Why Resumes and Interviews Are Both Broken (And What I'm Building About It)
After 15 years of hiring at scale, I've watched too many brilliant people get filtered out by a system that wasn't designed to see them. Here's why I built Needl.
By Ben Henry, Founder of tryneedl.ai
If you talk to any recruiter about hiring today, you'll hear a quiet desperation about how things have changed — and not for the better. It's getting harder to find the right candidate. Technology has flooded the open application process with mobs of perfect-sounding resumes and cover letters. And it's burying the best hires for your team.
I spent 15 years on the other side of this problem. I built and scaled engineering organizations at Google and Pinterest. I hired hundreds of people. I personally reviewed thousands of resumes and sat through hundreds of interview loops. And I came away convinced that the system we've built isn't just inefficient — it's fundamentally broken at the input layer.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote what might be the oldest resume we know of. He listed specific things he had built — military engineering projects, weapons, infrastructure — concrete deliverables he could point to. Art, by contrast, he listed almost as an afterthought, a general skill. No jargon. No summary paragraph. Just evidence.
Technology has come a long way since 1480. The resume, not so much.
The resume problem
The original purpose of a resume was simple: prove to a reader that you have the requisite experience for the role you're seeking. "I worked at Google for a decade" carries a signal. Google is a hard place to get into and even harder to stay at. That tells you something.
But we've piled so much onto the resume since then — skills sections, jargon-heavy summaries, quantified impact claims — that it's become nearly impossible to know what to believe. It's rare for candidates to accurately represent their own role and impact in a complex organization. Self-reflection is hard. Who's to say whether a candidate spearheaded an effort, merely supported it, or simply participated?
And now LLMs can turn a bad resume into a polished one in seconds. Hiring managers are seeing unprecedented volumes of applications, all of which look decent. We've optimized the format while losing the signal.
Based on a resume alone, it's becoming more and more difficult to know whether someone actually did what they said, in the way they implied.
Resumes are not enough. But this all gets sorted out in the interview, right?
The interview problem
Interviews should fill the gap. But they're broken too, for different reasons.
Interviewers are generally bad at interviewing. It's a skill that takes real investment to develop, and most hiring managers don't get that investment. They're making high-stakes talent decisions with almost no training in how to evaluate people.
Interviews are the wrong format entirely. I have never, in any job I've held, been asked to perform work the way I'm asked to perform it in an interview. The anxiety, the preparation rituals, the artificial pressure — none of it maps to how anyone actually thinks or works day to day.
Interviews are optimized for finding reasons to say no, not for discovering genuine alignment. Panels of five people with different biases, different lenses, not always acting in the hiring manager's actual interest. The process rewards people who are good at interviewing, which is a completely separate skill from being good at the job.
Some of the best hiring stories I know of didn't involve resumes or formal interviews at all. Eric Schmidt reportedly connected with the Google founders at Burning Man. No resume. No loop. They discovered they shared values, saw the world similarly, and complemented each other's strengths. That's the actual signal that matters — and it almost never shows up in a resume or a 45-minute interview.
The alternative is networking. But networking has its own failure mode: it's inherently exclusive, and it keeps outsiders out. The people with the best networks get the best jobs, regardless of fit.
What if we fixed the input?
Here's what I keep coming back to: the industry has spent decades adding compensating layers on top of the broken input. Technical screens, take-home projects, case studies, panel loops, reference checks after the offer. Layer after layer of qualification theater, all trying to answer questions that a better input would have answered upfront.
What if, instead of patching downstream, we fixed the input itself?
That's the thesis behind tryneedl.ai.
For job seekers, needl replaces the resume with a richer, more honest representation of who you are. Through guided AI coaching, you work through structured self-discovery — your strengths, values, working style, what drives you, what environments you thrive in. The output isn't a better-formatted resume. It's a persistent AI persona that can represent you in early conversations with hiring managers, 24/7, for every role.
For hiring managers, needl replaces the job description template with a coaching session that forces clarity about what you actually need — not just the title and the years of experience, but the values, the team dynamics, the working style that predicts whether someone will succeed in this specific role on this specific team.
The matching happens where the richness lives, not where the compression happens. Instead of keyword-matching a thin resume against a thin job description, needl matches full personas against deeply understood roles.
It replicates the best of networking — finding real alignment on values, vision, and complementary skills — without requiring people to already be inside the right circles.
Why I'm building this
After 15 years of hiring at scale, I've watched too many brilliant people get filtered out by a system that wasn't designed to see them. Career changers whose resumes told the wrong story. People returning from layoffs, invisible in a stack of 500 identical applications. Hiring managers running six-round loops and still making bad hires because they were measuring the wrong things from the start.
I built needl because I believe hiring can be more human, not less, even with AI at the center. The paradox is intentional: we're using AI to surface the deeply human qualities that resumes were never designed to carry.
Beyond the resume. Find your one.
If any of this resonates — whether you're job seeking, hiring, or just frustrated with the status quo — try needl. If you sign up before April 30, 2026, the first year is free for the first 100 users. And if you have questions, reach out directly: ben@tryneedl.ai.
— Ben