Recruitment agents: let the agents talk it out first
There’s this idea that the future of everything in human communication is having your own agent that does the difficult bits for you — asking the nagging questions about a hotel booking, ordering stuff and handling the negotiation, arranging and managing your vacation through whatever the future of Booking becomes. Marc Kohlbrugge’s example captures it well.
So: why not do this for recruitment?
Picture agents hooked into channels on both sides — people looking for a job and people hiring — where the agents talk it out amongst themselves first. Availability, salary ranges, must-haves, dealbreakers, all the awkward early back-and-forth handled agent-to-agent before any human spends time on it. Something in the spirit of rentahuman.ai, but for matching people with jobs instead of agents with gig workers.
Recruitment feels unusually well-suited for this. The early funnel is mostly structured information exchange that both sides find tedious, and both sides already automate it badly — ATS filters on one end, mass-apply tools on the other. Agent-to-agent negotiation is arguably a more honest version of an arms race that’s already happening.
The first step that seems easy to do now: hiring platforms exposing an MCP that supports candidates, not just recruiters. That’s a partial version of the full idea — it gives a candidate’s agent, whichever agent they use, a real channel into the hiring side, and makes finding a job easier long before the full agent-to-agent negotiation loop exists.