Hiring Insights, reimagined

Hi everyone,

I’m rethinking Hiring Insights.

Up until now, this newsletter looked like a lot of B2B updates do: what we shipped, where we showed up, what we’re building next.

Useful. But not the most interesting thing happening right now in recruiting.

What is interesting is how quietly hiring has changed — not because tools got better, but because attention moved.

Before founding CollabWORK, I spent my career in media and journalism — working alongside Katie Couric and with teams at Yahoo News, CNN, Tribune Media and Amazon Studios.

In media, you learn a few things quickly:

• Audiences don’t follow brands — they follow trust

• Distribution matters as much as content

• Algorithms change; relationships compound

Recruiting is now going through the same shift media did years ago — often without fully realizing it.

Over the past year, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with employers, recruiters, media operators, and partners.

A pattern keeps coming up: People aren’t discovering jobs the way most hiring teams are optimizing for.

They’re not starting with a job board. They’re not clicking alerts. They’re not even always “searching.”

Instead:

• Roles show up in Slack and Discord communities

• Jobs appear in newsletters people already trust

• Candidates ask LLMs questions like:
  “Who’s hiring right now?”
  “What’s it like to work at ___?”

And then — after all that — they apply.

The more automated hiring has become, the more human discovery has mattered.

Most teams already have more than they think.

• Past applicants and silver medalists

• Alumni and former interns

• People who opted in once — and then went quiet

Most employers don’t actually want more applicants. They want the right people opting in.

To try and solve this, hiring teams are experimenting with AI in two main ways:

1. AI sourcing and agents
Automated outbound. Personalized messages. Scaled outreach.

Helpful — but still a cold outbound problem.

2. Earned, opt-in discovery
People who already trust you.
People researching intentionally.
People discovering roles through environments they chose.

This is where owned and partnered audiences matter.

When someone opts into a newsletter, engages in a community, or consumes curated content — that attention is earned.

When someone asks AI a question based on their chat history, preferences, and context — that discovery is already qualified.

Not spray-and-pray. Consent-based.

AI didn’t make hiring more transactional. It made discovery more conversational.

AI surfaces:

• Content

• Context

• Credibility

Which means the employers who show up are the ones who’ve already earned attention elsewhere — through media, communities, and owned channels.

This is where everything connects:

• Content fuels community

• Community fuels trust

• Trust fuels discoverability — including inside AI systems

Not instead of job boards or career sites. Before them.

This is where many teams get stuck.

They understand the shift — but can’t see it.

So we’ve been quietly testing Employer AI Visibility at CollabWORK.

Not rankings.
Not hacks.

But clarity:

• How employers actually show up when candidates ask AI questions

• What job content is being surfaced — and what’s missing

• Where community and media are doing the work before the apply

We’re actively pressure-testing this with partners now.

If you’re curious — or want to see how your company shows up — feel free to reach out. Feedback welcome.

Going forward, this will be a weekly field report on how talent attraction is actually changing based on what I’m seeing, hearing, and testing in real time.

I’ll cover:

• Where job discovery really happens

• How employers show up in AI search

• Why owned and partnered audiences compound

• Why presence beats campaigns

• And the best articles and interviews I am reading on these topics both within and outside of recruiting.

If you’re building employer brand, hiring at scale, or trying to future-proof how candidates find you, I think you’ll find this useful.

And if you have a take on any of these topics and want to share them to our audience, respond to this email.

More next week.

Best,
Summer Delaney | Founder and CEO, CollabWORK