The recruitment system is completely broken. And everyone knows it.

A 19th-century tool in a 21st-century world

CVs were invented in the 1800s. Job ads too. They worked when a company had 20 applicants and the labour market was local and stable.

Today? You're flooded with applications for every role. Candidates are all over the world. Competencies change every year. And we still pretend that a fairy-tale CV meeting an epic job ad makes any sense.

It doesn't.

Theatre of the absurd in three acts

Act one: The candidate gets a job ad. Knows they must tailor the CV. Writes version number 17. Or – increasingly – pastes the ad into ChatGPT and asks it to rewrite the CV. Pretends it makes sense.

Act two: The recruiter receives a mountain of CVs. Knows they won't read them all – even 50 is too many to learn what matters. They turn on an AI-powered ATS to 'catch the best'. The system uses AI to read CVs written by AI. The recruiter pretends it makes sense.

Act three: The candidate who 'won' the AI-versus-AI game shows up for the interview. And suddenly it's about five simple, concrete questions: Can you do X? Do you know Y? Have you worked with Z? The rest? Irrelevant.

Hundreds of people wasted time. The recruiter wasted time. The company wasted money. Everyone acts like they know what they're doing.

The real cost of this process

For the candidate: You have to pretend. Write dozens of versions of the same CV. Spend hours on applications knowing an algorithm, not a human, will read them.

For the recruiter: You receive an overwhelming number of CVs. You don't know what's true. You're searching for a needle in a haystack while what you really need are answers to five questions. You physically can't read even 50 CVs properly, ask follow-ups, understand them – so you throw it into GPT, into an ATS, or you skim in a rush and pick 10 out of 100 that seem reasonable.

For the company: You lose money. You hire the person who wrote the nicest CV. Or the one who 'hacked' the ATS. Or the one who simply got lucky.

The biggest absurdity: everyone is on LinkedIn

Listen, 90% of white-collar professionals are on LinkedIn. They have their CV there. One, real, up to date.

Yet the system tells them to send a PDF.

Why? Just because. When at this initial stage, the LinkedIn CV should be enough.

Peak perversity: LLMs as a bandage on gangrene. It doesn't heal, the wound just looks better.

The market's reaction to this problem? Exactly what H. Ford said: I don't want a car. I want a faster horse. I don't want to change how I work. I just want to speed it up.

We use the most advanced technology in the world to rescue a 19th-century tool.

What do we really need?

Every interview – always, without exception – reaches the same moment. The recruiter or hiring manager asks three to five crucial things. Can you do this? Do you know that? Have you worked with this?

Meanwhile you need to ask five questions. The candidate needs to answer them. Done.

Revolution means changing the process, not patching the old one with new tools

Real innovation isn't inventing a better ATS. Or a better CV. Or a better matching algorithm.

Real innovation is throwing out CVs and job ads altogether.

Instead:

• The recruiter asks the five toughest questions upfront – the ones that matter most
• The candidate answers concretely, without fluff – about their competencies
• You immediately know if there's a match – the shortlist builds itself
• You don't waste time on overwhelming piles of CVs
• Candidates don't waste time writing fiction
• Every ATS can go straight to the trash

One real CV. Concrete questions about concrete competencies. Respect for everyone's time.

And the best part? The time you save goes to those five shortlisted candidates. For deep conversations. For truly understanding who's on the other side. Not for wading through hundreds of CVs that will be rejected anyway.

Why doesn't it work today?

Because the system was created in the 1800s, when it actually worked. The world changed.

Does this replace the entire recruitment process?

No. It solves the problem of building a shortlist with full respect for both sides.

The candidate answers whether they have the competencies. And either you part ways, or you move forward.

When the recruiter decides the candidate meets the requirements, they open the CV, read the details, and invite them to an interview. That's when the real recruitment starts – but with five candidates, not hundreds.

It doesn't replace conversations, tests, or verification. Quite the opposite. It lets you focus on the conversation.

Transparency instead of silence

The system shows what's going on. Finally.

The candidate sees everything: when they applied, whether the posting is active, whether someone viewed their LinkedIn profile, when the rejection arrived. And they see the embarrassing truth for recruiters: nobody viewed the profile, yet they declined.

No more silence. No more pretending.

The feedback myth

Let's talk honestly about interview feedback.

If feedback is substantive, it means the right questions weren't asked at the beginning. If stage two or three produces substantive feedback, it means the first, screening stage failed to ask the right questions.

And every other feedback?

It's either a polite phrase you can replace with 'we chose someone else' – same informational value – or 'no culture fit', the universal catch-all. We look for people with strong character, then reject them because... we fear change. Culture fit is how you justify what you want, or reject what you don't.

The truth? Organisations often don't know what happened. Someone changed their mind. Someone panicked. A better candidate appeared. The budget shifted. Power games. Fear of losing autonomy.

Translating that organisational uncertainty into feedback for the candidate is victim blaming. A tasteless joke.

That's why our feedback is simple: 'we chose someone else' or a short, concrete reason if you truly have one. No circus. No pretending. With respect.

Do we use AI?

Yes. An LLM helps rewrite a 19th-century job ad into five structured questions.

But it's a tool. AI doesn't know your organisation, doesn't know what people really think. The recruiter can always edit the questions, improve them, add what's genuinely important.

Traditional job ad → fast conversion → ready-to-publish form.

We don't use AI to read CVs written by AI. We use AI to help recruiters ask the right questions. Immediately.

The solution is simpler than you think

You can keep juicing horses with steroids and strapping GPS trackers to the carriage. Invent better whips and faster wheels.

Or you can get in the car.

The choice is yours.