Recruiting and Doing AI Right When Most Get it Wrong

By: Will Rose

Buzz Words, Slop, and Distilling Insights that Matter

AI slop is what I call it. The AI Bros strike again on LinkedIn talking about their new start up selling "Agentic AI" that will solve every problem. But the problem you end up adding to your operational load is a bunch of slop that is nothing that it promised to be. To get the data you need, you need an entire team to host the infrastructure (local or in the cloud), build the infrastructure, build and maintain AI applications, and somebody else to manage the project. You need a team who is intimately familiar with your business model and tools to tune and train those models. If you have those teams, you can distill insights that are game changing. If not, you're getting the same slop everybody else is getting and chances are, your users are doing a pretty poor job because they think having AI means they can turn their brain off with a free ticket to unlimited bathroom breaks and funny cat videos while chat bots do all the work.

AI is a Mirror

I could get into the weeds but we're not going to. Rather, I want to talk about what matters most: not the tools themselves but how businesses SHOULD actually use them.

The tools are cool. Most businesses are rushing to utilize AI. The problem is that generalized platforms marketed at large scale are incapable or meeting the direct nuances of each individual business. Every abstraction, on-piece-fits-all product, promise of infinite globe-shattering efficiency is missing the point—AI is a mirror. Confused? Let me explain.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on the nearly whole corpus of human creativity and conversation. The information is vast and relevant. But relevant to who? Everybody. That's a problem. When you take a large language model, package it up with a pretty bow then sell it to thousands or even dozens, you're taking on a system that was not made for you. Your needs, your employees, your business objectives are distinct and unique. You need insights and efficiency that is dialed in for you specifically. You competitive edge is that you don't do things like the guys down the street. You are DIFFERENT. Why would you depend on the same systems everybody uses? You might ask yourself "isn't that what OpTek is offering?". Well, no, it's not.

We Don't Sell AI

I have worked as an AI tools developer, building custom solutions for businesses that meet their exact needs. The advantage of hiring an in-house developer is you get somebody who can get into the weeds to build something you need. For most businesses this is outside of their wheelhouse. For most businesses, they end up buying software from new start-ups who slapped some branding on ChatGPT. Those businesses have horrible customer experience and don't get half as much efficiency as they expect and lose customer satisfaction and don't realize before it's too late. That's why we don't sell AI. I build it for us. To meet our needs. But, with the goal of meeting yours. I'm not a recruiter or a civil engineer. But my partners are. They are experts (and damned good ones). They are already informed and effective. I'm here to make them more effective for you. I can build tools that do the work of dozens of people across teams. I've done it several times. But it requires expert input, alignment, relentless tuning, and somebody who has their hands on the levers, gears, and wheels to keep that efficiency resilient and dynamic. I'm not going to make my co-founder a better recruiter or our engineering consultant a better engineer but with their input, I can automate the monotonous but important tedium to get them data distilled from the general to the specific that they can act on and spend their time providing maximum impact for our clients.

Our business model isn't to sell you an imaginary panacea. It's to enable our top performing team to 10X their output and provide 10X value to you.

My partners, their job is to be the very best of what you need. My job is to help them meet your specific needs on an accelerated timeline with exponential and compounded impact.

What We Can Do For You Right Now

Right now our tools can:

• source:

  • Public DOT websites to get the latest contract awards

  • sam.gov to get the latest federal contract awards

  • Public licensure records

  • PE awards

  • Job postings

  • Local news websites

  • Engineering journals

  • Industry publications

  • Federal spending bills and congressional considerations

  • SEC Filings

  • press releases

  • Many more

    
    

We're talking thousands of sources.

So what do we do with all that data? Great question! Honestly, we can do a lot;

• Map out what your competitors are doing to win in their hiring strategy

• Note leadership transitions which may make passive talent more open to seeking a job

• Benchmark salary data

• Dissect talent backlog and ramp up for you and your competitors drawing from the same talent pool

• Identify rare talent facing employee dissatisfaction

• Proactively find what your and your competitor employees are saying on-line that lead to either good or bad perceptions in the labor market

With all this information we can paint a clear image of exactly the talent you are looking for, who is likely to come, who has relevant experience, and what their expectations will likely be. It's a proactive approach which offers you the chance to be intentional and strategize instead of throwing out a line in the labor market and hoping for the best after several rounds of trial and error.

What this means is that we can provide in 72 hours a tailored C.I.A Report (Competitive Intelligence Analysis) giving you strategic insights and baseline expectations for your most competitive roles. Did I mention we offer the report for free during discovery? Pretty sweet deal.

We don't leave you hanging after that. We immediately launch a targeted campaign that meets your specific needs. Our process looks like:

1. Discovery and Delivery of a C.I.A Report

2. Strategic planning for your most in demand roles

3. Launch a Targeted Talent Campaign (TTC)

4. Source candidates with near insider knowledge gleaned from public sources and employee voice

5. Leveraging that data in candidate outreach to drive real engagement

6. Recruiter Interview

7. Technical Screen

8. Deliver the candidate to the client

Our Clients, Your Trust

You might be concerned that we would leverage this information in solcitation of business with your competitors. We don't. We never will. Here at OpTek, we are obsessed with loyalty to our customers. We want a long relationship that will last for years to come. We offer an NDA that obligates us to not use propriatary information for anybody's benefit other than for yours alone. We can additionally consult on strategies that can make your hiring strategy more incognito and resilient against competitor research.

What We Sell

At OpTek, we are a full-stack talent consultancy. We adjust our needs to yours and provide compounded results and informed recruiting strategy that is precise, data-driven, and pertinent to your operational positioning.

In short, we sell aggressive and fine-grained talent pipelines that prevent delays and turned down contracts due to talent suffocation Give us a call or send us an email and we'll be happy to provide you an initial C.I.A Report and discuss meeting your talent sourcing needs in an explosive way.

Oh, yeah. This was not written with AI. But the image was....