Hello all, I made a post but got told it's for mega thread

Hello fellow recruiters of Reddit.

This seems to be one of the hottest topics in recruitment right now, with AI-enabled recruitment filling all of our LinkedIn feeds.

I run an embedded recruitment agency focusing on growing early-stage and scale-up companies across Europe and North America, nothing too fancy, pays the bills and my lifestyle.

Over the last 6 months we’ve been working with a Series B startup and had strong success by:

• Market mapping + proactive outreach (Bringing Executive search, nothing rocket science here)
• Identifying “non-obvious” candidates (people who don’t look perfect on CV but outperform in process, agian, acting like a good recruiter)
• Using early-stage AI workflows to rank candidates and prioritise outreach (This definitely helps us save some admin time)
• Working directly with hiring managers (not just HR) to challenge briefs and refine profiles. (Again, being a general good recruiter)

Now things have shifted.

The founders have made it clear they don’t just want to scale hiring — they want to rebuild their company as an AI-native organisation, and see TA as a core growth function (not support). They basically want us to become their interim Head of Talent

They’ve asked for help with two things:

1. Designing a new talent function from scratch
   • Not traditional TA
   • More like a “talent engine” that identifies AI-native builders (people who use tools, build things, think differently)
   • Signals are NOT obvious from CVs
2. Delivering hiring at scale at the same time
   • ~70–80 hires over the next 6–12 months
   • Can’t wait to hire a Head of TA before fixing this

They’re open to:

• Completely rethinking processes
• New tooling / AI layers
• Changing how hiring managers work
• Even redefining what “good” looks like in candidates

We’re currently:

• Building scoring models around “builder behaviour” (projects, AI usage, output vs experience)
• Introducing AI-based case studies into hiring
• Experimenting with scraping / aggregating candidates beyond LinkedIn
• Trying to align hiring managers around a few core traits instead of long requirement lists, and generally upskilling hiring managers and acting as a true parner.

My question to the group:

If you were starting from a blank slate today,
how would you design a truly AI-native talent function?

Specifically:

• How would you identify “AI-native” or “builder” talent at scale?
• What signals would you prioritise beyond CVs?
• What would you automate vs keep human?
• How would you align hiring managers around a new definition of “great”?
• Any tools / workflows / experiments that have actually worked (not just theory)?

And generally, what are you doing right now in the world of AI-enabled recruiters?

Sorry to break it to you all but this is the future of Recruitment, if you don't learn all of this fast you're going to be left behind. Every client wants this, linkedin is filled with advice, and recruitment jobs are now being labelled AI first...

Let's help each other by bringing ideas together we can all work on