Navan Co-Founder Says AI Changes What Junior Talent Looks Like
Ilan Twigg, co-founder of Navan, said in an interview during Google and Calcalist’s AI Week that hiring priorities are shifting in the AI era. “Today it is much more important to hire a person who is curious, goal-oriented and wants to succeed than someone with a programming background,” he said, describing an internal experiment the company ran to test what junior roles should look like now.
Twigg said the test began about six months ago, after Claude Code emerged and started producing complex code at a high level. That led him to question the role of junior developers and to widen recruitment beyond computer science graduates. Navan posted a job ad and closed it after about an hour and a half, after receiving roughly 2,000 applications from across faculties, including candidates with no degree, computer science graduates and people from other fields.
Applicants were brought to the office in groups of 20 to 50 and given a task: build an agent that could book flights through conversation. Twigg said the company did not expect a full solution, only to see how far candidates could think and progress. The best were hired, and the resulting team now numbers about eight or nine people. He said that team built Navan’s conversational booking capability for flights, hotels, cars and trains.
Twigg said the pilot has been “very, very, very successful,” and Navan now plans to expand it to three or four more teams around the world, not just in Israel. He argued that the definition of talent is changing, and that junior hires no longer need strong coding experience so much as the ability to work with AI tools, curiosity, drive and hunger to succeed. “This is a new generation of seniors,” he said, adding that people who do not adapt to AI risk becoming irrelevant.
On broader job-market fears, Twigg said he does not expect mass unemployment in the next five or even 10 years, but believes robotics could eventually displace many jobs, from baristas to laundry folding, milking cows and farming. If people end up in the streets, he said, that would be “a mistake of all governments,” and governments may need to create “fictional” jobs to preserve social order. His advice to junior workers was to stay uncomfortable, keep learning, and never feel settled for more than a month.
