Talent Now: Rebooting Recruitment for the Age of Ethical AI

ai upgrade for creative professionals ai hiring platform ai transformation bias-free hiring ethical ai recruitment fair hiring practices hr automation recruitment technology skills-based hiring talent now Oct 22, 2025

Hiring's been bleeding out for years. Everyone feels it. Recruiters drowning in résumés, candidates ghosted by algorithms, CEOs whining about "talent shortages." The system keeps repeating its failures, a rusted machine pretending to be meritocratic while running on outdated code.

That's where Armin Layegh walked in. Twenty-five years in the HR trenches, watching companies collapse under their own hiring habits. For his capstone project in The AI Upgrade for Creative Professionals, he stopped talking about the problem and started engineering a fix.

The result: Talent Now, an ethical AI hiring platform for small and midsize businesses built on fairness and human intent.

▶ Watch Armin's Capstone

From Frustration to Foundation

Armin's story begins in the trenches of human resources. Two and a half decades surrounded by spreadsheets, job boards, and circular excuses.

"We can't find anyone."

"We've tried everything."

"The right people just aren't out there."

The cycle never ends because the methods never evolve.

Recruitment became a maze of bias and meaningless language: "great communication skills," "team player," "self-starter." None of it defined, none of it measurable. In 2019, Armin started sketching an alternative. That idea sat on paper until AI Upgrade for Creative Pros equipped him with the tools and mindset to bring it alive.

He walked out of the course with more than skills. He had momentum.

The Birth of Talent Now

Talent Now began with a clear intention: predict the right hire through ethics and data.

Armin built it using Microsoft Copilot for research, Lovable for web design, and Canva for visualization. The prototype blends analysis with empathy. It reads job descriptions, clears away bias, and evaluates candidate profiles using skills and potential as its foundation.

"We're scraping all the biasing information from the dataset," Armin explained.

"The tool predicts hireability based purely on skills…not gender, race, religion, or orientation."

The platform produces transparent scores and structured insights. It highlights each candidate's strengths and growth areas, then offers interview prompts to guide thoughtful decision-making. The process keeps people in control and restores judgment to its rightful place.

The Candidate's Mirror

In true DIY democracy fashion, Armin didn't stop at employers. Talent Now also serves job seekers, flipping the same system to show them how they score against a role.

Paste in a job description, upload your resume, and the AI tells you:

Where you shine.
Where you're underprepared.
Which courses or skills could close the gap.

The approach turns job searching into a learning process. Instead of endless rejection loops, candidates gain direction and practical next steps. In a market defined by opacity, this kind of feedback changes the game.

Compliance Meets Conscience

Here's where Armin went from innovator to philosopher-engineer.

He built Talent Now on principles that most HR tech companies avoid because they're "too complicated":

Humans in the loop. No black boxes deciding careers.
Bias-aware assessments. Transparency and explainability baked into every score.
Consent and privacy. Candidates choose how their data moves.
Alternative evaluations. Beyond degrees and résumés, into lived experience.

He benchmarked the system against Ontario's disclosure standards to ensure legal and ethical compliance.

Talent Now represents a structural shift toward ethical hiring. And it happened in class.

Breaking and Rebuilding the Machine

Armin confessed that during his deep research, he "broke the system."

During testing, the AI revealed what everyone in HR secretly knows: bias lives inside data. Prestige often outranks performance, and privilege shadows skill.

Armin disassembled the framework and rebuilt it from the inside out. School names were removed. Evaluation refocused on content, course work, and proven ability. Each adjustment created a cleaner reflection of merit.

This rebuild defined Talent Now's identity: an AI system engineered for fairness, not hierarchy.

From Prototype to Platform

Talent Now now operates beyond the concept phase.

The name is trademarked. The pricing model has been validated. A development company has already stepped forward to partner in scaling the platform.

Armin continues refining it without waiting for approval or external validation.

Kris Krüg's feedback captured the excitement:

"I want batch mode… 300 job descriptions at once. And one-off pricing for employers to test-drive it. You're on to something real here."

Peter Bittner added:

"You've built an actual product, deployable and working. That's massive."

Within a single semester, Armin transformed uncertainty into a tangible product ready for the market.

The Upgrade Moment

The deepest transformation happened within the creator.

The same professional who once avoided technology now speaks in the language of systems, ethics, and scalability. He's building more than a product and is shaping a philosophy of responsible innovation.

Kris Krüg summed it up during the session:

"The biggest change I'm noticing is the one that took place inside you."

That reflection captures the essence of The AI Upgrade.

The evolution belongs to the human who learns to use technology with intention, clarity, and courage.

Kris Krüg is co-founder of The Upgrade Academy, recovering photographer, and professional instigator of creative chaos. He's spent 20+ years watching technology either amplify or stifle human potential. He's chosen amplification. The results speak for themselves.

Peter Bittner is an entrepreneur, AI product thinker, new media journalist, and UC Berkeley lecturer, and the methodical yin to Kris's creative yang, turning chaos into deployable systems. Together, they've empowered hundreds of professionals to realize their true potential.