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TRUST

TL;DR

Hiring is broken because everyone builds for companies first. The only way to fix it is to build for candidates. Earn their trust, scale it, and everything else follows.

Right now most recruiting startups are losing trust. They treat candidates like an afterthought, or worse, raw material to train their models. They chase where the money is: selling to companies, pleasing investors, optimizing for quick revenue. That might look good in the short term, but it kills candidate trust, and once that's gone the whole system rots.

Here's the reality. Companies pour money into sourcing, building pipelines, and attracting talent. But candidates lose trust during the interview process. They get ghosted, treated like numbers, or judged against broken systems. That distrust doesn't just hurt the candidate, it damages how they see the recruiter and the company. The tragedy is most of those people are actually great. They just walk away thinking they aren't good enough because the process failed them.

Think about it. A candidate applies to ten jobs and hears nothing back. No feedback, no clarity, no respect. They start believing they're the problem, when really the company just didn't have its shit together. That's broken. Candidates want to know why they didn't get picked, what they can improve, and how to move forward. Every candidate deserves that, not just the "top" ones.

But right now everything tilts toward the top percentile. Tools like LinkedIn Recruiter and the rest keep feeding the same pool of "top" candidates while ignoring thousands who could be a better fit. Algorithms make it worse. They overweight the same polished profiles and bury people from different backgrounds. The result is a trust deficit.

If five companies all source from LinkedIn Recruiter, they're chasing the same 500 engineers in San Francisco. Meanwhile, there are thousands of engineers in other cities, or from nontraditional backgrounds, who never even get seen. Those people might be the perfect fit, but the system never gives them a shot. That's where the experience needs to change.

The baseline candidate experience should feel like working with a world-class recruiter. Roles surfaced to you. Interviews set without you chasing. Feedback at every step: from resume edits to interview prep. Hiring managers held accountable when they don't deliver feedback. At the end of the day it's simple: treat people like people.

If you win candidate trust, you win the market. Candidates won't waste time on gimmicks like AI interviewers. No one wants to talk to a bot about their future. Those tools prey on desperation. That's not innovation, it's exploitation.

Look at marketplaces that lasted. Indeed gave candidates access to jobs. Glassdoor gave them a place to speak. LinkedIn gave them tools to present themselves. Only after locking in candidate trust did those companies build client-side features. That's the playbook.

Earn candidate trust first. Then build the best distribution and data on top of it. Once you own the candidate pipeline, companies have no choice but to come to you for quality talent.

The hard part is scale. Treating 10 or 100 people like people is easy. Doing it for 10,000 or a million is different. That's where LLMs change the game. For the first time, we can deliver personalization, feedback, and context at scale without losing the human element. LLMs can process every interaction, give real feedback, and adapt in real time. Combined with the new distribution layer of the internet, trust can finally scale.

That's the unlock. Technology caught up with the philosophy: treat people like people, but do it at internet scale.

Bezos won because he obsessed over customers while everyone else chased margin. We'll win because I'll obsess over candidates while everyone else chases companies. That's the future of hiring. That's why Flows will work.

At Flows, we're candidate obsessed.

— Abdullah

Founder of Flows

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