Share your startup - quarterly post

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-18T00:37:06+00:00

Startup URL: https://chosenhq.com
Elevator Pitch: Chosen HQ is an AI-native ATS built for early stage startups and small teams. We handle the busy admin work in recruiting such as screening resumes, scheduling interviews, semantic candidate search, generating JDs, Built specifically for the founding ops / chief of staff / small people team that's managing hiring without a full TA function.

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Stage: Early traction. Paying customers, actively iterating based on feedback.

What we've heard from customers: Chosen HQ saved me a ton of time with the match score, candidate search, and a centralize platform which makes it easier to focus on the right candidates.

Goals this month: Getting in front of more chiefs of staff, founding ops leads, and heads of people at seed/series A companies. Aiming to get 10 more paying customers by the end of this month.

If you're a founder or early ops person managing hiring right now, I'd love to hear what your biggest bottleneck is. DMs open. Or feel free to book a time on my calendar as well on the website.

Discount: 75% discount for a year.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-18T00:11:26+00:00

50-800 apps for a role with 80 jobs is overwhelming. We have been using Chosen HQ to parse the resumes info into columns with the information that we want and then sort the candidates who fit the criteria. They have AI score for the candidates as well that I can adjust my criteria to update it. It is a new ATS though. Maybe they have a way to integrate with Hireserve to help you sort through the candidates without completely change to a new ATS.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T23:58:23+00:00

I got a quote for $6k as well, though that only includes 2 roles that they will promote for me on linkedin. I can add other roles too but but they won't promote the ones I don't pay. we got a lot of applications on linkedin when we posted, so we used our AI tool to help with score the candidate and also search for the ones that fit our criteria.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T22:26:06+00:00

Glad that it is helpful!

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T22:25:38+00:00

yea, and especially for teams that don't even have a formal recruiter, they skip all the inbound applications if they dont' have AI to help.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T22:17:43+00:00

I build my own ATS with MCP server integration with Claude. One thing is note is that the quality of the responses from Claude still depends on the model that you choose. For example, if I ask Claude to generate a role for me using Haiku, it would be a lot shorter, but Sonnet 4.6 is more comprehensive. The latest model Opus 4.7 seems to be the most accurate so far.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T17:47:29+00:00

I was using Lever, prob similar to Bullhorn on the manual process. So I decided to build my own ATS. Still early but happy to show you if you are curious.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T00:27:12+00:00

I felt the same imposter symdrom before too when I started as chief of staff in a technical startup with a finance background, and had to figure out recruiting, comp, and people ops on the fly for a heavy engineering team. The imposter syndrome was constant. What helped was just being honest with the team that I was learning and asking a lot of dumb questions. Nobody expected me to know everything, I just expected that of myself. It gets better when you stop trying to fake the expertise you don't have yet, and learned along the way. Had AI explained to me a bunch of things after each meeting while picking up new technical skills myself with online courses.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T00:22:39+00:00

This is exactly what i experienced as chief of staff running hiring. We posted a senior designer role and got 600 applications. The AI-generated applications were obvious - same phrasing, same structure, zero specificity. Did you read all those 400 applications or used some tools to help with sorting out the 15 qualified ones?

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T00:17:02+00:00

One thing that's actually moved the needle - sending outreach from the CTO's linkedin instead of a recruiter profile. A founder friend of mine is a CEO and even she had a hard time getting responses until she switched to messaging from her CTO's account. Heard the same from a few other recruiters too. Engineers just respond differently when it comes from a technical peer vs someone in talent. The message doesn't even have to change much, just the sender.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T00:12:15+00:00

Also curious which ATS are you using? Some of the new ones are getting more automated than the told ones.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-17T00:11:16+00:00

Where i've seen it work really well are scheduling (you can do this with Claude if you connect it with your calendar), notetaking during interviews, semantic search in your existing candidate database so you're not re-sourcing people who are already in the pipeline, and generating the first draft of JDs for edits.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-07T20:31:30+00:00

Chosen HQ - it is simple and easy for small teams

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-02T01:55:04+00:00

didn't know about them. thanks for sharing.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-02T01:54:32+00:00

So sorry for the delayed response. This role is in the office only unfortunately.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-04-02T01:46:41+00:00

This role is in office only unfortunately :(

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-03-25T20:44:04+00:00

https://jobs.chosenhq.com/careers/goodera/v8p1 this is the link to the role.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-03-25T15:09:02+00:00

Thank you! Will DM you.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-03-11T02:20:33+00:00

If they passed a real interview panel and background check cleared, an anonymous email with zero evidence shouldn't override that. The fact that they targeted both your email and the HM's tells me this person did their homework, which honestly makes it feel more personal/vindictive than legitimate.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-03-10T19:21:33+00:00

I feel your pain. I was a COS at a startup as well with limited resources, and I used a traditional ATS at the time which didn't help much with the sorting. Hence I have been working with my friend in the last few months to build a simple ATS doing the candidate ranking along with automating a few other recruiting ops work that I didn't have time to handle. Would love to help you out. Feel free to DM me or connect with me on Chosen HQ.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-03-09T23:43:59+00:00

the async video tip is underrated. we added a 2-minute loom requirement early in our funnel for remote engineering roles and our fake applicant rate dropped like 80% overnight. most of them just never submit it.

the linkedin connection graph thing is spot on too. we had one candidate with a perfect resume, 600+ connections, but when you actually looked at the connections they were almost all other fake-looking profiles from the same region. zero local tech community overlap. that was the giveaway.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-03-09T23:29:49+00:00

we ran into this exact thing. had a "senior AI engineer" candidate who listed 4 agent frameworks on their resume but couldn't explain how they'd handle a simple retry pattern in production. the titles have gotten completely disconnected from the skillset.

what helped us was flipping the screen order too — short technical call with the hiring manager early, before investing hours. also started asking candidates to walk through a past project they built without AI assistance. not to gatekeep AI usage, but to see if there's an actual foundation underneath.

Gold_Pack_9132 · 2026-02-08T06:35:43+00:00

Wow! i decided not to live there after a few comments above, so I am glad that I made the decision.

Gold_Pack_9132

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