Overview
A recruiter could screen 50-100 candidates a day by hand, and that number was the whole business. Paid social could not help: one missing mandatory skill disqualifies a candidate, and no ad platform can filter on that. Tidalstead built Talent500 Razor, a Chrome extension that is a live product to this day. It took the recruiter’s manual loop, automated every step of it, and lifted the ceiling to 500+ invites and 200+ auto-screened candidates per job.
Targeting an ad platform cannot express
Relevance in recruitment is a hard filter, not a probability. A candidate missing one mandatory skill is not a weaker match, they are not a match, and there is no ad platform on earth that can be told that.
A human ceiling on screening
Sourcing, screening, inviting, enrolling: everything worth doing sat in one recruiter’s hands, so throughput was capped at whatever a person could do between morning and evening.
Intent that had to be caught the moment it appeared
Candidate interest is perishable. By the time a manual process reached someone who had shown interest, the moment that made them reachable had usually passed.
Tidalstead’s Approach
We always start from first principles thinking. If no ad platform can express the targeting, then buying attention is the wrong instrument entirely. The question becomes where candidates declare their own intent, and what it would take to be there the instant they do. Recruiters already knew the answer: Naukri, whose bulk invite-to-apply flow reveals a candidate’s email the moment they show interest in a job.
Automate the recruiter’s own loop, not a theory of it
Razor plugs into the ATS, pulls open jobs and their required skills, auto-runs the Naukri query, screens through Mercurial, and invites at scale. Every step existed before. It was simply being done by hand.
Catch the intent the second it is declared
On application the email is revealed, the profile is auto-created, and the candidate is enrolled in a HubSpot flow carrying a magic link that lands them directly in the assessment. No form, no wait, no handoff.
Ship it to its own builder first
The extension went out with the builder as its own primary user, so the loop was tuned by someone who felt every rough edge, and only then handed to 100+ recruiters.
Every event in the flow was piped to Slack with a relevance score attached, so the whole engine was monitorable at a glance: which jobs were pulling, which screens were passing, and where the funnel thinned.
Results
- 500+ invites per job, up from 50-100 manual screens a day
- 200+ candidates auto-screened through the assessment, per job
- First working cut in 3 weeks, then iterated in the open
- 100+ recruiters adopted it as their daily driver, and it remains a live product
Conclusion
The ceiling that defined the business turned out to be a tooling problem, not a headcount problem. Moving to a surface where intent is self-declared, and automating the whole path from query to assessment, multiplied one recruiter’s output by roughly ten. The tool that did it is still running.