Applicant Tracking Systems Are Crushing Job-Seekers' Dreams

AI Automated Candidate Screening Is Turning Job Searches Into Dead Ends

It's 2011, and I'm in the corner of a musty coffee shop in a Hilton hotel in Northern Virginia. And I'm losing hope.

Having just figured out the science of our Generative AI platform, one of the first of its kind, and with a content deal looming with Yahoo Fantasy Football, our startup needed to hire a dream team to make the AI part happen at scale.

I led the AI side of the company, and I was failing at hiring my dream team. There were no data scientists, there were no machine learning wranglers, there were no large language model enthusiasts - at least any who wanted to work for a startup that planned to make money by teaching computers how to write sports articles.

I had just bought breakfast for the "head of stats" at a well-known sports media network - my current angle of attack being to find and hire "Pete" from Moneyball (stream it). He didn't get us. There was smirking.

As I got in my car to drive the four hours home, and yes, I'm using the last of my shoestring budget to find this unicorn, I told myself I've got one more shot, a kid just out of college who was a self-proclaimed sports and numbers nerd, who was waiting tables at a local Chili's.

You can pretty much guess what happened next.

This is a preview. You can get access to all of my posts by joining my email list at joeprocopio.com