There's a moment in most of these hiring-manager calls where I stop taking notes and just listen, because what's being described isn't really a feature request. It's closer to a belief about people, and what a screen can and can't hold.
I dont trust AI recruiting
One manager, describing how he interviews for his sales team, told me he won't look at a single recorded pitch before meeting someone. Doesn't matter how good the reel is. What he wants, he said, is the version of a person before they've had time to compose themselves. He wants to see the stumble when a customer pushes back mid-sentence, the half-second where you can see them deciding whether to bluff or admit they don't know something. A video, to him, is a mirror the candidate has already rehearsed in front of. He wasn't against efficiency exactly. He just didn't think efficiency and truth could share the same screen.
I do trust AI recruiting.. but
Later that same week, a manager running a much bigger team told me almost the opposite. He doesn't want to meet anyone who hasn't already been filtered down to a shortlist. He had forty open roles, one sales recruiter and him. The math was not in his favour. He wants the video, the scorecard, the pre-screen, all of it, so his own hour goes only to the five people worth an hour.
But in the same breath he said something that's made me twitch. He doesn't trust the video fully, he said, because a person can be extremely good at being watched and still be the wrong hire. Thirty polished seconds on camera and a person's actual first Tuesday on the job are not the same evidence. He wasn't asking for less signal. He was asking for a signal he could trust more than the reel itself.
What does this mean?
I keep turning this over, because as someone actually building the thing both of them are describing, I don't get to resolve it by picking a side. Build for the first manager and I'd have to strip the product down until it isn't really a product anymore… closer to a scheduling favor, and the whole premise of pre-screened video, that a hiring manager's time is finite and worth protecting, disappears with it. Build only for the second and I risk building exactly the object he's suspicious of: something that flatters on camera and says nothing about Tuesday.
What I notice, sitting with both calls, is that these two managers are asking the same underlying question from opposite ends of it. Is a video, a transcript, a scorecard… closer to a performance, or closer to a person. Neither believes a screen can fully answer that on its own. The one who won't watch has decided the only honest fix is distance from the screen entirely. The one who wants nothing but the screen has decided the fix is to make the screen ask harder questions the kind that don't reward rehearsal, because there was no way to have practiced them.
What Scooter wants to build towards
I think that second path is the only one a product can actually take. You cannot put everyone back in a room together; there isn't enough room, or enough hours in anyone's week. What you might be able to do is get a little closer to the moment before someone learns what to perform unscripted follow-ups instead of scripted pitches, situations instead of speeches, signal that gets a little worse on a second viewing instead of a little more polished. But on other days I'm less sure, and I think about the first manager again, sitting across the table from someone, watching them not know what to say, and I wonder if there just isn't a substitute for that… if the thing he's protecting doesn't scale, and is right not to.
I don't have a clean answer for which of them the product is really for. Most days it feels less like two customers wanting different things, and more like two people describing the same fear from either side of the same glass.