We want to fix hiring. Looking for feedback from recruitment teams!
Hi everyone,
I'm a software engineer working on a product to help recruiters and am currently in the customer discovery phase. I've worked at companies at various stages, including a 5 person startup, series C startup, and big tech, and each company struggled when it came to hiring.
From their perspective, it seemed like it was difficult to find high quality candidates amongst all the applications. But from my perspective as a candidate, this seemed bizarre to me. I assumed companies had all the leverage and recruitment was just a matter of making a job posting and choosing from one of many qualified candidates.
This was when I realized there must be something inherently broken about the current ways companies hire. Speaking with friends seeking jobs, and friends already in industry and on the other side of the hiring process, I discovered that exaggerated resumes, mass applications, cheating during online assessments, and many more issues made the recruitment process a pain for both candidates and companies.
This inspired me and some friends to make this process better for both companies and candidates. We want to hear from hiring teams on the biggest issues they face - some questions we have:
What's your biggest bottleneck when screening candidates?
- How many applications do you typically receive for a role?
- What percentage of applicants receive a phone screen?
- What signals do you trust most when deciding who moves forward?
- If you could automate one part of candidate screening, what would it be?
Would also love to hear from candidates on their experiences, and we're excited to share findings and progress here!
One thing I'd be careful with:
The assumption seems to be that recruitment is broken in the same way for everyone involved.
A team overwhelmed by applications, a team struggling to find qualified candidates, and a team worried about assessment fraud can all describe the same hiring process as "broken" while needing very different outcomes.
That's one of those decisions that tends to shape more than people expect. I wouldn't make that call casually during customer discovery.
Good point! Our focus is small - medium size companies (50 - 100) that are bottlenecked by application review time. But we're hoping to find out exactly how and where this bottleneck comes from during this stage.
That's exactly the part I'd be careful with.
The risk isn't necessarily finding the wrong bottleneck.
It's finding a bottleneck that looks important enough to optimize around but isn't actually driving the decision that matters.
I wouldn't try to unpack that properly in a thread.
If useful, drop your email and I'll put together the tighter version.
This is a real issue many companies struggle with, especially the signal-to-noise ratio in applications.
One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of hiring teams don’t actually have a consistent scoring system for candidates, which makes screening very subjective.
Curious—are you focusing more on improving candidate quality or improving the screening process itself?
As a developer/candidate, I can’t speak from a recruitment team’s perspective, but I can share what feels broken from the candidate side.
A big issue is that many hiring processes seem to rely on weak signals: keyword matching in resumes, generic coding tests, or polished CVs. These don’t always reflect whether someone can actually build, debug, communicate, and work well in a real product team.
This sounds precisely like a solution that was already built but has zero recruiting experience advising the right path.