Trust in the Hiring Funnel Hackathon @ NYU
📋 Event Description
Generative AI broke hiring on both sides at once. Recruiters can't tell which applicants are real, and candidates can't tell which employers are. Come spend a day building something that fixes it - with the founders, engineers, and TA practitioners who live this problem every week.
This is a full-day, in-person hackathon co-hosted by localhost:nyc, Integral Recruiting (IRD), and NYU — where builders team up with real talent-acquisition operators to ship working tools against a single, focused challenge.
🎯 The Challenge: Trust in the Hiring Funnel
Hiring has a trust crisis on both sides of the funnel — recruiters can't tell which applicants are real, and candidates can't tell which employers are. Talent acquisition runs on a basic assumption: that the person applying is who they say they are, and that the company reaching out is who it says it is. Generative AI has broken both halves of that assumption at once. Your job for the day is to rebuild it.
You can attack either side of the funnel — or the seam between them.
Side A — Trust coming in: the applicant flood. A role that used to draw 30 applicants now draws 500, and a growing share aren't real, aren't qualified, or are gaming the system. Candidates embed hidden prompt-injection text to manipulate the AI tools that screen resumes. And increasingly, applicants appear qualified but look strikingly alike — the same phrasing, the same structure, the same accomplishments — a tell that everyone is leaning on the same AI tools to write their applications. Recruiters are drowning, and the tools meant to help have no clear winner yet. The challenge: reliably separate real, qualified humans from AI-inflated noise — without punishing legitimate candidates who simply used AI to polish their resume.
Questions worth chasing:
What signals — behavioral, identity, provenance — actually distinguish a real applicant from a manufactured one?
When applications converge on the same AI-generated look, how do you tell genuine signal from sameness?
How do you detect a manipulated or machine-generated application without false-flagging honest people?
How do you surface the candidates who deserve attention fast, inside an existing recruiting workflow rather than replacing it?
Side B — Trust going out: impersonation and candidate scams. Bad actors register look-alike domains to send fake offer letters, run deepfake recruiter calls, and scam job seekers out of money and data. Employers have almost no way to detect it or warn candidates. The challenge: make it harder to impersonate a real employer, and easier for a candidate to verify that an offer or a recruiter is genuine.
Questions worth chasing:
How would a candidate confirm that an offer or outreach is legitimately from the company?
Can impersonating domains be detected and flagged early?
What does a lightweight "trust signal" look like on a careers page or an offer letter?
What a strong build looks like. A working tool that raises trust in the funnel and fits the way hiring actually happens — a triage or screening layer that plugs into an existing applicant tracking system rather than replacing it, or a candidate/employer verification tool that makes impersonation harder to pull off and easier to catch. We care more about a real, demonstrable solution to a narrow slice of the problem than a broad concept that doesn't run.
You don't need HR or recruiting-software experience to compete here — that's the point of a single, focused theme. Engineers and builders can go straight at the detection, identity, and verification problems. HR-technology practitioners will be in the room to keep your build grounded in how hiring actually works, and to pressure-test whether a recruiter would trust what you've made.
⚡ What to Expect
A full day of building - 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, hard stop
Small teams (or solo if you insist) working in one shared room
TA practitioners from the SAI community in the room to keep your build grounded in how hiring really works
A panel of expert judges: HR-tech founders, operators, and system admins who know these problems cold
End-of-day demos to judges, investors, and real TA leaders
The strongest teams get connected to investors — and, over time, to real customers
🏆 Prizes
Winners walk away with build-tool and platform credits, expert consulting sessions, and investor time. Everyone in the room gets connections that outlast the day - this is a room full of builders and buyers.
👩⚖️ Judges
Tiffany Jin: Eqo. Building in the employee-referral and hiring space; brings a founder's eye for what actually ships.
Steven Grover: Partnerspring. Operator and builder in the HR-tech ecosystem.
Shane Papp: Ex-iCIMS. Deep insider knowledge of the ATS world these tools have to live inside.
Adam Treitler: Related Industries. HR-tech operator with a practitioner's view of the funnel.
More judges to be announced - investors and TA buyers joining the panel.
🙌 Who Should Attend
Engineers - full-stack, backend, frontend, AI/ML
Founders and aspiring founders who like shipping fast
Recent grads, master's students, and NYC college builders
TA ops and recruiting-systems practitioners who want to build alongside engineers
HR / recruiting professionals newer to the space - join a team as a product advisor
You do not need HR or recruiting-software experience to compete - that's the whole point of one focused theme. Engineers go straight at the detection, identity, and verification problems; practitioners keep it real. Just show up ready to build.
🤝 Sponsors
AI build-tool and credit partners are providing platform access for every team (to be announced). Interested in sponsoring food, credits, or a judge seat? Reach out to somyag00@gmail.com
✨ Hosts
Somya Gupta: The face of NYC startup ecosystem.
Integral Recruiting (IRD): Enterprise talent-acquisition and iCIMS/ATS specialists, and stewards of the ~350-member SAI community of TA operators and system admins.
Greg Mendez: NYU. Bringing the university's builder and HR-analytics community into the room.