Comment by rgbrgb

fwiw my experience building a small tech talent agency / recruiting shop disagrees with this. Cold application pipelines are overwhelmed by gen AI applications and many of the (very qualified) candidates we place report getting totally ghosted on all cold applications - even when we’re able to get them several interviews a week with companies in our network.

Seems like companies still value a curated pipeline. 15-20% of first year salary (numbers we see these days) appears to be worth saving the company time interviewing unscreened candidates. Recruiting can be a real time suck and a bad hire can be catastrophic.