Where Are We Now?

"Hi, I came across your profile and I think you'd be a great fit for a role we're working on. Do you have time for a quick chat?"

You already know how the next twenty minutes will go. You will walk through your experience. You will list your skills. You will try to remember the right project, the right number, the right story that makes your last five years sound like a coherent arc rather than the messy, overlapping reality it actually was. You will do this from memory, on the spot, while simultaneously trying to figure out whether this role is even worth your time.

And then you will do it again next week with someone else.

The Same Model, Just Taller

To someone on the outside, the hiring industry has not fundamentally changed in decades. At the bottom of the stack sits the CV — a static document, written once, updated reluctantly. On top of that, job boards bolted search. Keyword matching. Boolean filters. Then the applicant tracking systems arrived, adding another layer of automation to the same foundation.

Now AI has entered the picture, and the pitch is that everything will be different. But look at what AI is actually doing in most recruitment tools: it is reading the same CVs, matching the same keywords, and generating the same outreach messages — just faster and at greater scale.1 The foundation has not moved. We have just built the tower higher.

More messages. More keyword matches. More noise. The tools have become more powerful, but the experience of being on the receiving end has become worse, not better.

The Same Questions, Every Time

Every recruiter conversation starts from zero.

"Walk me through your experience." "What are your key skills?" "Tell me about a challenging project." "What are you looking for in your next role?"

You have answered these questions dozens of times. Each time you try to surface the right stories from your career on the fly. Sometimes you remember the perfect example — the project that saved the company money, the decision that changed outcomes, the team you built from scratch. Sometimes you forget it until after the call, and you kick yourself for not mentioning the one thing that would have made the difference.2

The information is there. You have spent years documenting your work — writing project summaries, updating your CV, logging achievements. But in the moment, on a call, you are working from memory. And memory is unreliable, incomplete, and biased toward whatever you did most recently.

The recruiter does not know what they are missing. You do not know what you forgot to say. Both sides walk away with an incomplete picture.

The Noise

Then there are the messages that never should have been sent.

"I see you have experience with project management — would you be interested in a role doing data entry?" "Your profile mentions client relationships — we have an exciting opportunity in cold-call sales." "Can you do this? What about that? Is that interesting to you?"

The sheer volume of irrelevant approaches is not just annoying. It is corrosive.3 You start ignoring your inbox. You stop responding to recruiters entirely. And the good opportunities — the ones that genuinely match your skills and interests — get buried alongside the noise. You miss things you should not miss because you have been conditioned to expect that most inbound messages are not worth your time.

The recruiters sending these messages are not malicious. They are working with the tools they have: a keyword search, a job description, and a quota. The system incentivises volume over precision. AI has made that volume cheaper to produce, which means there is more of it, not less.

The Asymmetry

There is a fundamental imbalance in the way hiring conversations work.

The recruiter has a job description and a search tool. You have years of nuanced career history — projects, achievements, professional decisions, client relationships, lessons learned. The conversation format compresses all of that into whatever you can articulate in a phone call or a LinkedIn message.

The best candidates are not necessarily the best at selling themselves in a cold conversation.4 A brilliant professional who struggles with small talk will underperform in a recruiter screen compared to a mediocre one who interviews well. A nurse with a decade of critical care experience, a lawyer who has handled landmark cases, a programme manager who has delivered complex transformations — they will all sound the same as everyone else if they cannot distil it into the right thirty-second pitch.

And it works both ways. The best roles do not always come with the best outreach. A badly written recruiter message does not mean the opportunity is bad. But when you are filtering hundreds of messages, you make snap judgements based on the quality of the approach, not the quality of the role.

What If?

What if there was a different approach? Not another layer on top of the same CV. Something new. Something tailored, focused. Something that integrates with your portfolio, your professional presence, your actual body of work — and helps people get the most from you before they ever pick up the phone.

What if the fact-finding could happen asynchronously? Grounded in your actual career documents — your projects, your achievements, your professional history — not your ability to recall the right anecdote under pressure. What if a recruiter could explore your professional background in depth, ask specific questions, and get citation-backed answers, all before the first conversation?

The first meeting would start differently. No more "walk me through your experience." No more forgetting the best example. No more compressing years of work into a phone call. The surface-level fact-finding would already be done. You would start from substance.

I decided to build something about it. Read what came next →