#15: 97% of US Candidates Talk to His AI Recruiter (AI Engineers Refuse)

Shjeel Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Nexa, a London AI recruiting company that finds, screens and introduces engineers and AI talent to startups, and only gets paid if the hire lasts six months. Shjeel spent fifteen years recruiting in London and co-founded Techruiter, an agency that grew past thirty people. In 2025 he started over: AI agents source and screen, a hiring fingerprint scores every candidate, and a human closes every offer. Now candidates polish CVs with AI, companies screen with AI, and Gartner expects one in four candidate profiles to be fake by 2028. But when the fee only lands if the hire is still there in month six, how much of the decision can he hand to the AI? Expect to learn why the LLM boom reminds Shjeel of recruiting app developers the year the App Store launched, what broke at a thirty-person agency with more customers than recruiters, the cost nobody talks about when an AI company runs on tokens, why "we hire the best" is a contradiction and what the hiring fingerprint decodes instead, how the safety-driver rule keeps a human on every hiring decision, the culture-fit warning his AI raised and the recruiter who overruled it until the company proved the AI right, why Nexa scrapped its own sourcing platform and bet on the part of recruiting where the revenue sits, how scoring a whole career makes an AI-polished CV irrelevant and why a fee paid in month six makes Nexa stricter, the one question that made a wave of North Korean fake applicants hang up, what Gartner's forecast of one in four fake candidate profiles by 2028 means for structured interviews, why 97% of US candidates complete Nexa's AI screen while UK AI engineers refuse it, what a human recruiter decides in the first 30 seconds of a call that an AI never does and much more… ========== Guest: Shjeel Ahmed, founder and CEO of Nexa (hirenexa.ai), co-founder of Techruiter, based in London. Connect with Shjeel:   / shjeelahmed   Connect with Leon:   / leonwosko   Want to have human writers create content for your LinkedIn personal brand? Check out our offer on https://www.publicative.com ========== Chapters: 00:00 Intro: Shjeel Ahmed, founder & CEO of Nexa 02:15 Why start Nexa after 15 years in recruitment: the App Store moment for LLMs 04:24 Techruiter vs Nexa: from a people bottleneck to token costs 06:55 "Everyone wants to hire the best": the hiring fingerprint 11:30 Where humans stay in the loop: the safety driver rule 14:16 The candidate the AI flagged, the recruiter overruled, and the AI got right 16:18 How often humans overrule the AI 18:10 Why Nexa scrapped its own sourcing tool and bet on closing 22:11 AI-polished CVs vs AI screening: who wins 26:36 Fake candidates and the North Korean agents who hung up 27:39 Gartner's 1 in 4: is an AI recruiter better prepared for interview fraud? 31:15 Why candidates resent AI interviews 34:42 97% in the US, 60-70% in the UK: who refuses the AI screen 36:11 Outro ========== Human-Led Growth is the podcast where B2B tech and AI founders share how they turn human trust into revenue through reputation, relationships and measures AI cannot automate. Hosted by Leon Wosko, founder of Publicative.com. ========== Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: W7BFOD9PJT6SNXMC