With the accelerating pace of business, speed and talent are everything. AI is a force multiplier for top talent, giving people the leverage to work at a higher level of abstraction. This creates a top-heavy workforce where fewer people are doing more complex, valuable work.
So each hire you make today matters more than ever before, and the companies that find top talent fastest will win.
Hiring top talent quickly requires elite recruiters. Some think that recruiters will be entirely replaced with a bot, but we think recruiters will be more important than ever. Top performers want to talk to real people when navigating a career change, and the most effective recruiters take the role of strategic advisors, much like sports agents: trusted partners who understand the market, advocate for top talent, and broker high-value opportunities.
When equipped with the right AI tools, elite recruiters can deliver 10x the impact, sourcing, vetting, and placing exceptional candidates faster than ever. At the limit, each recruiter will have a team of virtual agents, freeing them to focus entirely on what they do best: working with people.
All of this is why we led Paraform’s Series A.
Paraform is building a recruiter-first marketplace that helps companies hire the best candidates 3x faster. For each role, several top-tier, expert recruiters work in parallel to hire the right people. Paraform equips them with AI-enabled tools that dramatically increase speed and precision. Their AI taps into a network of thousands of recruiters, helping companies dramatically speed up their hiring process. Getting a high-quality candidate for an onsite once took weeks, but now takes days.
Companies like Palantir, Ramp, Rippling, Cursor, Windsurf, and Decagon already rely on Paraform to fill their most critical roles — from forward-deployed engineers with security clearances to head of sales hires responsible for revenue growth.
On Paraform, recruiters earn 3x - 5x more than in traditional roles. A significant portion of active recruiters on Paraform earn six figures or more, with a few already earning $1M per year. This isn’t about replacing recruiters with AI; it’s about scaling their impact and recognizing their value.
Paraform cracked the cold start problem of a two-sided marketplace by providing incredible value to both sides and is rapidly growing liquidity. With every search, candidate submission, and interview, Paraform’s network compounds in intelligence, improving candidate matching, interview efficiency, recruiter-role fit, and more. Strong network effects and multiple data flywheels embedded in the product continuously enhance the platform’s speed and accuracy, cutting into the almost $900 billion per year spent on recruiting.
Paraform is also rapidly building a talent graph, one that isn’t about who’s connected to whom or what people self-report as their skills, but one that also understands each person's strengths and passions in great detail, giving recruiters more information to make the perfect match.
Two macro shifts make this the right moment:
- The tech contraction of 2021 triggered a surge in experienced independent recruiters, unlocking a new wave of highly skilled professionals eager to work on their own terms.
- AI is becoming increasingly powerful, enabling automation of time-intensive tasks like sourcing, transcription, and scheduling, allowing recruiters to focus on what drives results: relationships, judgment, and closing key hires.
Since raising its seed in 2024, Paraform has scaled revenue 40x to a mid-eight-figure run rate, and they’re just getting started. Recruiting is a $900 billion market that touches every business, and yet, it remains largely untouched by modern technology. Paraform is changing that, not by removing the human element, but by scaling it.
We’re excited to partner with John, Jeff, and the entire Paraform team as they transform how the world hires.
1 Source: IBIS World.
