Washington, DC — May 24, 2026 — HiredAI today announced the general availability of Cortex, an automation layer built into its recruiting platform that handles two of the most time-consuming functions in modern hiring — inbound applicant triage and outbound candidate sourcing — without requiring recruiters to babysit either one.

Cortex is now live for all HiredAI customers at app.hiredaiapp.com/cortex, with no separate purchase required.

GoodTime has released Cori, a proactive digital teammate that takes action to keep hiring moving, from first touch to final interview.

Do I use AI? Yep. And honestly? It's made me a way better recruiter.

Let me break it down.

Last week I was sourcing for a millwright role at a manufacturing client. Ten years ago, that meant hours of digging, calls, and crossed fingers. Now? AI helps me screen faster, find the right candidates (not just the loudest resumes), and craft outreach that actually sounds like me. Not a robot blasting 200 people with "Hi {{FirstName}}."

Here's where it gets good though......

I use AI to dig deep into my clients, their culture, their projects, what their shop floor actually looks like, what kind of person thrives there. Pair that with my own background in skilled trades and engineering, and I can tell within a conversation whether someone's going to fit or flame out.

That's not AI doing my job. That's AI handing me a magnifying glass.

The human part? Still 100% me.
The gut feel on a call. The "this candidate's going to crush it" instinct. The trust I've built with clients over years. None of that comes from a prompt.

AI isn't replacing recruiters. It's outputting my role x10, if you know how to use it.

The ones who lean in are going to eat. The ones who don't… well.

AI tools are not replacing recruiters. They’re replacing bad recruiters.

I use AI every day in my process.

For:

✔ Initial CV screening patterns
✔ Job description optimisation
✔ Interview question generation
✔ Market salary data synthesis

Not for:

✘ Deciding if a person is right for a team
✘ Reading between the lines of a candidate’s career story
✘ Managing a hiring manager’s expectations
✘ Negotiating an offer that both sides feel good about

The recruiters panicking about AI are the ones whose entire value was in admin.

The recruiters thriving right now are the ones whose value was always in judgment, relationships, and insight.

And if you’re a hiring manager — are you working with a recruiter or a CV forwarding service?

Today, we’re introducing SeekOut Sam: our AI-powered screening and inbound evaluation solution! 🚀

Sam helps recruiting teams evaluate applicants against role-specific criteria, invite candidates into structured AI-led screens, and review summaries, transcripts, scores, and supporting evidence before the first live conversation.

The result is a more consistent way to understand who should move forward, without asking recruiters to spend hours reviewing every resume or scheduling first-round calls that may not lead anywhere.

With SeekOut Sam, teams can:
– Evaluate inbound applicants with explainable AI insights
– Screen candidates asynchronously
– Compare resume claims with screening responses
– Keep recruiters and hiring teams in control of every decision
– Focus live conversations on candidates with stronger signal

Sam can be used as a standalone solution for inbound applicant evaluation and screening, or bundled with SeekOut Recruit for teams that want sourcing, talent rediscovery, inbound evaluation, and screening in one broader workflow.

Read the full launch post to learn more: https://lnkd.in/eXDxTX2b

Most recruiters are using AI wrong. Heck, I was using AI wrong in the beginning. They treat it like Google.

“Write me a job description.”
“Summarize this resume.”
“Draft an email.”

That’s not where the value is.
The real shift in thinking is this...
AI is not a tool but it’s a workflow layer.

Here’s what that looks like in practice...

Before AI:
1) Open req
2) Write JD from scratch
3) Manually screen 50 resumes
4) Start sourcing

After AI:
1) AI drafts the JD from intake notes
2) AI summarizes and ranks applicants against non-negotiables on the req
3) AI generates search strings
4) Recruiter focuses on decisions, not typing

Same job. Completely different leverage.

The teams who will be the most efficient won’t be the ones “using AI.”

They’ll be the ones redesigning their workflow around it. This doesn't need to be scary. It's actually super cool.

Amazon Connect Talent is now available in Preview, giving talent acquisition leaders an AI-powered hiring solution that accelerates candidate selection at scale. Informed by decades of Amazon's hiring science, Amazon Connect Talent uses AI agents to conduct structured voice interviews, administer science-backed assessments, and score candidates consistently — freeing recruiters to focus on strategic decisions. Candidates interview 24/7 from any device. Recruiters review scores, transcripts, and detailed candidate evaluations generated by their AI teammate — empowering them to make faster hiring decisions with consistent objectivity.

Preview capabilities include AI-driven skills assessments, AI-led voice interviews with adaptive questioning, a brand-customizable mobile-first candidate portal, a comprehensive recruiter dashboard, system admin onboarding tools, and Applicant Tracking System (ATS) integrations for quick deployment. Amazon Connect Talent scales to handle hiring surges, evaluating hundreds of candidates simultaneously.

AI conducts a full pre-screening interview with every candidate. Every hiring round that follows is coordinated automatically. No phone screens, no scheduling emails, just the right people ready to meet.

CLEVELAND, April 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- uRecruits, the AI recruitment software platform for HR teams, recruiters, and staffing agencies, today announced the simultaneous launch of two new capabilities inside uR Agent™, its conversational hiring assistant: the AI Pre-Screening Agent and the Interview Scheduling Agent. Both are live immediately for all customers on every plan, from $39 per month.

I’ve been heads-down building my AI workflow for the past few months.

As a Talent Partner at a VC fund, I’m constantly context switching: sourcing candidates, prepping for calls, writing content, tracking market signals, supporting founders.

The cognitive load is real.

So I started systematically automating the parts that don’t need me to be me so I can spend more time on the parts that do. 🛠️

Here’s what I’ve built so far.

🔍 Talent workflows
• Auto generated weekly prep sheets for all candidate 1:1s pulled from calendar and intake notes
• “Jobs of the Week” LinkedIn posts drafted automatically from role inputs
• Candidate matcher that scores my entire talent pool against any role in seconds
• LinkedIn network matcher using the same scoring across my 20,000+ connections
• Student finder that analyzes project depth not just keywords to surface top interns and new grads 🎯

📊 Market intelligence
• Daily briefing with layoffs, acquisitions, funding rounds and ready to use Boolean strings
• Weekly digest that turns signals into a portfolio ready email
• Monthly report covering news and press for every portfolio company 📰

🧠 Founder support
• Values based interview guide generator customized in minutes
• Talent playbook builder with Notion ready guides for hiring and people topics from pre seed to Series A
• Daily briefing also includes AI news and top stories

💡 Bonus
On workout days it tells me what to do at the gym. Yes, really. 💪

I’m not a developer.

I built all of this in Claude.

Took a few weeks of iteration. Saving hours per week already.

If you’re in recruiting, VC, or any role heavy on relationships and content, building your own system is very worth it.

The ROI is real.

I've spent a lot of time recently experimenting with AI. Testing tools, pushing them, seeing where they're genuinely useful in my work as a recruiter.

And I'll be straight with you, a lot of it has impressed me. The progress in the last couple of years has been remarkable.

But after all of that testing, the thing that's become clearest to me is this.

AI can process. It can summarise, screen, match keywords, draft outreach. It does a lot of that faster than any human ever could.

What it can't do is think creatively about a person.

It can't look at someone's career on paper and see the story underneath it. It can't reframe a brief when the obvious candidate doesn't exist. It can't figure out that the best person for a CTO role has never had the title but has been doing the job for two years in everything but name.

That creative leap, connecting dots that aren't obviously connected, is what experienced recruiters do every single day.

I don't think AI is a threat to great recruiting. I think it's actually made great recruiting easier to see.