I Turned LinkedIn Recruiter Spam Into a Customer Funnel

#vibecoding #recruiting #hiring #resume

My LinkedIn inbox looks like a telemarketing call center.

“Hey, are you open to new opportunities?”

“We’re hiring aggressively with elite comp…”

“Got 15 minutes to chat?”

Most of these I ignore, especially the ones that keep following up after I say I’m not interested.

But then I had an idea:

What if I could turn this stream of recruiter messages into a customer funnel for something I built over the weekend?

So I gave myself a challenge: build a tool that actually helps them do their job. Something small, useful, and fast. Then send it right back.

The Problem Is Obvious

From talking to friends in early-stage startups, two things stood out:

Small teams don’t have time (or budget) to screen 500+ resumes for a single listing.
Recruiters don’t have time either, but they’ll happily charge you like they do.

So I built a simple app that uses structured LLM prompts to triage resumes fast:

👉 KnockoutAI.replit.app

What It Does

Upload a pile of resumes and a job description. KnockoutAI will:

Automatically tier candidates
Highlight must-have and nice-to-have skills
Summarize pros/cons for your given job post
Flag content that looks AI-generated or generic
It even comes up with a list of suggested follow-up questions tailored to each candidate.

The goal isn’t to replace human judgment - just get to the shortlist faster, so you can spend more time interviewing real people and less time stuck in a pile of resumes.

The Real Lesson

I sent it to a few of the recruiters in my inbox.

“Actually, I’m hiring. Want to help me screen resumes?”

(Attached: KnockoutAI link)

It was fun to flip the script. But here’s the real insight:

Building the tool was easy.

Finding people, let alone getting people to use it is the hard part.

We’re in a golden age of MVPs - tools like Replit and ChatGPT make it fast to ship.

But building something people want and getting it in front of them? That’s still as hard as ever. It's even more important now than ever to address a narrow, specific need that real people have.

In this case, recruiter DMs just happened to be a convenient distribution channel.