Why hiring tech talent is harder than ever?

Over the last decade, I’ve seen the hiring landscape evolve in countless ways, especially in product and engineering. But the shifts we’ve experienced over the past 18 months are different.

AI hasn’t just changed how people build software. It’s changing how they hire. How they interview. And in some cases, how they impersonate.

At Codelitt, we build full product teams for some of the most ambitious companies in Fintech, PropTech, CRE, and other fast-moving industries. That means we’re not only hiring internally, we’re also helping our clients solve for talent, scale, and trust.

And that trust is harder to come by now.

What we’re seeing: A noisier, faster, and harder-to-verify hiring market

Our Director of People, Omar, has been on the frontlines of this shift. In a recent team conversation, he walked us through just how complex and unpredictable AI has made the recruiting process.

  • We’re seeing mass applications submitted by bots.
  • Candidates using tools to alter how they appear on camera.
  • Take-home assignments being outsourced to LLMs.
  • Vendors building portfolios powered by AI, not experience.

And in some extreme cases, we’ve even seen fake profiles backed by real-time AI impersonation during interviews.

This isn’t just a curiosity. It’s a real operational risk. For companies building real products on real timelines, trust and clarity have become make-or-break factors when hiring.

What hasn’t changed: Trust and accountability still matter

Despite all the noise, our approach has stayed rooted in a few simple principles:

  • Evaluate people, not performances. We interview to understand how someone thinks, not just what they’ve memorized.
  • Look for ownership. Tools can change, but how someone navigates ambiguity, risk, and collaboration is what scales.
  • Don’t isolate hiring. A great team is greater than the sum of its parts. We build them as systems, not silos.

We still run take-home assignments. We still walk through code. We still test for communication, clarity, and technical judgment. But more than ever, we rely on context. Human signals. Patterns we’ve learned from years of building cross-functional teams.

For clients: We’re building faster than ever, without cutting corners

Many of our clients are under pressure to ship. They can’t afford to gamble on unknown contributors. That’s where we come in.

Because we’re technical founders ourselves, we’ve felt the pain of trying to scale when talent is hard to source and harder to trust.

So we built a system that filters for the things that still matter: honesty, ownership, speed, and technical depth.

That means no AI filters. No templated portfolios. No hidden red flags. Just real people, solving real problems, for teams who need real results.

Final thoughts

AI is transforming how we work, no question.

But when it comes to hiring, the best signal is still human. And the best investment is still in people you can count on.

If you’re scaling and want to talk about how we’re doing this at Codelitt, we’d be happy to share what’s working.