According to Fortune, Alex Bates, founder and CEO of the AI executive recruiting platform HelloSky, argues that companies must stop “recycling” talent from the same old Silicon Valley pools to fuel AI innovation. His company, which announced a $5.5 million oversubscribed seed round in April 2025 from investors including Caldwell Partners and angels from Google and Cisco, uses a GenAI-powered platform to consolidate data on candidates, companies, and research. The platform acts as a “complete map” to find real domain experts who aren’t well-networked, scouring code contributions, peer-reviewed papers, and open-source projects instead of just resumes. Bates, who also authored the book “Augmented Mind,” says this “moneyball” approach can surface candidates who left a company before a big IPO or who don’t brag enough, helping find “diamond in the rough” talent that traditional searches miss.
The recycling problem is real
Look, Bates has a point. The AI talent market is insane. We’ve all heard the stories about million-dollar compensation packages for researchers with the right pedigree. When Sam Altman says there’s only a “medium-sized handful” of people who can figure out the next big algorithmic leaps, he’s not joking. So what do companies do? They poach from each other. Mark Zuckerberg keeps a literal list, for crying out loud. It’s a classic case of incestuous amplification—the same ideas and backgrounds getting passed around a tiny, hyper-expensive club. No wonder innovation can feel stalled. You can’t discover new things if you’re only talking to the same people.
Data over pedigree sounds great, but…
Here’s the thing: the “moneyball” promise is incredibly seductive. Who doesn’t love the idea of finding undervalued geniuses based on their actual output, like code commits or research impact, instead of where they went to school? HelloSky’s approach of mapping the “alternate pathways” is basically an attempt to fix a broken system. And it makes sense. In a field moving as fast as AI, a groundbreaking open-source project on GitHub is probably a better signal than a decade-old PhD from a top school.
But I’m skeptical. For one, quantifying “impact” in research or code is notoriously messy. An AI can tag data, but understanding the nuance of a contribution? That’s still human work. Also, this creates a new kind of panopticon. Your every digital breadcrumb—every pull request, every forum comment—becomes part of your permanent, scored record. That’s a bit creepy. And what about the people who *are* brilliant but work in closed, proprietary environments? They’d be invisible to this system.
The future is more tests?
Bates also predicts a wave of “next-gen behavioral assessments” for candidates. His logic is that if you target better, you can spend more time deeply vetting the right people. I get it. Wasting time on bad interviews is the worst. But come on. “Forcing assessments” sounds like a dystopian HR nightmare waiting to happen. We already have a proliferation of take-home projects and grueling whiteboard sessions. Adding another layer of AI-proctored, personality-mapping exams? That feels less like finding genius and more like building compliant cogs. The goal should be to *reduce* friction for true talent, not build a more elaborate gauntlet.
Is this the solution?
So, is HelloSky’s team onto something? Probably. The $5.5 million in funding suggests investors think so. The core idea—looking beyond LinkedIn and Stanford—is 100% correct. The global talent pool is vast and under-tapped.
But let’s not pretend an AI platform is a magic bullet. It’s a new tool, but the fundamental challenges remain. You still need humans to make final judgments on culture and potential. And you have to ask: does this just create a new, data-driven elite while leaving another group behind? The book “Augmented Mind” talks about the human-AI relationship. The real test for HelloSky will be whether it augments human recruiters’ ability to see potential, or just replaces one set of biases with another, algorithmically determined set. The talent wars are brutal. A smarter map might help, but it won’t end the war.
