Resource-constrained startups demonstrate the future of corporate functions by bypassing HR entirely. Founders now use LLMs to write job descriptions and build custom AI agents to screen and stack-rank resumes, automating the entire top of the hiring funnel.

Countering the idea that AI sacrifices quality for speed, Honeybook's recruiting agent found four net-new, high-quality candidates the team had missed manually. The fifth candidate it found was one the team was already pursuing, validating the AI's quality and ability to augment human efforts.

Your hiring funnel has an ideal customer profile, just like sales. Analyze your top-performing employees to identify common demographics, past experiences, and behaviors. Use this 'avatar' to filter applications and target your sourcing efforts, increasing the likelihood of success for new hires.

With 88% of companies using AI to screen resumes, traditional applications are often unseen by humans. A new hack involves sending a small Venmo payment with a resume link directly to a hiring manager, creating an unignorable notification that bypasses automated gatekeepers.

The problem of fake job applicants has escalated from an HR nuisance to a national security issue. State actors, like North Korea, are weaponizing AI to submit thousands of applications for remote IT jobs to infiltrate corporate systems, forcing companies to treat recruitment screening as a security function.

While the 'Tinder for Jobs' app Source creates a 100x better experience for applicants, it exacerbates the problem of application spam for employers. By making it too easy to apply, it risks flooding companies with irrelevant candidates, which could lead them to block or find ways to circumvent the platform, ultimately harming its own ecosystem.

The job market is extremely competitive. AI application platforms like Massive operate on an expected 1% callback rate, meaning you may need 30 to 100 applications to get a single callback. This reframes the job search as a numbers game that requires high volume.

As AI renders cover letters useless for signaling candidate quality, employers are shifting their screening processes. They now rely more on assessments that are harder to cheat on, such as take-home coding challenges and automated AI interviews. This moves the evaluation from subjective text analysis to more objective, skill-based demonstrations early in the hiring funnel.

Job seekers use AI to generate resumes en masse, forcing employers to use AI filters to manage the volume. This creates a vicious cycle where more AI is needed to beat the filters, resulting in a "low-hire, low-fire" equilibrium. While activity seems high, actual hiring has stalled, masking a significant economic disruption.