We Rewrote cruit.dev's Hero Headline for Free — Here's the Before, After, and Why the Original Wasn't Landing

#webdev #startup #copywriting

cruit.dev's headline is already better than most.

"Get hired for what you shipped with your agent."

Outcome-first. ICP-specific. No jargon. In nine words, it tells AI-native developers exactly who this was built for and what they're getting. That's harder to write than it looks.

But here's what's missing: the enemy.

The gap that outcome-first headlines leave open

When an AI developer reads this headline, they already believe they should be hired for it. The headline agrees with them. That's comfortable. Comfort doesn't convert -- urgency does.

Agent-built projects don't surface in recruiter keyword searches. Non-technical hiring managers can't read GitHub commit histories. A two-week RAG pipeline you shipped solo looks identical to a weekend side project on a resume. The developer knows their work is serious. The recruiter can't tell.

Cruit.dev exists to close exactly that gap. But the headline doesn't name it -- so a developer who already knows they deserve to get hired skims past without feeling urgency to act.

The rewrite

Before: "Get hired for what you shipped with your agent."

After: "Your agent work becomes a recruiter-searchable profile in 5 minutes -- no resume rewrite, no keyword game, no GitHub grind."

What changed: Three specific frictions named instead of zero. A timeline that makes onboarding feel negligible. "Get hired" replaced with the concrete mechanism so the developer knows what Cruit actually does, not just where they'll end up.

The pattern we keep seeing

Across 30+ founder landing pages we've audited, this is the most common H1 failure mode in AI-adjacent products: the headline lands on the destination without naming the obstacle that was making it hard to get there.

Outcomes need obstacles to land with urgency.