Why we’re building Archer
The film can’t be played right now. The manifesto it sets to picture is below.
There are two views on what AI does to jobs.
One says it displaces labour. The other says it creates an explosion of it. We're in the second camp, and history is on our side.
When something useful gets cheaper, we use more of it. It happened with electricity, with computing, with software. It's now happening with intelligence. Most of the work AI does in the next decade will be work that doesn't exist today: the products that wouldn't have been built, the research that wouldn't have been run, the companies that wouldn't have been started.
Which means the people who can direct that intelligence become more valuable, not less.
The gap between a good hire and a great one has never been worth more.
But the same abundance broke hiring.
A recruiter opens a role and gets 400 applications in a week, most of them AI-written. They can't read them all, so they buy AI to filter them. Candidates apply to a hundred jobs, hear nothing, and conclude the answer is to apply to two hundred. Hiring managers wait weeks for a shortlist, then say none of them are right. Everyone is acting rationally inside a broken system.
The system was never sound.
The CV never captured a person. The job description never captured a job.
We ran hiring on those two documents for decades because there was nothing better. AI turned the volume up until nobody could pretend any more.
Giving one side more AI doesn't fix that, it just escalates the arms race.
Hiring starts working again when both sides are properly represented.
So we went back to the oldest idea in talent: the agent.
Someone who knows you, advocates for you, and never stops working. Today that's reserved for athletes and stars. Everyone else gets a CV and a submit button.
Archer is that agent, for both sides of hiring.
600k+ people have signed up to work with Archer.
It talks to them and learns what a CV never holds: what they're actually good at, what they earn, what would make them move. Then it advocates for them.
Employers get an agent too.
The judgement stays human: recruiters decide what good looks like. Archer finds the right people, talks to them, and makes the introduction when both sides want it.
What we want is simple.
Nobody should have to apply to 200 jobs to be seen once. And nobody should have to read 400 applications to find the one.
We’ve been inside hiring for over a decade at hackajob.
Fixing it properly has only just become possible, so that’s what we’re doing.
Mark Chaffey, Co-Founder & CEO
