Introducing Myself
Hi Product Hunt 👋 I'm Nikita.
The resume hasn't meaningfully changed since 1482. That's the year Leonardo da Vinci wrote to the Duke of Milan listing the things he could build. Bullet points. Self-reported. Unverifiable. Five hundred years later, that's still the artifact the entire hiring industry runs on, and now we've bolted AI resume screening on top of it, which mostly means we're pattern-matching claims faster.
I'm 16, so I obviously haven't spent 20 years as a hiring manager.
But that's also part of why I got interested in this problem in the first place.
The more I learned about hiring, the stranger the whole system seemed to me. Companies can get hundreds or thousands of applications for one job, recruiters have nowhere near enough time to actually understand every candidate, and somehow we're still relying mostly on a document people wrote about themselves to decide who gets a chance. A document, that isn't gonna list the same opportunities a single mother first generation immigrant had versus the son of a billionaire, even if the first generation immigrant has more potential and a better skillset for the actual job.
And the thing I kept coming back to was: a resume doesn't actually tell you whether someone can do the job.
What tells you is putting a real problem in front of someone and seeing what they do with it. How they handle a moving target. What they prioritize. What they choose not to do. What happens when the plan breaks.
That gap between the document and the person feels like one of the biggest problems in hiring. Recruiters drown in volume. Great candidates get filtered out. Everyone's miserable.
I'm not just building an equitable applicant tracking system. I'm not just building a job simulator. I'm building a performance predictor - find out who will excel at your job and who you'd have to fire in 10 minutes rather than 3 months.
I'm building SocketHR.
It's a hiring intelligence platform with a candidate simulation engine. Instead of only screening a PDF, it can put candidates inside a compressed version of the actual job, generated based off your exact job description and the specific candidate it's sent to:
Pivot Challenge: you're halfway into a task and the requirements change underneath you. What do you keep, what do you kill, what do you tell your stakeholder?
Inbox Chaos: six competing messages, everything is urgent. Show me your priority order.
Roleplay: a case that unfolds and pushes back based on what you actually say, how do you actually communicate with your team on the job?
Instead of you manually screening applications, SocketHR automatically ranks and responds to candidates in seconds, then runs short on-the-job simulations to see who'll actually perform, not who wrote the best resume. No more hours per job lost to reading resumes, no more hours lost on video conferences booked based on who looks the best on paper, not who is the best on the job. And most importantly, no more losing strong talent because they didn't meet typical ATS resume filters.
That's hours back in your week to land new clients, deepen existing ones, and let your firm grow while the filtering runs itself equitably and predictively in the background.
Where I am right now
Early and unglamorous: building, talking to recruiters, cold-emailing companies that are drowning in resume volume, hearing what they hate, fixing things, and doing it again. I love talking to people, so feel free to reach out! No matter if you are a recruiter, startup, looking for a job, or just someone interested in the hiring industry :)
What I'd genuinely love from this community
If you hire: what is the single worst part of your screening funnel right now? And if you're even the least bit interested in SocketHR, reach out! I'd be happy to give you a quick 15 minute demo for completely free, or run it on one of your live roles so you can see for yourself if it helps or not.
If you're job hunting: would you rather do one 10-minute simulation, or fire off 100 applications into an ATS void?
Anyone: tell me your thoughts!
I'm here to build in public and I'll answer EVERY SINGLE comment.
If you want to see what we’re building: sockethr.com
Also very happy to hear from other young founders :)
- Nikita
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