I Use Tinder for My Hiring Process

Getting 50 applications for a job is exciting. Getting 550 in under a week is… a lot of reading.

We opened two consultant roles at Bridge AI and got buried in applications almost immediately. This week I'm taking you inside the setup that dug me out: an AI hiring agent that does the first read, and a swipe app Claude built so I can make the real decisions fast.

If you run a small team, hiring is probably the job you dread most. It doesn't have to eat your whole week anymore.

This week:

How our team is reviewing 550+ applicants with a swipe

Claude can now read your bank account (but it can't touch it)

AI is speeding up AI research, Grok starts making phone calls, and Siri opens up to every app

The Deep Dive

I Use Tinder for My Hiring Process

Not really. But close enough that I've started calling it that.

We posted two roles at Bridge AI, and in under a week more than 550 people applied. If I had opened a spreadsheet and read every application one by one, you would be getting this newsletter sometime in February.

So here's what I built instead.

First, I have an AI agent that works as my hiring manager. Twice a day it goes out to LinkedIn, Wellfound and anywhere else the jobs are posted, and pulls every new applicant into one database in Notion. Claude built that database for me too.

Then the agent does the first read. A few high-level filters catch the obvious auto-declines. Everyone else gets graded and scored against what I told it I'm looking for.

This is where I want to be careful. Hiring is one of the places where keeping a human in the loop matters most.

So I had Claude build me an app. My hiring Tinder. Each applicant shows up as a card with the most important info pulled from their resume and application, a link to their LinkedIn, Claude's score, and where they are in our interview process. I read it, make the call, and swipe. Right sends them on to the next step. Left is a decline.

Every morning, the agent messages everyone I made a decision on and tells them what happens next. Every afternoon, it runs again, pulls in the new applicants, and refreshes my deck for the next review. Then it repeats the next day, without me having to think about it.

This has saved me more hours than I can count. And now that we're getting into interviews, my trusty friend Claude is helping me with that part too.

The part I keep coming back to is that companies pay real money for applicant tracking systems, or for an outsourced recruiter to do exactly this. For most small businesses, I don't think either one is worth it anymore. You can build the version that fits the way you actually hire, and it was easier to set up than you would think.

If you're hiring right now (or about to be) and want to see how this works, send me a note at [email protected]. I'm happy to walk you through exactly how I set it up.

From the Field

Claude Can Now See Your Bank Account. It Still Can't Touch It.

Last Thursday, Anthropic launched Personal Finance in Claude. You connect your bank and credit card accounts through Plaid (the same service most finance apps use to talk to your bank), and then you ask about your money in plain English.

Ask "where did my money go last month?" and you get a real breakdown from your actual transactions. Ask which subscriptions you're still paying for, or how much you'll have left before payday. Claude can look back up to two years, and it can turn the answers into a chart, a calendar of upcoming bills, or a dashboard you keep coming back to.

The guardrails are the reason I'd tell my own family to try it. Access is read-only, so Claude can't move, manage or invest a single dollar. Your bank password goes into Plaid's window and never to Claude. There are no ads or sponsored recommendations, and conversations inside the Personal Finance hub aren't used to train Anthropic's models.

Don't see it yet? Don't worry. It's a beta rolling out gradually to Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers in the US, on web, desktop and mobile. It's for personal accounts only, not Team or Enterprise plans.

Why this travels: everyone has one money question they avoid until tax season. Where is it actually going? Now you can ask it on a random Tuesday and get a straight answer.

Where this gets really exciting is when you pair it with your email. Personal Finance can't touch your money, but it can find the four streaming subscriptions you forgot you're paying for (we all have them). Connect your Gmail or Outlook to Claude, and it can track down the account emails for each one and handle the cancellations for you. Those extra Netflix accounts you know you don't need but still have? Gone, without you ever sitting on hold.

AI News Worth Your Time

Three Stories From This Week

AI Is Helping Build AI, and It's Going About Twice as Fast

METR, an independent group that evaluates AI models, spent nearly three months inside Anthropic with broad access to internal data and about 15 staff interviews. Its conclusion: as of October, Anthropic is improving its models on well-specified tasks at roughly twice the pace it managed from March 2024 to October 2025. METR's best guess is that about 80% of that speedup comes from AI itself, and it's confident the cause isn't simply more computing power. METR is upfront about the caveats, including that Anthropic redacted much of the evidence it found most useful, and that the real figure could be anywhere from 1.3x to 3x.

My take: For business owners, the practical meaning is that the tools are going to change faster than your playbook does. The Claude you trained your team on this spring is not the Claude you'll be using next spring. Build habits around learning the tools, not around one version of them. READ THE METR REPORT →

Grok Can Now Pick Up the Phone for You

xAI's Grok Bot can now place real phone calls on your behalf. You tell it who to call and what you need, it dials, talks to whoever answers, and sends you back a summary. The launch demo showed it canceling an internet plan and turning down a 10% retention offer along the way. Early users report it's US-only and outbound-only for now.

My take: Everyone's first thought is finally canceling their cable. Mine is the other end of the line. If your business answers phones, some of the people calling to ask about your hours, prices or availability are about to be bots. Make those answers easy to give. And if there's a call your team makes 40 times a week, phone agents for businesses already exist. WATCH THE GROK BOT DEMO →

Siri Is About to Work Inside Every App

Apple opened a developer preview of Siri AI on November 3. Any developer can now plug their app into it through App Intents, Apple's framework for letting Siri take actions inside an app. Siri AI understands personal context and what's on your screen, and a new feature called skills lets it chain several actions together for more complex requests. Apple is rolling this out across its own apps, including Mail, Calendar, Files and Notes. It's in beta on iOS, iPadOS and macOS 27.3, with a full release expected in a few months (not yet in the EU on iPhone and iPad).

My take: This is the one I'm most excited about. Right now, if you want AI to do something in your work apps, you open a chat window and wire things together. If the software your business runs on builds for this, you could ask Siri to move tomorrow's client call to Thursday and email them the deck, and it just happens. That's Siri actually controlling your work. If you have favorite tools you live in every day, ask the companies behind them whether they're building for Siri AI. READ THE APPLE ANNOUNCEMENT →

That's it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to the person on your team who is buried in resumes right now. That's who this is for.

And if you want to talk about what AI could do for your business, not in theory, but in your workflows, with your team, on your timeline, reach out at [email protected]. That's what we're here for.