Recruiters vs. my chatbot: early reactions

The recruiter Q&A bot on this site has been live for a couple of weeks now. The idea, as I wrote earlier, was simple: it reads from a structured version of my profile and answers the questions every recruiter call opens with — availability, rates, stack, preferences — so nobody has to chase anybody for basics.

Time for an honest early review.

The positive camp

The reactions I hoped for did happen. Several people told me it was genuinely easy to find what they needed instantly — no scheduling, no waiting for a reply, no "quick call" that takes three days to arrange. They asked, they got an answer grounded in my actual profile, and they moved on. That's the whole pitch, working as intended.

The humans-only camp

And then there's the other group: people who want to talk to a human, full stop, and who told me they "don't have time to speak to an AI."

I understand the instinct — recruiting is a relationship business, and a chatbot can feel like being handed a ticket number. But there's an irony I can't unsee: the calls take far more time than the bot would, for both sides. More than once I've sat through a call, politely, where every question asked was one the bot answers in its first three messages. I always try to be nice, to listen, to give people the conversation they prefer — but the bot would have "closed" some of those calls in the first minute, and everyone would have gotten their afternoon back.

The reaction I didn't expect

Here's the surprise: the most frequent user of the bot is me.

Because the bot is grounded in a structured profile — where I used which skill, on what project, in which role — it turns out to be an excellent memory aid. When I'm preparing for an interview and need a quick summary of "where did I apply X in my career," I ask my own bot. It's faster than re-reading my CV and it answers in exactly the framing I need.

That alone made the build worth it. The tool I made to save recruiters' time is saving mine.

Where this lands

I'm not going to convince the humans-only camp, and I've stopped trying — the bot is an option, not a gate, and my email is right there next to it. But the experiment confirmed something I believe about AI in general: put it where it removes real friction, keep the human path open, and let people choose. Some will. And the ones who do get their answer in seconds.