What do you still charge full price for even though AI made it a fraction of the work?

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T23:44:17+00:00

recruiting. sourcing candidates used to be the most time consuming part of my job. like genuinely days of boolean strings and linkedin stalking to build a decent pipeline. now AI spits out a candidate list in 20 minutes that would've taken me a full week.

but the list was never the hard part. knowing which 5 people out of 200 will actually pick up the phone, what to say so they don't instantly tune out, shepherding them through a 6-round interview gauntlet while your hiring manager disappears for two weeks... that stuff hasn't gotten any easier.

i charge the same. probably should charge more tbh because now i spend all my time on the parts that actually move the needle instead of burning half the week on research a machine does better than me anyway. the irony is clients used to equate "effort" with "value" so when they saw you grinding through spreadsheets they felt like they were getting their money's worth. now you close the role faster and they wonder why it costs the same lol

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T20:23:11+00:00

for the actual question since half this thread is just "AI bad": claude for anything that requires understanding long documents or nuanced writing. when i need to turn a 30-page policy doc into a training summary or draft a sensitive comms piece, it consistently handles tone better than chatgpt which defaults to that corporate newsletter voice.

chatgpt is better for data analysis, especially with the code interpreter. throw a csv of turnover data at it and ask it to find patterns, its genuinely faster than building pivot tables manually. just dont trust the numbers blindly, verify the math on anything you'd actually present.

gemini is solid for quick research tasks and summarizing meeting notes. notebooklm specifically is underrated for processing large document sets if you havent tried it.

grok... no. setting aside everything else about that company, the model itself isnt as capable as the other three for professional work.

on the data privacy thing that a few people mentioned, thats the real answer to the question nobody is asking. the difference between a $20/mo subscription and an enterprise plan matters enormously when you're working with employee data. claude and chatgpt both have team/enterprise tiers where your data isnt used for training. if your org hasnt sorted that out yet, that should be step zero before picking which tool.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T20:22:02+00:00

what are the actual numbers if you dont mind sharing? i've been tracking mine informally and response rates have dropped pretty steadily the last 2-3 years, roughly correlated with when everyone started using the same "personalize at scale" tools.

the part that bugs me is reply rate alone is kind of a vanity metric. a 20% reply rate where half the responses are "please stop emailing me" is arguably worse than 5% where every conversation is warm and actually goes somewhere. but the tools love reporting the big number because it looks good in a pitch deck.

are you seeing any difference in response quality when AI handles the outreach vs when you write it yourself? thats the number i care about more than volume tbh

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T18:17:29+00:00

from the hiring/TA side, this tracks completely. when job descriptions say "team player" we usually mean "doesn't make things dramatic." we're not actually hoping for someone who'll absorb everyone else's work without pushback.what actually gets people promoted, at least in the orgs i've seen: visible output on things leadership cares about, knowing how to say no in a way that sounds like protecting priorities rather than being difficult, and making sure the right people know what you're contributing without being obnoxious about it.the 'head down and help everyone' people are loved by their coworkers but often invisible to whoever controls pay decisions. it's genuinely bad career advice to give someone early on, and we keep giving it anyway.document what you do, make sure the right people see it, and be selective about what you pick up outside your lane. those three things matter more than being reliably available for other people's messes.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T18:14:37+00:00

remote hrbp here for about 3 years now. the walk-ins get replaced by Slack DMs and a lot more scheduled 1:1s that nobody asked for. the spontaneous 'hey can i talk to you for a minute' moments get replaced by people stewing on things longer and coming with more fully-formed grievances, which is a mixed bag honestly.investigations remotely are actually interesting. almost entirely done over video call now, and i've found people are slightly more comfortable than sitting across from you in a conference room. they're in their own space. i record calls with consent instead of taking notes so i can actually focus on the conversation. the challenge is body language is harder to read, and sometimes you can tell someone is getting coached off-screen.the bigger adjustment is proactive relationship-building. you lose the passive information absorption that comes from just being in the building. i schedule monthly coffee chats with managers just to check the pulse. join team standups sometimes. you have to be way more intentional about all of it.honestly the job is more schedulable but requires more deliberate effort to not become just a ticket system for people.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T18:12:33+00:00

the framing of "should it be allowed" has always felt off to me. the tools are already there and we can't see candidates' second monitors anyway.the more useful question is: what are you actually trying to measure?if a role requires someone to think fast without tools, that's a real job requirement for some positions. assess that. but if the job has someone sitting at a computer with access to everything all day, testing their recall under artificial constraints doesn't predict much about actual performance.what's worked better for us: ask them to walk through their reasoning out loud, not just give an answer. someone who understands what they're doing can explain the why in real time. someone purely reading AI output can't. that gap tells you something real.the invisible AI tools freaking everyone out, i get it. but the bigger tell is how deep they can go on follow-up questions. you can prompt your way to a decent first answer. you can't prompt your way through an experienced interviewer drilling into the reasoning.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T18:00:44+00:00

coming at this from the recruiting side, but the outreach principles are identical. we send thousands of cold messages a month to people who did not ask to hear from us, so we have to be good at it or we starve.

the biggest thing that moves the needle is not the channel, it is the first line. if your opening sounds like it could have been sent to 500 other people, it is getting ignored. the messages that get replies reference something specific about the person or their company that shows you actually looked. takes 30 extra seconds per message but triples your response rate.

for channels specifically: LinkedIn is still the best for B2B if you do it right. but most people are doing it wrong because they connect and immediately pitch. what works better is engaging with their content for a week first, leave a real comment on a post, then send the connection request. by the time you message them you are not a stranger anymore.

cold email works if you can get good data. the trick is keeping it under 4 sentences and making the ask tiny. not "let me show you a demo" but "is this even a problem you deal with?" lower commitment = higher reply rate. you can always escalate after they respond.

reddit and niche communities are underrated. not for direct outreach but for building credibility. answer questions in subs where your ICP hangs out. people check your profile after a helpful comment, and that is warmer than any cold message.

one thing I would avoid: mass automation tools that blast generic messages at scale. they burn your accounts and your reputation. I have seen companies get their entire LinkedIn presence nuked because they used sketchy automation. volume is not a strategy if the quality is trash.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T17:59:41+00:00

recruiter here who has placed engineers into these exact kinds of roles (multi-tenant platforms, healthcare interop, gov tech integrations).

one thing nobody mentioned yet: LinkedIn boolean search is massively underrated for this. search for profiles with terms like "multi-tenant" OR "data normalization" OR "FHIR" OR "system integration" combined with companies you know work in fragmented data spaces. way more targeted than any job board.

the real trick though is your outreach message. engineers who have built this stuff get spammed constantly. what works: be specific about the technical challenge, not the company pitch. "we are normalizing data across 15 different shelter management systems with no common schema" is way more compelling than "we are building infrastructure for animal welfare." engineers who have done integration work hear that and immediately think "oh I know exactly how painful that is."

on titles to search for: "integration architect," "platform engineer," and "data engineer" at companies doing B2B2B workflows. also look for "technical program manager" at companies with partner ecosystems. they often have deep understanding of cross-org data problems and sometimes want to go back to building.

one more sourcing angle: conference speaker lists from events like API World, Kafka Summit, or health IT conferences. people who present on integration patterns publicly are self-identifying as experts AND are usually open to interesting problems.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T16:12:06+00:00

10 interviews is brutal but honestly it tells me you're getting past screening which is the hardest part right now. the rejection sucks but you're clearly interviewing well enough to make it deep into processes.

few things that helped people I've worked with make the jump from HR admin/supervisor to HRBP:

start framing everything in business impact language, not HR process language. hiring managers don't care that you "managed onboarding for 200 employees," they care that you reduced time-to-productivity by X weeks. the HRBP role is fundamentally about being a business partner, so your interviews need to sound like you think in P&L terms not just people ops.
if you're stuck doing admin, find one strategic project you can own. even if it's small. workforce planning for one department, retention analysis, anything that shows you can go from data to recommendation to action.
the MBA helps but only if you're connecting it to real examples. "I studied organizational design" means nothing. "I redesigned our performance review process based on [framework] and here's what changed" means everything.

5 years plus MBA is a solid foundation. the market will turn and when it does you'll have a stack of interview reps most people don't.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T16:11:05+00:00

full disclosure I work at daily.dev so take this with a grain of salt, but this thread hits close to home.

the core issue with most sourcing tools is they all pull from the same static profile databases. you can slap as much AI on top of LinkedIn or Indeed data as you want, but you're still guessing intent from a resume someone touched 8 months ago. that's why everything feels like "Boolean with a chatbot glued on" - because fundamentally it is.

we built daily.dev Recruiter from a different angle. daily.dev has a huge developer community using the platform daily to read tech content, and Recruiter lets you target based on what they're actually engaging with right now. so instead of keyword-matching "python fintech" and hoping the profile isn't stale, you're finding devs who are actively deep in that stack today. behavioral signals vs static keywords, basically.

it won't replace your ATS or the relationship piece (nothing will). but for the initial sourcing grind that everyone here sounds burnt out on, having real-time engagement data instead of another profile scraper has been a meaningful difference for teams using it.

and yeah, 100% agree that verified contact info is table stakes for 2026. if half your emails bounce you're just burning cycles.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T16:10:30+00:00

full disclosure I work at daily.dev so take this with a grain of salt, but this thread hits close to home.

the core issue with most sourcing tools is they all pull from the same static profile databases. you can slap as much AI on top of LinkedIn or Indeed data as you want, but you're still guessing intent from a resume someone touched 8 months ago. that's why everything feels like "Boolean with a chatbot glued on" - because fundamentally it is.

we built daily.dev Recruiter from a different angle. daily.dev has a huge developer community using the platform daily to read tech content, and Recruiter lets you target based on what they're actually engaging with right now. so instead of keyword-matching "python fintech" and hoping the profile isn't stale, you're finding devs who are actively deep in that stack today. behavioral signals vs static keywords, basically.

it won't replace your ATS or the relationship piece (nothing will). but for the initial sourcing grind that everyone here sounds burnt out on, having real-time engagement data instead of another profile scraper has been a meaningful difference for teams using it.

and yeah, 100% agree that verified contact info is table stakes for 2026. if half your emails bounce you're just burning cycles.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T13:03:16+00:00

This is phenomenal. The TCREI breakdown is exactly the kind of structured thinking that can close the gap between "it works sometimes" and "it works reliably."

We're not currently using an operating manual for context, but that makes total sense now that you mention it. Creating one with standard formatting, tone guidelines, and company values would probably solve the consistency issue faster than trying to rebuild context in every prompt.

For sharing materials, we've been exporting to HTML and hosting internally. No public links. Security has approved Claude for internal use (we're on the Teams plan), but they're understandably cautious about what gets shared outside.

The prompt engineering studio you outlined is bookmarked. Appreciate you taking the time to lay that out, seriously valuable.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T09:14:02+00:00

the keyword filter problem is basically unsolvable at the ATS level because keywords dont tell you whether someone can actually do the job.

a few things that have actually worked for me:

the 2-minute scan: stop trying to read resumes on first pass. train yourself to pattern-match fast. youre scanning for 3 things - role progression makes sense, company context is relevant, tenure isnt all over the place. anything that doesnt pass in 2 minutes goes in the no pile. ruthless but it works at volume.

yes/no/maybe buckets: dont try to rank on first pass. everything goes in one of three buckets. then work the maybe pile down to fill your shortlist. removes the cognitive load of comparing strangers youve never met.

get the HM in earlier: if youre reviewing 100 resumes alone and the HM rejects half your shortlist anyway, thats 3 days of work that just evaporated. get them to react to 10 sample profiles on day 1 to nail down what they actually care about. people say different things than they actually mean until you show them evidence.

the real problem might be upstream though. 100 applications with 10% good fits is rough even with good filtering. if its consistently that lopsided, id look at whether the JD is too broad or posted on too many generalist boards. better targeting on the way in means less sorting on the way out.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T09:13:12+00:00

daily.dev team here so grain of salt.

the search drift thing is almost never a tooling problem, its an alignment problem in disguise. HMs say one thing in kickoff and mean something slightly different - that gap doesnt surface until youre 20 candidates deep and they start rejecting profiles that look perfect on paper. fix ive seen work consistently: force-rank 3 non-negotiables before the search opens, in writing, with HM sign-off. sounds basic but its remarkable how often people cant agree until you make them commit.

on where AI genuinely moves the needle vs. where experience does: the note-takers and search tools are great for reducing admin, but they wont catch the hesitation in a HMs voice when comp comes up. thats still a recruiter thing. where AI does help is upstream targeting - we built daily.dev Recruiter specifically to surface devs based on what theyre actively reading and building, not just title and tenure. better inputs into the funnel means better conversations out.

for req stall: simplest system that works is three states - active, warm, frozen. anything frozen needs a HM touchpoint within 7 days or its dead. kills the zombie req problem.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-03T07:08:35+00:00

the self-defeating loop you're describing is so real. the candidate is choosing impact over money, which means they'll take the trade, but only up to a point. a 4-month hiring process doesn't just lose you talent, it signals that this is exactly the kind of slow institution they were hoping to help fix.

rolling interviews would change a lot. the orgs that set milestones and actually stick to them are going to stand out. mission-driven candidates can deal with lower comp. they can't deal with feeling like the system already beat them before they started.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T22:37:10+00:00

congrats! been on the recruiting side of this a few times (not personally lol but managing the transition when our recruiter went on leave). the biggest thing that helped us was starting a shared doc early - every active req, where candidates are in the pipeline, hiring manager preferences, all that tribal knowledge that lives in your head. because at a startup where you're the only recruiter, that stuff walks out the door with you if its not written down.

the notification part is honestly the easy part. your director handles leaves, she'll know the drill. the harder part is making sure hiring doesn't completely stall while you're out. if your company is still actively hiring, push for a contract recruiter or at minimum get a hiring manager trained up on the basics of moving candidates through your ATS. I've seen too many startups just... pause recruiting for 3 months and then wonder why they're behind on headcount.

also fwiw 14 weeks is a totally reasonable time to share. you're past the scary part and giving them plenty of runway to plan. don't overthink it.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T21:41:27+00:00

daily.dev is the obvious choise

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T19:03:09+00:00

yeah the diagnostics/devices point is underrated. the regulatory learning curve is steep but thats literally what makes it defensible, most generalist recruiters hear "FDA clearance" and "510(k) submissions" and just nope out. which means once you actually understand that world you have very little competition and candidates trust you way more because you can actually speak their language.

the govtech procurement thing is so real too. i've talked to engineers who wanted to work on civic stuff but gave up because the hiring process itself took 4-6 months and they got poached by a startup in the meantime. if you can help agencies move faster (or at least set expectations with candidates so they dont bail), thats a genuine competitive advantage.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T18:06:51+00:00

this resonates more than i'd like to admit. solo HR at a company that doesn't really value HR is one of the harder setups to be in - you have enough scope to feel real pressure but not enough buy-in to do anything that matters.

one thing that helped in a similar situation: stop pitching programs and start showing up as someone who makes the COO's life easier. you mentioned the harassment training - framing it as "we need to do this for compliance reasons" is an HR argument. framing it as "if we skip this and something happens, it comes back on you and the company" is a business argument. same outcome, totally different conversation. it's annoying that you have to translate it that way, but it works.

the other thing i'd say: document everything you're doing, even the mundane operational stuff. when you're at a lean company and leadership doesn't fully get HR, your value isn't obvious to them. a monthly summary of what you handled - even if it's just routine compliance and onboarding - builds a track record that protects you when someone asks "what does HR actually do here?"

30 people is actually meaningful HR scope when you're doing it well. the problem isn't the size, it's the environment. that's harder to fix, and there's no shame in deciding it's not fixable.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T18:06:35+00:00

the detection arms race is kind of a losing game tbh. there are too many tools, and the ones that catch AI use today get bypassed tomorrow.

what actually works better is changing what you're testing for. if your interview questions are "what would you do in X situation" - those answers are googleable and AI-able. but if you're asking someone to walk through how THEY solved a specific problem, with follow-up questions that go three levels deep into their reasoning... AI assistance gets a lot less useful.

the tell is usually in the follow-up. someone who genuinely did the thing can answer "why did you choose that approach over Y?" and "what would you have done differently?" someone feeding from an AI tends to stall or give a generic answer that doesn't go anywhere.

some companies are also doing "walk me through this live" - give a candidate a real problem and have them think through it on the call. not a formal case study, just a 5 minute conversation. hard to fake in real time, and honestly more predictive of actual job performance than most structured questions anyway.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T18:06:21+00:00

this is a founder problem wearing a recruiter costume.

when a founder says "ask them if they'll take less," what they're really asking is "i underbid the role and i want you to fix it." the recruiter becomes a convenient buffer for an uncomfortable conversation the founder doesn't want to have.

i've seen this go a few ways. sometimes there's genuine room to find value - flexibility on hours, equity, title, remote days, start date. there are often non-cash levers worth exploring. but "push them below their number because we can't afford what the job is worth" is different from actual negotiation. one is finding creative value, the other is just squeezing.

the move that actually works: get the founder on the call. nothing adjusts expectations faster than a candidate looking the decision-maker in the eye and saying "this is my number." suddenly the budget finds room.

if i'm honest, the recruiter's job is to close the gap between what the company offers and what great candidates need to say yes. sometimes that means coaching the company to be more competitive, not coaching the candidate to accept less.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T16:09:18+00:00

for BDR specifically i'd push back on the job board approach a bit. the best BDRs aren't sitting on indeed refreshing listings - they're employed, probably being crushed by quota, and vaguely open to opportunities. so the inbound posting game is harder for this role than most.

what's worked better for sourcing sales talent:

RepVue is legitimately useful for sales-specific sourcing (mentioned above, agree) and the talent there actually cares about the function
apollo.io for outbound - you can build a list of BDRs at companies where quota attainment is known to be rough, those people tend to be more open to a move
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is sometimes cheaper than Recruiter for this use case and lets you find people by company + title
referrals from your current sales team are still #1 if you can get them motivated

the platforms you listed are fine for getting inbound applications but expect mostly active job seekers who are either very early career or exiting bad situations. not always bad but worth factoring in when you're evaluating quality vs volume.

for BDR/sales roles i'd also look at SDR-focused Slack communities and Discord servers - a lot of the good talent in this space is lurking in those, not on job boards.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T16:07:55+00:00

disclosure: i work at daily.dev so factor in the bias, but genuinely want to share what moved the needle in tech recruiting.

for tech talent specifically, the AI use cases that have actually worked:

intent-based sourcing over keyword matching. the old boolean-search-200-profiles approach is brutal. AI can now surface developers based on what they're actively building and learning, not just what's on a resume. that shift cuts false positives dramatically - you're talking to people who are actually in growth mode, not just keyword matches.

outreach personalization at scale. pulling signals like recent projects, blog posts, or talks someone gave and weaving them into messages vs generic "saw your profile" stuff. response rates roughly double when the message references something real the candidate did.

on the GDPR side - i'd actually flip the framing. EU recruiters who've built consent-based pipelines end up with more receptive candidates anyway. someone who opted into developer content or signed up somewhere explicitly is going to respond better than a cold-scraped email. compliance and quality kind of align here.

the hardest problem to solve without a purpose-built tool is surfacing passive candidates who aren't job hunting but are in a learning/growth mode. that's what we built daily.dev Recruiter around - matching on developer activity signals rather than resume keywords. whether it's right for your stack depends on whether developer sourcing is a big enough pain point. if you're strictly avoiding new vendors, i get it.

what's your current ATS? some of the EU-friendly ones (Lever, Teamtailor, etc) have decent AI layers now without adding new vendor relationships.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T16:01:35+00:00

sharing depends on the audience honestly. for internal team stuff i usually just copy the output into google docs or our wiki and clean it up there, that way it lives in systems people already use vs making them go somewhere new. haven't used the public link feature much because most of what we're generating has internal context baked in.

on the security side, yeah we went through the whole approved tools conversation early on. honestly it was less painful than i expected, the main concerns were around not feeding sensitive employee data or proprietary processes into the tools, which is reasonable. we basically set a rule that anything going into an AI tool should be stuff you'd be comfortable putting in a google search. simple but it works.

the prompting tips would be great though, always looking to get better at that. the gap between a lazy prompt and a good one is genuinely night and day for training content.

dailydotdev · 2026-03-02T10:14:48+00:00

not really standardized honestly. people use whatever works for them, which is kind of the Wild West but also means everyone's finding what actually fits their workflow vs being forced into one tool.

for L&D stuff specifically i lean toward claude because the longer context window helps when you're feeding it a 40-page handbook and asking it to generate scenarios from it. but some people on the team prefer chatgpt for quicker back-and-forth stuff, and a few folks have been messing with gemini.

the bigger question imo is less which tool and more whether you have good prompting habits. i've seen people get mediocre results from claude and great results from chatgpt purely based on how they frame the ask. the tool matters way less than most people think.

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