| Tuesday, 07 October 2025 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Picture this.
An employer posts a job opening. By the next morning, their inbox is overflowing with hundreds—sometimes thousands—of applications, nearly double what they would have seen before AI. They turn to AI tools to sift through the pile of cookie-cutter résumés, and shortlist a few candidates. But when it’s time for the first in-person screening, the perfect-on-paper applicant doesn’t hold up.
This is among the biggest challenges facing founders, hiring managers, and recruiters today. Don’t get me wrong—hiring has always been a tough nut to crack. But today, the challenge is compounded by AI. I spoke to over a dozen people who have recruited in the past year, and most of them have had to fundamentally re-think their approach to hiring.
In the latest episode of 90,000 Hours, The Ken’s podcast on the future of careers and workplaces, Abhimanyu Saxena, co-founder of tech-upskilling platform Scaler, talks about how AI is disrupting the way recruiters go about things too.
Abhimanyu: Today, I can write a detailed job description describing my ideal candidate and feed it to an LLM. The system will not only pull out the 10 best-matching résumés, but also draft personalised outreach messages for each of them. So Rahel might get a note saying, “Hi Rahel, I saw the work you have done at The Ken and your previous role. I’m impressed. At Scaler we are building something similar. Would you like to explore the role with us?”
That’s my pipeline building. It’s completely automated. Instead of a recruiter spending days on discovery, AI can map the job to the person’s capabilities, reach out 24×7, and hand over the best candidates who respond. That’s step one: discovery and pipeline building.
What’s interesting is that it isn’t just startups wrestling with these shifts, global giants are too.
For the past year, Anthropic has been on a hiring spree. As you read this, the California-based AI research company is trying to fill nearly 200 roles across multiple teams. Which tracks, given it is one of the most sought-after names in tech right now.
But what is surprising is that until just a few months ago, if you wanted one of those jobs, you were banned from using AI to help with your application.
Let that sink in for a minute.
The maker of one of the world’s most talked about AI models today didn’t want potential employees to use AI. As a Gen Z colleague might remark: “Make it make sense!?”
From Anthropic’s application for an economist role earlier this year:
“While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.”
Which raises the obvious question: why would the maker of Claude not want applicants to use Claude? Anthropic’s reasoning was that some things—like intent, authenticity, and basic skills—still can’t be outsourced. Whether that logic holds up in practice is another matter.
But the story doesn’t end there. Soon after reports of Anthropic’s hiring policy started doing the rounds, the company decided to reverse the ban.
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