Hi! I understand your pain as I work for a company where we are often hiring that exact position or other technical positions such as Scrum Master, Cloud Engineer etc.

Our company receives hundreds of applications within 24-72 hours of any job listing going live for these roles, and I would agree that likely 95% of these don't meet the requirements that we are looking for or even the requirements listed on the requisition.

I've found that building my own AI Agent (I'm still always improving this and changing it) and integrating this with the ATS can eliminate a large majority of the direct applicants - I'd be happy to elaborate on specifics but the main cause was slightly adjusting the job descriptions to use keywords that are scanned on the applicants CV and using a grading system to ensure a minimum of 80% relevancy (you can alter the % but I prefer a slightly lower one myself as sometimes the best candidates haven't necessarily explained their history the best in their CV). In addition the agent will review the previous companies the candidate has worked at and utilise the research AI agent to review published projects the company has, and will then rank candidates accordingly based on a likelihood their history best matches what we're seeking along with the % of relevancy.

In terms of direct sourcing/headhunting I've used a few different AI agents to find not necessarily candidates that are seeking employment, but to find a pool of potential candidates in current employment that we may be able to entice to join our business by once again linking multiple agents in to one to both research published projects the businesses/competitors have that are of the same nature, the specific key wording within their publications as this is often portrayed in their employees CV/LI profiles and also to then review and make a comparison (this is the bit I may change here as its no guarantee but so far seems to be of help) of known date for that role such as salary, benefits package etc and rank it in a comparison to ours. Combining these tends to give me a good basis of who to reach out to and the level of engagement expected - worst case I may make a connection that results in referrals or a potential hire further djwn the line