How to stand out, get interviews, and get hired in an AI-first world.

We see you

Maybe your resume doesn’t fit neatly into a specific job requirement. Maybe you’re trying to leap into a new industry, into an AI-first company, into a role you’ve never technically held before. Whatever your starting point, if you’re not already in the room, it’s hard right now.

AI didn’t make hiring more open. It made it more closed. Networks matter more, not less.

If part of the gap is your LinkedIn itself, here’s our guide to optimizing it for humans, and the AI agents now screening it too.

At Ground Floor Careers, we’re lucky to meet dozens of candidates like this every day. The ones who jump out to us are the ones we take real time on. What they’ve actually accomplished. What excites them. What energizes them. The work they’ve built and can point to.

The other side of the table

Founders are living the mirror image of this. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications land in a short window, most of them some flavor of AI-approved response, and the hiring process on the other side of that flood gets opaque fast. The real answer for a founder isn’t a better applicant tracking system. It’s meeting great people before they’re actively looking, so you’re already part of their consideration set when they are.

That’s part of why we’re seeing more company open houses, hiring events, and reverse pitches: founders sharing what they’re building with a room of candidates, instead of the other way around. And more founders asking candidates to go one step further than hitting submit on a LinkedIn application.

Isaac Park is CEO and founder of Keebler Health, a Ground Floor portfolio company using AI to turn messy clinical records into data health plans can actually use, including for RADV audits. Every one of his job descriptions asks candidates to do the same thing: email him directly, tell him about yourself, and why you’re interested in the role. Not a cover letter. Just that.

It’s not a big ask, and you’d be surprised how many people skip it anyway, or hand back something so obviously AI-generated you can’t tell where their own thinking started and the handoff to a chatbot happened. This is your moment. A little extra effort goes a long way.

In late August, Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom Supersonic (the company building Overture, the first new supersonic passenger jet in decades), posted on X that he was hiring his next Chief of Staff. No application link. Just the role, why it mattered, and one call to action: find a quality way to reach me.

@bscholl on X, August 26, 2026

One candidate found a quality way. Sy bought space on a digital billboard near Boom’s own office and pointed it straight at Blake.

@Sybuilds on X, August 27, 2026

Blake noticed. He reposted the photo to his own following and said the person buying billboard space to reach him was, in his words, definitely at least getting an interview.

Requests for intros rolled in after that the way you’d expect. We’ve had to remind a few people since: we’re happy to make an intro, or point to a short list of people who seem like a real fit. But nobody gets the job because we sent the email. The candidates who go hardest at a search like that are usually the ones the team can’t say no to.

What this looks like, role by role

Not a generic “show initiative.” Something specific enough to build in an afternoon.

• Product: find something in the product that doesn’t work, or the roadmap line nobody’s built yet, and mock up a real MVP with a go-to-market attached.
• Sales / SDR: show you understand their ICP. Map how you’d go after it, what tools you’d use, and bring three real leads with you.
• Engineering: find something broken and fix it. Small is fine. It’s a gift, not a job application.

We are you

There were so many interesting jobs when I was looking to make the switch out of Apple retail, but I knew my resume was pretty non-traditional. I had to work hard to help recruiters translate my experience into their job requirements. I narrowed things down to my top three, learned everything I could about each company, and burned midnight oil a few nights in a row to write applications by hand, like the pilgrims. I got interviews at all three, and landed a job at the startup that started my whole journey, just a few weeks later.

Today, we’re lucky to be surrounded by an incredible community at Hustle Fund that’s gotten to know us over time. Some have become part of the extended team. We have angels in our own community who impressed us so much they’ve ended up recruited into our venture fellowship, or become venture partners themselves, scouting and supporting companies alongside us. In every case, they landed the opportunity through proof of work, before there was ever a job to apply for.