A few weeks ago LinkedIn gave my team a new tool to try. Free trial, and the plan was obvious. We'd use it, get hooked, and pay to keep it when the trial ran out.

Last week I asked them to turn it off early.

It was an AI plug-in that sits on top of whatever search you're running. You feed it the parameters for a role and it reads the profiles and tells you who fits. In theory it saves hours. In practice it cost us more time than it saved.

Here's what it couldn't capture that's fundamental to any recruitment process:

The tool can see keywords. Recruitment runs on the things underneath them.

Speaking of tools… 60% of you said your biggest frustration was finding the right roles.

I’ve built a tool that pulls roles directly from company pages, before they ever hit LinkedIn and way before they get 1000 applicants.

You can check it out here 👈

Sometimes you can just tell. If I speak to someone, I know within 2 minutes if they’re right for the role. They also get the opportunity to understand if they’re right for it. That can only happen in a real conversation.

Human interaction is the core of everything we do. Otherwise, what's the point?

I saw a company on LinkedIn that announced their first round-interview process was an AI interview. How degrading and who on earth would want to work there?

You can't expect applicants to give up their time for a conversation you couldn't be bothered to have yourself.

Around the same time I saw a post doing the rounds. Someone had hidden a block of extra keywords on their CV in white font. This would be invisible to a human reading it but readable to an AI screener. The idea was to trick 'the bot' into ranking them higher.

It's a clever trick. The problem is it only survives one step.

Say a company was using an AI-screening tool. Eventually the CV will end up with a human and the skills the bot "found" are nowhere they can see.

Or even if you bypass this step, you make it to interview on the back of experience you don't have, and someone asks you to walk them through it.

There's no good version of how that conversation goes.

So if you're job hunting right now, here's what I'd take from all this.

AI isn't the villain you've been told it is. Worst case, it sorts and ranks. It doesn't decide. A person still does that. Take it from me, we’ve filled roles in the last year across 14 markets and not a single one involved an AI screening process.

You'll get further building a CV and a profile for the human who reads it, not the filter it passes through first.

And if your applications are going into silence, it's more likely the market than the machine. It's tight out there. That's harder to sit with than blaming a robot, but it's the truth, and it changes what you do next.

I'd still rather read every profile myself and that's why we turned it off.

If you're fed up not hearing back I will review your LinkedIn profile today, on video.

This market is tough and you don't have to go through it alone. Right now you're one of 500 applicants for every role and the silence is becoming expensive.

I will tell you exactly what I tell the candidates I actually place. What's working this week. Why you're getting passed over and what to change to start getting interviews.

If you’re struggling to find the ‘right roles’ and don’t know where to look

LinkedIn is where jobs go to get 1000 applicants.

So I built something that gets you in front of roles before that happens.

My tool scans careers pages direct at source and shares roles the moment they go live - before they hit LinkedIn. I've cross-referenced and the vast majority aren't on there and likely never will be.

It's early days and we've already shared an opening at one of Singapore's leading PR agencies, a fully remote GCC Public Affairs role, and a Senior Marketing role for one of the world’s most exciting sports brands in Dubai.

My tool finds the positions → I filter them → you get to apply straight to the company's own site.

This all happens away from the thousands piling in on LinkedIn.

It lives on a private Telegram channel and it's part of The Shortlist. Sign up and start scrolling the roles. I update daily.

- Charlie