The Signal · Column 063

Hiring Software Gets Funded, Hiring Judgment Gets Scarcer

Andrei van Noordt · 23 September 2026 · 1 min read

Spott, a recruitment platform, has raised $21 million, first reported by Axios. That is the whole fact. On most days it would be filed under routine venture news and forgotten by Thursday, and I am keeping this one only because of what the money is actually buying.

The common reading is that investors are betting against recruiters. That is not what is happening. Investors are betting that the mechanical layer of hiring, the sourcing and screening and scheduling, is expensive enough to be worth automating and standard enough to be automatable. Both of those are true. What the bet quietly assumes is that once the mechanical layer is solved, the rest of hiring works. In my experience the rest of hiring is where it breaks.

Capital keeps funding the search for candidates, while the scarce thing has quietly become the decision about them.

Every round like this one raises the number of plausible candidates a company can put in front of itself, and does nothing to improve the company's ability to choose between them. I watch this play out weekly. A team fixes its top of funnel, doubles its shortlist, and then sits on the shortlist for six weeks because nobody in the building is confident enough to say which profile is right. The repricing follows from that. The scarce role is no longer the person who finds the candidate. It is the person who can define the role precisely and decide with conviction, and that person is usually a senior hiring manager or an internal lead who already has more work than hours.

For hiring leaders, the practical read is simple. Before you buy more volume at the top, name the single person who owns the decision on each open role and give them the authority to make it without a committee. More candidates arriving into an unowned decision does not speed anything up. It just moves the queue somewhere less visible.