// Good morning — while Dario, Sam, and Elon debate how fast the frontier should move, we'll be down here dealing with what it's already done to hiring.
… And for any new readers, welcome to Signal // Noise — the newsletter read by founders, CEOs, and scrappy builders every Thursday. Each week, what I’m listening to, one deep dive, notes from the field, three links worth your time. No buzz, no bullshit.
| THE SIGNAL |
📡
|
Two Robots Walk Into a Room…
Let me tell you a quick story.
Pindrop is a security company. Their whole business is detecting deepfakes and bullsh*t online. So when they posted a senior engineering role and got over 800 applications in a few days, they did what they do. They ran the profiles.
And of the 300 or so they analyzed, more than a third were fake.
One job post; over a hundred fake people.
That's not a hiring funnel, that's a massive pain in the ass.
And this isn’t just happening at large, Fortune 100 companies.
Inside of Hampton, a private community for tech founders and CEOs, the hiring Slack channel is ripe with this new wave of AI-induced hiring problems. One founder posted a heads-up this spring about two candidates he was "fairly certain" weren't who they said they were. His workaround was to ask about the old parts of the resume, like which dorm they lived in at Ohio State. "When I threw those curveballs in, and they couldn't answer, and when I started pressing further, they hung up." The replies came fast, nodding in agreement of how many deepfakes everyone is currently seeing.
Another founder quickly pulled the numbers from her applicant tracking system: 88% of resumes were "garbage, either bot-generated, vibe coded, or a job seeker with zero compatibility for the role."
Again, these aren't monster organizations, these are 10, 15, 20 person startups, a founder trying to hire a single engineering IC or a great ops manager.
But they're running into the same wall as the billion-dollar companies: the machine on the other side of the table is making it harder and harder to find great talent.
The Loop is Closing from Both Ends
Let's start with candidates.
Greenhouse surveyed about 4,000 job seekers and hiring managers last fall, and found that 65% of hiring managers said they've caught applicants using AI deceptively, meaning reading from scripts, hiding prompt injections in resumes, or full-on deepfakes.
Shockingly, nobody's denying it: 41% of candidates admitted to the hidden-text trick. And Gartner found 6% of candidates admit to interview fraud, as in someone else did the interview for them. Their projection, unfortunately, is that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake.
That's 25% (math maxxing!).
Now, let's talk about the employer side.
63% of job seekers say they've now been interviewed by AI, up 13 points in six months. And 38% have walked away from an interview process because of it.
Among Gen Z entry-level workers, 62% say that they've lost trust in the hiring process altogether.
Greenhouse's CEO calls this the AI doom loop: candidates use AI to apply to more jobs, employers use AI to filter them back out.
Everyone's running faster and nobody's getting anywhere.
The interview used to be the last high-trust, human-judgment ritual in business.
But now it's two bots reading each other's scripts, and nobody quite knows how to make it stop.
Three Important Things to Do
A great resume, a LinkedIn profile without major gaps, an impressive stint at whatever startup du jour was the latest, those used to be the things that mattered.
No more. You can AI your way into all of that.
Here are three things you should absolutely make a part of your hiring process.
Require a Loom video in the application. Two or three minutes, a couple of prompts, no script. Anyone who skips it doesn't get a first interview. You'll get the "sorry, I was on a busy train" in place of the video; no problem, that's the filter working. A person who won't spend three minutes on camera for a job they supposedly want has told you what you need to know, and a bot can't do it at all.
Run a work-round with a live follow-up. A paid project, scoped to 4-6 hours, on a real problem you have. Then a 60-minute session where they walk you through it and you ask questions on the spot. The project alone can technically be faked; but the project plus a live Q&A on their own choices is very hard to fake. Anyone can describe how they'd handle a churned account. Fewer can defend how they handled one, in real time, to someone who knows the business.
Do references, then back-channel, and make the calls yourself. The references they hand you are the warm-up. The real signal is finding the person they didn't list, someone you or your network knows who worked alongside them. As a founder/CEO, do not delegate this — do it yourself. And ask my favorite question: "What's one thing you remember [name] was actively trying to improve at the time?" It's an extremely hard question to BS your way through.
If you run a company of 20 or 50 or 100, these items can be your edge.
The big AI-screening machines can't do any of the above at scale (yet), but you can.
And the 62% of Gen Z who've given up on the corporate gauntlet will feel the difference the second they hit a process where a human actually shows up.
| A FEW JAWNS TO CHECK OUT |
🔗
|
📕 Long read // "Domination!"
Jeremy Stern spent months with the Zuck for Colossus and came back with one of the more interesting recent profiles of him: Augustus Caesar comparisons, MMA sparring in Tahoe, and Priscilla Chan finally understanding, after 23 years, why this dude just cannot stop building. It's a 30-minute read if you have the time to check it out.
🧠 Big idea // AI Is Only as Trustworthy as You Are Expert
Damn, I love that line. It's not mine, it's Juliette Ryan's, and it's the best one-sentence rule for using these tools I've read. Her argument: fluent writing used to prove someone did the thinking, and now it proves nothing, so the only way to catch AI's mistakes is to already know the subject cold. For founders, the takeaway is simple: take advice from people with real expertise in the thing, and be honest about where you don't have it yourself.
🤑 Money Rec // Why Does It Feel Like It's Never Enough?
Allison Schrager thinks the airplane is the best metaphor for why everyone's mad at an economy that keeps making them richer. Flying got cheap enough for everyone, so it also got worse, and the guy lying in the flat bed with warm nuts is in front of you the whole damn time. Her piece is a good one to reread the next time you catch yourself feeling like it's never enough.
Was this helpful? Relevant? Totally off-base?
—> Tell me. I read every single reply.
—> Or pass it to someone who'd get value from it.
Hope everyone has a great weekend.
And until next time, thanks for reading.
Jordan
P.S. Wanna work on something? Got a pod or content idea? → Email me | Need 30–60 min of advice? → Book here | Want a coach in your corner? → More info
