Welcome to The Hero 🗞️. This is approximately a 3.5-minute read.

👉 https://impartial-money-fa9.notion.site/The-OpenClaw-Recruiting-Setup-3569112c6a1f801f84aff54856951193

Every LinkedIn post has the same prediction.

"AI will transform recruiting."

"Agents are the future."

"This changes everything."

Cool…

But what does it actually look like when you let one run for a month?

A real agent.

Real outreach.

Real candidates.

A month ago, we gave Mina - our AI agent - access to Indeed and Metaview.

She runs on a Mac Mini in the office and talks to us through Telegram.

She handles outreach, follow-ups, message monitoring, and reply triage - sorting incoming candidate responses so I only see the ones that need a human.

The full breakdown is just below - don’t miss it! 😉

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Here are some of the best links I’ve found since last time I emailed you: 

The State of Skills-Based Hiring 2025 Report (link)

Skills-Based Hiring: The Ultimate 2026 Recruiter’s Guide (link)

Candidate Experience: Best Practices for Attracting Quality Talent (link)

Candidate Experience: 10 Best Practices to Attract and Retain Talent (link) 

Your Guide to Retaining Employees and Reducing Turnover in 2026 (link)

25 Employee Retention Strategies to Reduce Turnover & Keep Top Talent (link)

2026 Tech Layoffs Tracker: Live Updates (link)

This is the part that genuinely surprised us...

I had her go through 2,500 Indeed resumes to find candidates for a tough role.

She surfaced 54.

Some of these people hadn't updated their Indeed profile in 5+ years.

They reactivated for me anyway because the outreach hit right.

Several of them are money candidates I would never have found as a human recruiter.

But here's what really got me - watching her think 💭

She takes angles I'd never consider.

Alternative job titles I wouldn’t think of.

Similar tools in related industries.

And career paths I didn't know existed.

She has deep knowledge in every domain at once, so she pulls in context a recruiter genuinely can't match.

I've checked resumes she flagged and thought "I never would've looked for that profile" - and they're perfect for the role.

Mina handled the outreach, the follow-up, sent my calendar as a reply, and booked the phone screen.

That single placement turned into a 13x return on the development and setup cost in less than 30 days 🤯

She runs herself…

And we have another nine active interviews - which will undoubtably turn into more ROI.

Indeed's database is brutally manual.

We stopped using it three years ago except for a couple roles we get here and there.

But the candidates sitting there are gold - you just have to be willing to dig.

Mina digs and sends messages to candidates on her own.

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol.

It lets AI plug directly into another tool's data without browsing the web or copying anything which speeds up the entire process (and makes it more accurate too).

She can get caught in overthinking loops.

Instead of just doing the thing, she'll keep refining and second-guessing her approach - like a recruiter who rewrites the same email fourteen times instead of just hitting send.

For example…

I tried to troubleshoot an issue with her through Telegram for an hour while on calls but eventually gave up.

So, I logged into the actual machine, and fixed it in 3 minutes.

She was stuck in what we call a thinking spiral 😵‍💫

It wasn’t an intelligence problem - she knows what to do.

She just gets stuck deciding how to do it.

That's more of a system settings problem which we’ve since solved.

Last thing…

We’re keeping her on tight access guardrails.

We’d love to let her run unsupervised across more platforms, but we're being extremely cautious about security.

So, she's limited by design right now.

But that will loosen up over the next 30-60 days.

After one month: Mina is finding candidates I couldn't find, running outreach I'd never get to, and producing real placements with real ROI.

She's not a faster recruiter.

She's a fundamentally different kind of recruiter — one who knows every industry, every job title, and every career path instantly, with zero ego.

The question isn't whether AI agents work in recruiting. That's answered.

The question is how long you wait before you build one.

Our best sourcer this month wasn't a person.

She's a cool little lady named Mina who lives in a box on my desk.

There are a few ways:

Or you can just reply to this email.

I reply to absolutely everyone who writes me back 🙂