Tech Talent Drop - Edition 34

OpenAI is leaning harder into enterprise, Google is testing AI summaries that will change how candidates research your roles, and you can shave days off interviews with smarter scheduling. Use this edition to make pages readable by AI, cut calendar ping pong, and target teams that just raised.

Before we dive in further, remember you can listen to this episode here!

The Drop

OpenAI doubles down on enterprise and core product
OpenAI published the GPT-5.2 system card and a 10-year retrospective, and announced a content partnership with Disney. Its State of Enterprise AI points to massive weekly usage. Expect more partner-engineer and enablement roles around rollouts.

Google tests AI article overviews in Google News
Selective pilots summarize publisher pages with AI. Candidates and hiring managers will arrive with assistant-generated briefs of your roles and press. Make careers pages scannable, structured, and verifiable.

Comp trend to watch
OpenAI removed its six-month equity vesting cliff for new hires. Elite AI orgs are competing with compensation structure, not only cash. If you are chasing senior ICs, review your cliff and early-liquidity policies.

AI Tool of the Week

GoodTime Hire
Automates interview scheduling across time zones and panels, balances interviewer load, and gives candidates self-serve scheduling and rescheduling. Integrates with common ATSs to shrink time to screen.

7-day pilot

1. Choose one role with steady volume

2. Import interviewers and set load-balancing rules

3. Template your screen and panel loops, enable self-scheduling

4. Auto-send prep packets 24 hours before interviews

5. Track before and after metrics

Metrics to track
Median time to schedule, no-show rate, interviewer load variance, conflicts avoided, candidate reschedule latency.

Guardrails
Keep SLA targets visible, cap weekly interview hours per engineer, require a short debrief form after each loop.

Hiring and Interview Insight

Volume is not your friend, signal is
Figure AI received roughly 176k applications since 2022 and hired about 425 people, an acceptance rate near 0.24 percent. Bias for structured screens and practical exercises that separate noise from fit.

Funding Watch

All announced this week. Use these as sourcing beacons.

• Saviynt, AI identity security, 700M Series B. Hiring: identity, platform reliability, enterprise GTM.

• Unconventional AI, energy-efficient compute, 475M seed. Hiring: systems, hardware-software co-design, data center integrations.

• K2 Space, high-power satellites, 250M Series C. Hiring: avionics, embedded, test, data ops.

• Harness, software delivery platform, 240M Series E plus 40M tender. Hiring: developer platform, CI and CD, security.

• Fal, real-time generative media, 140M Series D. Hiring: multimodal inference, evals, growth.

Why it matters
Capital clustered in identity and security, AI infrastructure, space, developer experience, and multimodal media. Expect demand in platform reliability, integrations, data pipelines, and partner engineering.

Quick Bytes

• The OpenAI and Disney partnership highlights brand-safe AI content pipelines and licensing workflows

• Enterprise AI usage keeps climbing, so build internal enablement and governance before tools sprawl

• Google’s AI summaries raise the bar for machine-readable job pages, so audit headings, bullets, and concrete numbers

What to do this week

1. Comp check
   Review vesting cliffs and early-liquidity mechanics for senior AI and infra roles. If you cannot match cash, adjust structure.

2. GoodTime pilot
   Run the 7-day scheduling test above. Report time to schedule, no-show rate, and load variance next Monday.

3. AI-reader test
   Paste a role page into your assistant of choice and see what it loses. Fix headings, bullets, and missing facts.
   

That’s all for this week’s Tech Talent Drop — stay informed, and see you next week!