Niki on AI slop and the broken hiring market
Our first Talent Scout webinar: why every 2026 job posting gets 500–1,000 applicants — and how scout, combine, draft fixes it.
Applying for jobs in 2026 has become a strange experience. You send dozens of applications. You rewrite your résumé with ChatGPT. You pay auto-apply services to send it out for you. In most cases, you hear nothing back.
That silence is where the first Provn Talent Scout webinar began. Our CEO and founder Niki Parekh spent the hour explaining what is going on, and more importantly, what to do about it.
The silence isn’t your fault. The system is broken, and it’s broken in a specific way that most candidates can’t see from their side of the screen.
“We’re entering into a world where there is just AI slop all over. And we at Provn are here for you.”
The diagnosis: a war you can’t see from your side of the screen
Every job posting in 2026 receives between 500 and 1,000 applications. Here’s what happens to all of them. Résumés get filtered by the applicant tracking system. Interview answers get whispered in real time by ChatGPT or Cluely. Every candidate now looks perfect on paper and sounds perfect on the screen. Recruiters are drowning in the noise.
What do they fall back on? The old heuristics: did you go to the right school, did you work at the right company, do you know someone who can refer you in.
“Nobody is getting through unless you basically have a referral into the CEO.”
The first eight or so minutes of the webinar are worth watching just for this framing. The current job market is a war. There’s AI slop on the candidate side and the ATS on the recruiter side. Great candidates are caught in the middle, and they’re disappearing.
The model: scout, combine, draft
The analogy that makes Provn’s approach click is the NFL draft. Teams in the NFL don’t recruit based on high school transcripts or college GPAs. They scout prospects, then put them through a combine before drafting them based on what those prospects actually did when tested under pressure.
Provn is doing the same thing for hiring. Companies post roles with a challenge attached. Candidates complete the challenge in about an hour. They record a short video walking through their thinking. The top performers get put in front of the actual hiring manager.
“Performance is more important than pedigree.”
The counterintuitive part: lean into AI
Most hiring tools right now are trying to detect AI use and penalize it. Provn’s position is the opposite.
“We want you to use AI. We want you to lean into it.”
The reasoning is worth hearing in full in the webinar. The short version is that AI fluency is what companies are increasingly hiring for, so candidates who try to hide their AI use are missing the point of the exercise. What matters is how thoughtfully you use it and whether you can explain your choices. That’s why the video walkthrough is the hardest part of Provn to fake.
“It’s very hard to fake the video walkthrough. You can have AI create the transcript and read it, but when you see hundreds of people doing the same thing, the copy-and-paste-from-AI is actually pretty obvious.”
What it looks like when it works
Brilliant Earth’s AI Product Manager hire is the case study in the webinar. 234 applicants. 47 completed the challenge. 10 made it in front of the SVP of Technology. Alex, a biochemistry undergrad with a data science master’s who was working on a part-time MBA, got the role. She out-competed product managers from Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle on the quality of her work.
The SVP opened her first interview with “I feel like I know you already.”
We wrote about Alex’s side of that story in the Hired Spotlight. The webinar fills in the employer side.
Who Provn is built for
Provn isn’t for everyone. Some candidates aren’t going to spend an hour completing a challenge, and that’s a fair choice. The platform was designed for candidates early in career who are strong but invisible on paper, international students on a US master’s program, career changers, people later in career watching AI reshape their field, and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds who are great with AI.
“Provn is here for you as the candidates.”