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Event Description
Generative AI broke hiring on both sides at once. Recruiters can't tell which applicants are real, & candidates can't tell which employers are. Come spend a day building something that fixes it - with the founders, engineers, & TA practitioners who live this problem every week.
This is a full-day, in-person hackathon co-hosted by localhost:nyc, Integral Recruiting (IRD), & NYU - where builders team up with real talent-acquisition operators to ship working tools against a single, focused challenge.
The Challenge: Trust in the Hiring Funnel
Hiring has a trust crisis on both sides of the funnel - recruiters can't tell which applicants are real, & candidates can't tell which employers are. Talent acquisition runs on a basic assumption: that the person applying is who they say they are, & that the company reaching out is who it says it is. Generative AI has broken both halves of that assumption at once. Your job for the day is to rebuild it.
You can attack either side of the funnel - or the seam between them.
Side A - Trust coming in: the applicant flood. A role that used to draw 30 applicants now draws 500, & a growing share aren't real, aren't qualified, or are gaming the system. Candidates embed hidden prompt-injection text to manipulate the AI tools that screen resumes. And increasingly, applicants appear qualified but look strikingly alike - the same phrasing, the same structure, the same accomplishments - a tell that everyone is leaning on the same AI tools to write their applications. Recruiters are drowning, & the tools meant to help have no clear winner yet. The challenge: reliably separate real, qualified humans from AI-inflated noise - without punishing legitimate candidates who simply used AI to polish their resume.
Questions worth chasing:
What signals - behavioral, identity, provenance - actually distinguish a real applicant from a manufactured one?
When applications converge on the same AI-generated look, how do you tell genuine signal from sameness?
How do you detect a manipulated or machine-generated application without false-flagging honest people?
How do you surface the candidates who deserve attention fast, inside an existing recruiting workflow rather than replacing it?
Side B - Trust going out: impersonation & candidate scams. Bad actors register look-alike domains to send fake offer letters, run deepfake recruiter calls, & scam job seekers out of money & data. Employers have almost no way to detect it or warn candidates. The challenge: make it harder to impersonate a real employer, & easier for a candidate to verify that an offer or a recruiter is genuine.
Questions worth chasing:
How would a candidate confirm that an offer or outreach is legitimately from the company?
Can impersonating domains be detected & flagged early?
What does a lightweight "trust signal" look like on a careers page or an offer letter?
What a strong build looks like. A working tool that raises trust in the funnel & fits the way hiring actually happens - a triage or screening layer that plugs into an existing applicant tracking system rather than replacing it, or a candidate/employer verification tool that makes impersonation harder to pull off & easier to catch. We care more about a real, demonstrable solution to a narrow slice of the problem than a broad concept that doesn't run.
You don't need HR or recruiting-software experience to compete here - that's the point of a single, focused theme. Engineers & builders can go straight at the detection, identity, & verification problems. HR-technology practitioners will be in the room to keep your build grounded in how hiring actually works, & to pressure-test whether a recruiter would trust what you've made.
What to Expect
A full day of building - 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, hard stop
Small teams (or solo if you insist) working in one shared room
TA practitioners from the SAI community in the room to keep your build grounded in how hiring really works
A panel of expert judges: HR-tech founders, operators, & system admins who know these problems cold
End-of-day demos to judges, investors, & real TA leaders
The strongest teams get connected to investors - and, over time, to real customers
Prizes
Winners walk away with build-tool & platform credits, expert consulting sessions, & investor time. Everyone in the room gets connections that outlast the day - this is a room full of builders & buyers.
Judges
Tiffany Jin: Eqo. Building in the employee-referral & hiring space; brings a founder's eye for what actually ships.
Steven Grover: Partnerspring. Operator & builder in the HR-tech ecosystem.
Shane Papp: Ex-iCIMS. Deep insider knowledge of the ATS world these tools have to live inside.
Adam Treitler: Related Industries. HR-tech operator with a practitioner's view of the funnel.
Shiv Jethi - Engineer at SpaceX.
Olivia Iarmak - Meta Reality Labs. AI quality & operations leader; researcher. Brings a practitioner's lens to trustworthy AI.
D. J. Patel - VC | 3x exited founder.
Prince Rumi - Excelsior Edge Ventures, Partner | AI Researcher
Rami Abouemira, formerly People Ops at Square & VMware, now building the future of work with All Good HR & Founders Foundry.
Ishaan Das (TechBrig) - Leads AI transformation & product design for several recruiting firms & recruiting SaaS like SquarePeg.
More judges to be announced - investors & TA buyers joining the panel.
Who Should Attend
Engineers - full-stack, backend, frontend, AI/ML
Founders & aspiring founders who like shipping fast
Recent grads, master's students, & NYC college builders
TA ops & recruiting-systems practitioners who want to build alongside engineers
HR / recruiting professionals newer to the space - join a team as a product advisor
You do not need HR or recruiting-software experience to compete - that's the whole point of one focused theme. Engineers go straight at the detection, identity, & verification problems; practitioners keep it real. Just show up ready to build.
Credit Sponsors
Solari is the world's fastest agent infrastructure provider. Run headless browsers, sandboxes, & desktops from one API, & automate at scale.
Block Convey is an AI reliability & observability platform for AI agents. It helps teams see what an agent is doing across model calls, tools, retrieval & decisions, identify where it fails, & improve it.
Hosts
Somya Gupta: The face of NYC startup ecosystem.
Integral Recruiting (IRD): Enterprise talent-acquisition & iCIMS/ATS specialists, & stewards of the ~350-member SAI community of TA operators & system admins.
Greg Mendez: NYU. Bringing the university's builder & HR-analytics community into the room.
TechSHRM is NYU Tandon's, award-winning student chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Established in 1987, we bridge data science, technology, & organizational strategy through people analytics - leveraging data to optimize workforce decision-making, recruitment, & employee performance.
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