Introducing the Provn Talent Scout webinar series
Five live conversations with the people on the other side of the hiring table. Performance over pedigree, proof over polish.
Open up a stack of résumés for any open role in 2026 and you’ll notice something. They’re all good. The bullets are tight, the language is crisp, and every achievement reads like the same copywriter wrote it.
That’s partly because, in a sense, the same copywriter did. ChatGPT rewrote most of the bullets. The cover letters got tuned to the job descriptions. On the other side of the screen, candidates are using tools like Cluely to get a polished answer in real time during the interview itself.
None of this is the candidate’s fault. But the shorthand signals hiring managers used to rely on have flattened out, and when everyone looks good on paper and sounds sharp on the screen, it gets a lot harder to actually be seen.
That’s the question the Provn Talent Scout series was built to answer. Starting tomorrow, we’re hosting five live conversations with the people on the other side of the hiring table.
What the series is
Five sessions. Five operators who hire for real roles at real companies. Each session is free, each runs about an hour, and each one is built around what candidates want to hear directly from the person who will evaluate their work. The framing across all five is the same: performance over pedigree, proof over polish.
Meet the Talent Scouts
“Provn’s AI Talent Draft: How It Works and How to Succeed”
Niki launched Provn out of Seattle last fall, after a career that included running growth at Trulia, founding Suplari (acquired by Microsoft in 2021), and most recently leading the Copilot Accelerator team at Microsoft. This is the session to start with. Niki will walk through how the AI Talent Draft actually works, how employers review candidates on Provn, and the specific moves that help a candidate rise to the top of the pool.
If you’re planning to take a challenge, watch this first.
“Hiring Agentic Builders: What CPTOs Actually Look For”
Ganesh runs product and engineering at arrivia, the travel technology platform behind loyalty programs for American Express, Marriott, Hilton, and T-Mobile. Before arrivia he led Expedia’s B2B business through several years of double-digit growth. He has been very public, recently, about the kind of builder he wants to hire right now. On engineering, he is looking for people who have already shipped production agentic systems inside real product constraints, rather than folks who are still in the “exploring AI tools” phase. Same expectation on the design side: people who push work all the way to production and treat Cursor and Claude Code the way a senior engineer treats an IDE.
If you’ve been building this way and wondering how to signal it to an employer, this is the session.
“What Top Firms Actually Look for in AI-Era Talent”
Neal is a Senior Partner at BCG and chairs its Global Institute for the Future of Television. He spends a lot of his time thinking about how AI is changing creative and strategic work, and he has written publicly that AI in the hands of creative people makes “wonderful tools. But their tools nonetheless.”
For anyone trying to land a role at a top consulting firm, or anywhere that hires for judgment and strategic thinking, his hour is a window into how senior partners evaluate talent now that any deliverable could have been generated by a model. Short version: the bar on thinking went up, not down.
“Building Products That Matter: How a CTO Evaluates Engineering Talent”
Jeff runs product, engineering, AI, design, and security at Axon, the public safety company behind body cameras, in-car cameras, TASER devices, and the evidence management software used by most major police departments in the country. Before Axon he was VP of Amazon Alexa Entertainment. He has been openly bullish about Axon being on the right side of what he calls the “Gen AI divide,” a reference to the recent MIT report that found 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots are failing.
Block the hour if you write code or design products and you want to know how a CTO at a public, 30-year-old company with serious technical complexity actually decides who to bring on.
“Recombinant AI Fluency: The Skill That Gets You Hired”
Sandeep runs one of the largest business schools in the country and has spent the past year writing about a concept he coined called “recombinant AI fluency.” His argument in plain English: real value in the labor market is being created by people who can weave outputs from multiple AI systems (Claude, NotebookLM, Elicit, Gemini, and so on) into a single workflow, not by people who are just power users of one tool. He has called it “the killer skill for the job market.”
If you work with information for a living (data analysts, front-end developers, and anyone in between), his session is worth the hour. He’ll walk through what recombinant AI fluency looks like in practice and how to prove you have it.
Save your seat
Each session is free. Register for all five or pick the ones that fit where you are in your search. And while you’re at it, take a challenge on provn.co, because the people you’ll hear from in these webinars are the same people reviewing candidate work on the platform right now.