Hiring is broken for everyone. Today, we’re doing something about it.

Recruiters at the companies we work with have been telling us the same thing for months: they’re getting five to ten times more applications than they were two years ago, and almost none of them help. Not because candidates are bad. Because every application looks exactly like every other application.

That’s what happens when an entire job market optimizes against itself. Candidates use AI to tailor résumés to job descriptions. Recruiters use AI to screen those résumés. Everyone is more efficient and less informed than they were before. The irony would be funny if it weren’t costing both sides real time and real opportunity.

For candidates, the damage is quieter. The volume strategy of applying to enough roles until something sticks stopped working once everyone adopted it simultaneously. And the underlying problem is worse than application fatigue: a résumé was never a great format for showing how you think, and it’s a genuinely terrible format for showing how you work with AI tools. The skills that actually separate strong candidates right now are invisible on paper.

Hiring managers know this. They’ll sit through a first interview and realize in the first ten minutes that the résumé told them almost nothing useful. Then they do it again. And again. Because until now, there hasn’t been a better option.

Referrals help, but not as much as people assume. They work well for companies with large, well-distributed networks. For most hiring teams, they surface candidates who are well-connected more reliably than candidates who are genuinely capable. The best person for the role is often someone nobody in the room has met.

This is the problem we’ve spent the last several months building against.

What’s different about the Talent Draft

Every role in the Talent Draft comes with a challenge built around the actual work of that role, designed with the hiring manager before the role ever went live. Candidates don’t fill out a form and wait. They do actual work: scoping the problem, applying the tools at their disposal, walking through their reasoning. By the time a hiring manager reviews a submission, they understand what that person can do in a way that a résumé and a screening call never produce. The first interview becomes a real conversation.

Who’s hiring this cohort

Starting today, the Spring 2026 cohort is open. We’re hiring across these roles at five companies rebuilding workflows around AI tools from the ground up.

Every open role is at provn.co/jobs.

If you’re hiring

If you’re a hiring manager who has felt this problem and wants to fill a role the right way, reach out. We’ll build the challenge with you for the next cohort.

If you’re a candidate

The work is the application. No more optimizing for a system that can’t see you clearly.

The draft is open. Go show what you can do →