I built an AI that replaces recruiting agencies for SDR hiring. Here's why and what I've learned so far

The problem I kept running into

I do BD work for a living. Over the past couple years I've had to hire SDRs multiple times and every single time the process was the same painful loop:

• Post on job boards, get 300 applications, 280 of them are irrelevant
• Talk to a recruiting agency, pay $10-20k per placement, wait 3-6 weeks
• Or try to screen candidates myself which eats 15-20 hours I don't have

The recruiting agency model specifically started feeling absurd to me. You're paying five figures for someone to do keyword matching on resumes and send a few LinkedIn InMails. The margins are insane because the actual work is mostly pattern recognition and outreach, two things AI is already better at than humans doing it manually at scale.

I kept thinking: this entire workflow is automatable. Not in a "someday" way. Right now.

The market insight

Recruiting agencies for sales roles are a $150B+ market globally and the value chain looks almost identical to what happened with travel agents, real estate brokers, and insurance middlemen before software ate those industries. The agency model survives on information asymmetry and manual labor, both of which AI eliminates.

For SDR hiring specifically, the role is high-volume and relatively standardized compared to senior or specialized positions. The evaluation criteria are well-defined: communication skills, outbound experience, tech stack familiarity, coachability, ramp time indicators. This is exactly the kind of structured assessment that AI handles well.

I figured someone was going to build this. Might as well be me since I was living the pain firsthand.

What I built

Shortlist sources, screens, and delivers interview-ready SDR candidates. The entire pipeline is AI-powered end to end. No recruiters in the loop, no agency fees.

You tell us what you're looking for. The system sources candidates, screens them against your criteria, and delivers a shortlist of qualified people ready to interview. Average turnaround right now is under 2 hours.

I built it solo using AI tools and automation. No team, no funding. Just me and a lot of Claude.

Traction so far

• $1-5k MRR (growing)
• 100+ candidates delivered
• Under 2 hour average turnaround from request to delivered candidates
• Primary customers are startup founders scaling their first sales teams

Nothing crazy yet. But the signal is strong. The people who use it come back, and the most common reaction is "wait, that's it? no catch?" when they realize there's no placement fee.

What I've learned

1. The agency model is vulnerable everywhere the work is structured and repeatable. SDR recruiting is just where I started because I knew the pain. But the same logic applies to any high-volume, pattern-based hiring.

2. Speed is the real product. Founders don't just want cheaper recruiting. They want to go from "I need an SDR" to "I'm interviewing people" in the same day. Under 2 hours changes the entire hiring psychology. You stop treating it as a big project and start treating it as a Tuesday afternoon task.

3. Startups will try a no-name product if the friction is low enough. No one cares about your brand when you're charging nothing upfront and delivering results in hours. The traditional agency pitch of "trust us, we have relationships" doesn't land when an AI can surface the same candidates faster.

4. Building solo with AI is a real competitive advantage right now. My overhead is almost nothing which means I can offer this at a price point that agencies literally cannot match even if they wanted to. That won't last forever but right now the window is wide open.

What's next

Expanding beyond SDRs into other high-volume sales roles (AEs, BDRs, CSMs). The screening logic is transferable, it's mainly about tuning the evaluation criteria per role.

Also exploring a self-serve tier where founders can run searches on demand without talking to anyone. Right now there's still a light touch onboarding step to understand requirements, but the goal is fully autonomous.

Happy to answer questions about the build, the market, or the AI recruiting space in general. And if you're hiring SDRs and want to try it: getshortlistai.com

No lifetime deals though. I've been reading too many AppSumo posts on here to make that mistake yet.