We Built an AI Career Intelligence Platform. Here's Why That Was Necessary.

Hike Product Blog · Issue 001

Let's start with a confession.

When we first sat down to talk about what Hike should be, the phrase "AI recruitment service" was not on the whiteboard. Partly because our whiteboard is tiny and someone used a permanent marker on it, partly because I'd banned the user of the word "recruitment", but mostly because that phrase describes approximately four hundred thousand other products, and none of them are fixing the actual problem.

The actual problem: job hunting in 2026 is, by almost every measurable metric, broken.

The Market is a Bit of a Mess

Here are some numbers that should make your eye twitch.

53% of job seekers were ghosted by an employer last year. 61% of candidates who made it to an interview were ghosted — that's not the application stage, that's after someone looked them in the eye (or at least in the webcam). 1 in 3 job listings posted online right now are fake, ghost positions with no real hire intent. And the Stanford study from June found AI hiring algorithms were actively discriminating against candidates based on race at a scale nobody had properly measured before.

Meanwhile, on the candidate side, 48% of applicants are submitting without reading the full job description. 53% have paused their search for mental health reasons. There is now a word, doomjobbing, for the anxiety-driven spiral of mass-applying to roles with no strategy, no fit assessment, and steadily diminishing hope. Forbes wrote about it. HR Grapevine wrote about it. Your friend who's been job hunting for four months is almost certainly doing it right now.

This is the market Hike walks into. And we think there's a better way.

The Idea

The pitch we kept coming back to was simple: what if a candidate had a brilliant career coach in their corner; someone with genuine expertise, an honest voice, and endless patience who is available every time they needed them, not just for an hour a fortnight at £120 a pop?

That's the Hike "Sherpa". Less a chatbot, certainly not a dashboard, more of a career companion that carries some of the weight so you can focus on the actual "climb".

We had a couple of things up our sleeve, including an actual desire to build something people would actually want to use and give them some clarity as to where they were. We also had Gavin, whose career coaching methodology is the real thing (20 years of it, encoded into the product); Jo, who understands how the recruitment side of this actually works and what employers genuinely respond to; and me, who thought it would be fun to turn all of that into software and has experience doing this pretty well for around 20 years, too. (I was right. It is fun. It is also occasionally terrifying.)

A north star phrase we've lived by: "Speed with signal" (and also a relentless focus on "joy"). The market gives you speed with absolutely no signal at all. Fast, high-volume, bias-prone, outcome-blind. If you've been actively job hunting recently, you know this all too well. Hike is intended to give you speed with signals throughout: equally fast, but grounded in verified human evidence and built to get better with every outcome it sees.

Where We Are Today

We've shipped a lot. More than we expected to, honestly, in the time we've had. Here's where Hike stands right now.

JobFit - our front door. Paste in a job URL, let Hike read your CV, and in about forty seconds you'll have a fit score, a breakdown of where you're strong, where you're not and what a hiring manager is likely to think when they read your application. It's the product that makes people stop and go oh, that's actually useful rather than oh, another AI tool. It's free to try, which is deliberately the point.

CV Optimisation. A step-by-step wizard that takes your existing CV and tailors it for a specific role; not by hallucinating buzzwords, but by surfacing evidence from your actual career history that's relevant to this job. We've built in something we call the Evidence Bank: a verified record of your real career facts, metrics, and outcomes that every piece of output draws from. If it's not in the bank, it doesn't go in the CV. That's not a limitation. it's the whole product philosophy.

The Employer Portal. Hike isn't just a candidate product. Employers will get a full toolkit: job management, candidate screening, interview support (scheduling, notes, AI-assisted scorecards, question banks), and analytics. We've built it because we think the candidate and employer side of this equation need to talk to each other more honestly than they currently do. There's more to do on this, but we're making leaps and bounds in applying the same Hike lens to the Employer side, too.

Career Sherpa. The conversational layer that sits across all of it. Context-aware, honest, occasionally pointed. The Sherpa knows where you are in your search, what you've done, and what you probably should do next. It won't just tell you what you want to hear. That's a feature.

What's Coming Next

We're going to use this blog to go deep on each of those areas; how they work, why we built them the way we did, and what we've learned along the way. Some of it will be properly technical. Some of it will be about the coaching methodology underneath the AI. Some of it will be about the market context that makes all of this feel urgent rather than optional.

This post is the starting line. The "we exist, here's why, and here's what we've built so far" post. The job market is genuinely hard right now. We think it shouldn't be quite so hard. So we built something.

Have a look, and importantly, please let us know what you think. You can always get us on hello@byhike.com or just tag us on socials.

Up next: How JobFit works — and why your fit score isn't the number you think it is.