The Best Candidate is in Slot Number One. Pin's CEO Steven Lu on Rebuilding Recruiting Search (LIVE @ Transform 2026)

WATCH: https://youtu.be/Y7kyUznrLHg Recorded Day 3 at Transform 2026, this episode features Steven Lu, co-founder and CEO of Pin, an AI-powered recruiting search platform that Steven built with a team of veterans from his first company, Interstellar (acquired by Greenhouse). It's a conversation between a founder and one of his most enthusiastic power users, which gives it an energy and specificity that's hard to manufacture. The core thesis of Pin is deceptively simple: if you give AI the same Boolean search tools that recruiters use, you get the same mediocre results. The answer isn't smarter prompts — it's a rebuilt search engine designed from the ground up for AI to navigate. The result: the best candidate for a role shows up in slot number one, not buried on page seven of search results. Steven walks through what makes Pin's architecture different, how its natural-language question feature answers the make-or-break details that used to take hours of resume scanning, and how its pattern-recognition system learns from recruiter behavior — even when no explicit feedback is given. The conversation then moves into alpha territory: Steven reveals two features his engineering team is finishing — a Kanban-style visual pipeline board for tracking candidates through the hiring process, and an MCP Server integration that allows Claude Desktop to run Pin autonomously. That second announcement is genuinely significant: it means recruiters can put sourcing on autopilot, with Claude's broad knowledge base executing Pin's search capabilities without manual input. Steven closes with the team story behind Pin — seven employees from his first company followed him into this second venture, which he describes as "life on easy mode" because they already know how to build together. Connect with Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenlu/ Learn more about PIN and check out a demo: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=adam-posner