While Silicon Valley frantically used AI to “kill” recruiters, Paraform, which had just completed a $20 million Series A financing, did the opposite: using AI to turn recruiters into “talent brokers” and increase revenue by 3-5 times. The article disassembles how its “human-machine collaboration” model can achieve a 90% cost reduction and a 5x speed increase in high-level job recruitment, and reveals an anti-consensus trend – the more popular AI is, the more valuable top human experts are.
Have you ever wondered why everyone in Silicon Valley is thinking about replacing recruiters with AI? VCs have thrown billions of dollars into companies that promise to fully automate the hiring process, from AI resume screeners to chatbots that can conduct independent interviews to algorithms that claim to find the perfect candidate without human intervention. Sounds tempting, right? Since AI can do it faster and cheaper, why hire those expensive recruiters?
But something happened recently that made me rethink this question. A company called Paraform has just closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Felicis, with participation from A*, BOND, DST Global, Liquid 2, and well-known angel investors including Canva, Instacart, YouTube, and xAI co-founders. Interestingly, the company’s philosophy is the opposite of the mainstream thinking in Silicon Valley: instead of replacing recruiters with AI, they are using AI to empower recruiters. This leads me to think about a deeper question: in this era of AI tools proliferation, what is truly valuable?
Paraform’s revenue has increased 40 times since its seed round in 2024, and has helped recruiters generate $26 million, some of whom are expected to earn more than $1 million by 2025. Companies such as Palantir, Decagon, Cursor, Windsurf, and Hightouch are using Paraform to fill their most critical positions. Behind these numbers lies a larger trend: in the current era of increasing popularity of AI, high-quality talent acquisition has become more important and difficult than ever.
The double-edged sword effect of AI recruitment
AI has indeed brought significant efficiency gains in the recruitment field. According to the data, large companies like Unilever have reduced hiring time by 75% through AI-driven assessment systems, processing nearly 2 million applications annually, saving more than £1 million and 50,000 candidate hours. This efficiency revolution sounds enticing, but I have discovered a troubling paradox: these systems may systematically exclude non-traditional candidates who do not fit the algorithmic pattern, who may be the innovators and disruptors driving organizational breakthroughs.
I observe that the AI recruitment startup ecosystem is reaching a pivotal moment. The trajectory of companies like Mercor as they went from dorm ideas to $2 billion valuations in just 18 months reflects both the immense promise of algorithmic recruitment solutions and their inherent contradictions. Meanwhile, companies like Borderless AI are using AI agent workflows and AI as an early-stage AI-driven company for HR and global employer of record space, while Eightfold AI is focused on post-hire things: using AI to increase productivity and manage talent.
But the real test is not whether these companies can attract venture capital or handle millions of resumes, but whether they can solve the human problem of matching the right people to the right roles without perpetuating the inefficiencies and biases they claim to eliminate, and navigating a regulatory environment where there is growing skepticism about whether algorithmic recruitment truly serves workers or just algorithms.
Paraform’s reverse thinking
In the midst of this wave of automation, an interesting countertrend is quietly emerging. While most companies are pursuing the promise of fully automated hiring, more and more companies are discovering that their most critical talent decisions actually require more human expertise, not less. And they are willing to pay for it. This is exactly the transformation that Paraform is betting on.
I delved into Paraform’s model and found that their innovation is not about replacing recruiters with AI, but about using AI to make recruiters faster, sharper, and more profitable. The result is a new labor model, where elite recruiters are more like sports agents than back-office support, and companies get better results on the most important hires. John Kim, founder and CEO of Paraform, said: “The macro environment and the rapid development of AI are having a huge impact on the way technology companies operate and recruit. We believe that in this new era, highly skilled recruiters are more important than ever, and this decade will mark them closer to being sports agents handling complex high-stakes hires on behalf of companies. ”
From the customer case study, the effect of this model is remarkable. Apriora, an AI agent development company invested by Y Combinator, hired four engineers in one month through Paraform, reducing hiring time by five times and hiring overhead by 90%. After failing to work with a traditional agency, Carma, a fleet management platform, turned to Paraform for its founding engineer. In both cases, technology helped widen the funnel and speed up the process, but the final decision still depends on human judgment.
Notably, Paraform’s recruiters earn 3 to 5 times more on the platform than traditional roles. It’s not about replacing recruiters with AI, it’s about expanding their reach and recognizing their value. As Jason Rumney, a top-ranked recruiter on Paraform and founder and CEO of Intelletec Group, said, “Most recruitment platforms today use AI to replace recruiters, but Paraform uses it to empower us. That’s the difference. Paraform simplifies the heavy lifting so we can focus on what really drives results—building relationships and completing key hires. ”
I think the success of this model reflects a deeper trend: in the age of AI, the real value lies not in eliminating humans, but in enhancing human capabilities. Paraform’s platform provides recruiters with AI-powered tools like candidate relationship management, call transcription, sourcing tools, and workflow automation that save time without sacrificing quality. At the same time, because they have the freedom to work across companies and roles, recruiters are able to focus on what they do best: building relationships, advocating for talent, and completing hires.
A new pattern of elite talent competition
I’ve been pondering the question lately: Why is the recruitment of top talent becoming more and more like a sports star deal? When I saw the news of Meta “trading” AI researchers getting millions of views on social media, I realized that the trend was already beginning to emerge. As Paraform mentioned in a podcast interview, they believe that important tech companies recruit the best marketers, not much different from the Lakers announcing LeBron James joining or the Dodgers getting Shohei Ohtani.
With the rapid development of AI automating a large number of daily tasks, humans begin to focus on higher-level functions, and the amount of work that a person can complete will greatly increase. GDP growth will accelerate, and average salaries will also rise. John Kim mentioned in the interview: “The era of seven-figure pay that we have been talking about internally is fast coming, and while it already exists in some industries, I think it will become more mainstream. “This trend leads to more competition for top talent, and when scarcity exists, the value of brokers usually rises.
We’ve done this to some extent, and when someone says, “I worked at Stripe in the early days,” it actually means that they were involved in the process of creating the first $50 billion market cap. If you’re part of that 20-person team, we might give you $50 million in “points.” There may be more general measures in the future, just like points, assists, and minutes played in sports.
Of particular note is the rapid rise of the role of Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). As Paraform observes, this is one of the fastest-growing roles on their platform. Palantir coined the term and did a great job, but now we see that not only Palantir, but also traditional companies are looking to hire FDEs. In the age of AI, implementation becomes the biggest bottleneck, not the technology itself. We already have good large language models and technologies, and the key is how to put them in the hands of ordinary people and the wider industry.
I delved into a specific case where Windsurf, a company that builds AI development tools, quickly scaled its FDE team with Paraform. In just over a year, they grew from a founding team to more than 200 employees, raised $150 million, and launched flagship products like the Windsurf editor. But unlike most code assistants, Windsurf is built for the enterprise, serving companies like VMware, JPMorgan Chase, and Cisco. Each deployment requires deep integration with the customer’s codebase, and FDE takes care of this effort.
The complexity of the FDE role lies in the fact that they require a combination of the technical depth of an engineer and the expertise of navigating a high-stakes client environment. This kind of talent is very scarce, and recruiting even one is slow, expensive, and difficult to get it right. Windsurf’s Alex Laubscher, one of the company’s first FDEs and now in charge of recruitment, has built a team of more than 15 people through Paraform and is now generating between $50 million and $100 million in revenue.
What struck me was a detail in the recruitment process. Alex recalls, “When I joined as the first deployment engineer, I covered every delivery of the company. I know what this means for a person – it’s not a good thing. “Pressure builds up: team members are overstretched, delivery quality drops, staffing plans stall. But when they switched to Paraform, things changed dramatically. “People just see me alone in the conference room,” Alex says. That became my new office because I was interviewing all day. ”
This case reveals an important insight: even in highly specialized fields, AI-enhanced recruitment platforms can create amazing results. Alex completed seven key hires through Paraform, including attempts at new types of candidates that Windsurf had not previously considered. “Eashan and Alex have proven to us that we can find great fresh graduates who are up to the task. We haven’t taken this risk before. “Another great hire for Christina comes from a completely different background – a product manager at a large company. This diversity is difficult to achieve with traditional recruitment methods.
The future model of human-machine collaboration
I find that the ongoing recruitment revolution may provide an early glimpse of how AI is reshaping the professional services industry as a whole. Rather than completely replacing human workers, AI is increasingly deployed with them – simplifying repetitive tasks while leaving room for judgment, creativity, and relationship building. This model may extend to consulting, creative services, legal work, and other knowledge-intensive fields.
A McKinsey report supports this view, stating that workers who adopt AI tools are not only more productive but also more focused on high-leverage work that defines expertise in complex areas, such as strategic decision-making and problem-solving. As Peter Deng, partner at Felicis, says: “In today’s world, speed and talent are everything. Paraform allocates 10x faster talent by providing elite recruiters with modern tools and AI that augment, not replace, their judgment. With each search, the Paraform network continues to compound in intelligence – improving candidate matching, interview efficiency, and recruiter-role fit. ”
I think the deeper meaning of this shift is that it redefines the value of human expertise. In an era where AI can handle massive data processing and pattern recognition, the unique value of humans lies in emotional intelligence, creative thinking, judgment of complex situations, and the ability to build trusting relationships. These are essential elements of the hiring process, especially in high-risk, high-value hires.
This model is also more sustainable from a business perspective. Fully automated hiring can lead to a homogeneous candidate pool and a lack of innovative teams, while a human-robot collaboration model can find a balance between efficiency and diversity. As one recruiter using Paraform put it, “When you’re limited in recruiter output, you have to say, ‘Find me someone who fits this perfectly.'” With Paraform, I don’t need to do that. I can say ‘find aspiring tech talent for me’. “This shift in mindset is spreading across the company.
What interests me particularly is that this model is creating a completely new economic structure. According to Paraform, 87% of companies now use AI-powered recruitment tools, and the AI recruitment market is expected to grow to $1.12 billion by 2030. But more importantly, recruiters on this platform are redefining their value propositions. John Keenan, founder of Continuity Partners, hired four candidates in one month, generating $82,000 in billing revenue. By automating manual tasks using Paraform’s AI capabilities, he reduced his operational overhead by 20 hours per week.
At the heart of this economic model lies the redistribution of scale effects and value creation. “When the market is growing, I always think: if I hire a candidate a week, I make $20,000 from that hiring,” Keenan explains. 20 times 5 is 100, so if I hire one candidate a week, I can make $1 million a year. “This mindset reflects a broader shift: from paying by time to paying by results, from delivering services to creating value.
The deeper change is that this model is redefining the boundaries of professional services. Traditionally, recruiters are intermediaries, but in Paraform’s model, they are more like strategic consultants. They are not just about finding candidates, but understanding market dynamics, predicting talent trends, building long-term relationships, and in some cases, helping candidates and companies make strategic decisions. This evolution of the role reflects a change in the entire knowledge economy: professionals are no longer mere doers, but thinkers and creators.
An interesting phenomenon I observed is that this pattern is creating network effects. As Peter Deng points out, “Paraform’s network continues to compound in terms of intelligence with each search, candidate submission and interview.” This is not just a technical compound, but also a compound of knowledge and relationships. Each successful match adds value to the network, and each recruiter’s experience becomes an asset to the entire platform. This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing cycle where success attracts more success and quality attracts more quality.
I think deeply about the future
While I am confident in the hiring model of human-machine collaboration, I also see some challenges that need to be carefully considered. The first is the issue of skill assessment and cultural adaptation. AI can handle resume screening and preliminary matching, but it cannot assess soft skills, predict team dynamics, or assess whether candidates will contribute meaningfully to long-term success. This is exactly why human recruiters remain crucial in this process.
I am also thinking about the broader implications of this model for the job market. As top talent becomes more valuable, the pay gap can widen further. This could create a more polarized job market, where a few elite talents are paid extremely well while most need to adapt to new work models. But I think this trend is inevitable, and the key is how to help more people upskill and move into high-value job categories.
Another interesting observation is that remote work is changing the game for hiring. As the founder of Paraform mentioned in the interview the case of an engineer working for three or four companies at the same time, this situation has become easier in the era of remote work. This presents both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, companies have access to global talent; On the other hand, they need to establish better verification and management mechanisms.
I believe that the future of recruitment will no longer be a simple talent match, but a complex ecosystem involving market dynamics, individual career development, company culture, and technological capabilities. In this ecosystem, good recruiters will play a role akin to sports agents or investment bankers, not just intermediaries but strategic advisors and value creators.
But I must also admit that this model is not without risks. Is this high return sustainable when recruiters earn six or even seven figures? Will it lead to excessive speculation and bubbles? When everyone wants to be a “talent agent”, is the market overcrowded? These are questions worth pondering. More importantly, will this elitist recruitment model further exacerbate social inequalities and make it harder for ordinary job seekers without connections and resources to access opportunities?
I also noticed a potential problem: as recruiters become more like agents, their loyalty can change. Traditional recruiters usually work for employers, but sports agents’ primary loyalty is athletes. This role shift can change the dynamics of the entire recruitment ecosystem, but it can also create new conflicts of interest.
In the long run, I think this human-machine collaboration model represented by Paraform will become the standard for many professional services industries. Instead of AI replacing humans, AI augments human capabilities, allowing professionals to focus on their most valuable work. This shift requires us to rethink what true professional skills are and how to maintain and enhance the unique value of humanity in the age of AI.
Ultimately, successful companies will not be those that are the first to adopt AI, but those that best balance efficiency and humanity, automation and judgment, speed and quality. Paraform’s $20 million funding and 40x revenue growth are a testament to the business value of this idea. In a world where AI tools are ubiquitous, the real competitive advantage may come from how to better combine human intelligence and machine capabilities rather than simply choosing one over the other. But we also need to remain vigilant to ensure that this progress does not come at the expense of fairness and inclusion.
