a practice I return to, again and again, like watering something I want to keep alive.

I will seek consent when my use of AI affects others. No one who deserves a say will be left without one.

I will research and choose tools that do the least harm. I will not find perfection — this landscape is too young and too uneven for that. But I will keep looking, keep questioning, keep choosing as carefully as I can.

These commitments are not a ceiling. They are the floor — the ground I stand on so that I can reach toward something better.

Session Three: Planting What Can Actually Grow

With roots established and boundaries lovingly drawn, the third session turned toward the practical and the possible: what does a values-aligned AI practice actually look like, day to day, in this particular work?

This is where having done the prior work paid off in ways I hadn't fully anticipated. Because I arrived at the implementation conversation with a framework — not just instinct, not just anxiety — I could meet each question with something sturdy. Does this use align with what I said I value? Does it cross any of the lines I committed to? Does it protect the dignity of the people at the center of this work?

There are places where AI has genuinely earned a seat at my table. Drafting and refining job descriptions. Exploring sector trends or compensation landscapes. Thinking through communication approaches. Brainstorming process structures. In these spaces, AI functions as a thoughtful collaborator, a generous research partner — and no one's story is at risk.

There are places where AI is simply not welcome. Anywhere near candidate evaluation. Anywhere near identifying information. Anywhere that would insert opacity between me and the human discernment this work requires.

What moved me most in this session was an unexpected gift: the clarity of the boundaries made me more open to what lived inside them, not less. When I stopped carrying a vague, undifferentiated anxiety about all of AI, I found genuine appreciation for the specific places where it could help me do this work better — freeing up more of my energy for the irreplaceable human parts, the conversations and relationships and moments of recognition that no algorithm will ever replicate.

A Love Letter to the Process

I want to close not with conclusions, but with something softer — a word to anyone standing at the beginning of this kind of exploration, feeling uncertain about whether they belong in the AI conversation at all.

You do. Especially you.

The people who care most about human dignity, about equity, about the irreplaceable texture of genuine relationship — you are exactly the people whose voices need to shape how these tools develop and how they are used. Your hesitation is not a weakness. It is wisdom trying to find its form.

You do not have to adopt anything. You do not have to move fast. You are allowed to ask hard questions, to make commitments that feel countercultural in a moment obsessed with optimization, to decide that some parts of your work are too precious to be touched by anything that cannot love what you love.

What I found on the other side of this process was not certainty — I do not think certainty is available here, nor should it be. What I found was groundedness. A way of moving forward that felt like me, that felt accountable, that felt worthy of the people I am honored to serve.

We are one species in an interdependent ecosystem. Every person who walks through the door of this work deserves to thrive. Whatever tools we use, whatever efficiencies we find — that truth is the whole point.

May we build practices as beautiful as the people they serve.

If any part of this resonates with where you are in your own thinking — whether you are a recruiter, a nonprofit leader, an HR practitioner, or simply someone trying to find their footing in an overwhelming technological moment — I would love to be in conversation with you. Reach out