Tech Talent Drop - Edition 28

Welcome to this week's Tech Talent Drop. It has been a heavy week for AI in hiring, data center costs and security. If you are running a recruiting team or hiring engineers, these are the signals to pay attention to.

The Drop

1. AMS rolls out Next Gen Talent Acquisition
AMS announced a new AI-powered model that plugs into AMS One and is built to align talent strategy with business outcomes, not just req volume. It is positioned for companies that want AI in the recruiting flow but still need governance and reporting. Expect more RPOs and in-house teams to ask for AI visibility, model choice and human-in-the-loop reviews.

2. Energy costs are now a hiring story
New reporting on rising energy prices for AI and data centers warns that power is becoming a constraint for AI growth. More states and utilities are asking data centers to help carry the cost, which means infra, DC ops, energy procurement and sustainability roles will stay hot. Recruiters working with AI-first companies should factor location and power access into pitches.

3. CrowdStrike and NVIDIA launch always-on AI agents for security
The two companies announced an open and real time AI stack for SOC teams. This is a clear signal that security hiring will keep shifting toward AI-aware detection, data engineering for security and platform roles that can integrate vendor AI into existing detections. Good news if you place SecOps, platform or ML for security.

4. Navan goes public
Navan raised about 923 million dollars in its IPO, at roughly a 6.2 billion dollar valuation. Even with valuation pressure, that is still a scale up signal, so expect hiring around payments, travel integrations and sales engineering.

AI Tool of the Week - Access Evo

A newly launched recruiter-first AI platform from The Access Group that sits on top of your recruitment stack instead of being a separate point tool. It lets recruiters run sourcing, candidate insights and automated outreach from one place with role based permissions. That is useful if you are trying to introduce AI into recruitment without letting everyone copy data out to consumer tools. Run a two week pilot on one desk and compare time-to-shortlist and outreach reply rate.

Hiring and Interview Insight

LinkedIn’s latest hiring assistant data shows recruiters using an AI helper are saving more than four hours per role and are reviewing far fewer profiles while actually getting a higher InMail acceptance rate. That tells us judgment is still scarce, not speed. Add a short exercise in your loop where the candidate must decide when to pause or escalate an automated flow and when to leave it running. Score them on risk, documentation and communication.

Funding Watch

• Mercor - AI data and recruiting infrastructure - 350 million dollars, Series C - valuation about 10 billion dollars. Hiring: data partnerships, infra, applied ML, enterprise.

• SavvyMoney - fintech insights for FIs - 225 million dollars, minority growth round. Hiring: data, integrations, bank partnerships.

• Navan - travel and expense - IPO, 923 million dollars raised. Hiring: platform, payments, sales, customer success.

• Legora - legal AI, Sweden - 150 million dollars, valuation 1.8 billion dollars. Hiring: LLM for law, retrieval, EU GTM.

• Lula Commerce - AI commerce platform - 8 million dollars, Series A. Hiring: product, integrations, RevOps.

These five tell the same story as last week: money is flowing to AI infrastructure, fintech with embedded data, and AI that touches compliance and regulated sectors.

Quick Bytes

• Data center growth is pushing utilities to raise rates. This will keep infra and energy hiring elevated.

• CrowdStrike and NVIDIA are pushing AI into day to day SOC work, so candidates who can talk model limits and detections will stand out.

• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong used prediction markets content to drive engagement around crypto, which is a reminder to hiring teams that founders will keep using social to recruit in public.

• Sequoia announced 950 million dollars in new early stage funds for AI which keeps the 2025 AI founder market healthy. Business development and technical hiring around these portfolios will follow.

What to do this week

1. Add a one line privacy and AI note to candidate outreach since more platforms are shifting to AI trained on user data.

2. Pilot Access Evo or an equivalent AI recruiter workspace for one pod and track time-to-shortlist, reply rate and handoff to hiring manager.

3. Create alerts for Mercor, SavvyMoney and Navan on LinkedIn to catch early hiring moves and talent leaving post raise or post IPO.

That is this week’s Tech Talent Drop. Keep your edge, subscribe for weekly updates, and tell us which market you want tracked next.