In 2006 I was finding CFO candidates with a phone book and a James Bond script.
Not a metaphor. A physical phone book. Kyiv Business Directory, 2006 edition. I would cold-call companies, pretend to be someone important, ask to speak to the financial director, get the name, hang up, call back.
It worked. Slowly.
I found the phone book recently while cleaning out storage. I didn't miss it.
Twenty years later, recruiting still felt like a phone book.
The tools changed. The frustration didn't.
LinkedIn came along. Then LinkedIn Recruiter at $900/month. Then Boolean expressions — a programming language invented to help recruiters who aren't programmers feel like programmers. Then 47 open tabs. Then connection requests that took two weeks to be accepted. Then a separate tool to find emails. Then a separate tool to find phones. Then Excel to hold it all together. Then Gmail to send emails manually. Then another day gone.
In 2024 I sat down and counted the tabs I had open for a single search.
Eleven. For one recruitment task.
I had not left the phone book era. I had just made it digital and worse.
I had the idea for MindHunt AI in 2004.
No, that's not a typo.
I was 24, working as a junior recruiter in Odesa, watching senior colleagues do the same manual work I was doing — just faster and with more coffee. I thought: someone should build a tool that actually works the way recruiters think. Not the way databases work. Not the way LinkedIn works. The way a recruiter thinks.
I couldn't build it. I didn't know how.
I waited.
In 2023, the tools finally caught up to the idea. Claude Code. Railway. MongoDB Atlas. A non-technical founder with 20 years of domain knowledge and a very patient AI assistant.
I asked Claude what a Terminal was on day one. By June 2026 I had passed the Claude Certified Architect exam. Everyone is very happy. 😄
What MindHunt AI actually does.
You open it. You type:
"CFO in London with 5 years of experience in financial sector"
Press Enter.
AI reads it. Extracts job titles, skills, keywords, experience range, location. Guides you through confirming them. Runs the search.
1,760 candidates. Scored. Ranked. Ready.
No Boolean strings. No filter setup. No eleven tabs.
Move a candidate to Approved — email fetched automatically. AI writes a personalized email for every candidate — different for each person, based on their actual profile and your job description. Gmail campaign activates. Stops the moment someone replies.
Pipeline. Analytics. Shareable client report. GitHub search for developers — free, no credits ever.
One tool. The phone book is in storage.
Why Product Hunt. Why today.
299 users have signed up (Jul 7th, 2026).
I know what that means. It means the product works but the people who need it haven't found it yet. Product Hunt is how you find them.
If you're a recruiter who has written a Boolean expression at midnight — this was built for you.
If you're a founder building a team and tired of waiting two weeks for a LinkedIn connection to accept — this was built for you.
If you're an HR manager who has eleven tabs open right now — especially for you.
Free to try. No credit card. 200 candidate searches.
The free plan includes everything — AI search, GitHub search, Kanban pipeline, Gmail campaigns, AI personalization. We don't hide features behind paywalls. Try it first, decide later.
MindHunt AI
If you have questions — reply to this post or email me directly at vl@mindhuntai.com. I read every message personally. I have 20 years of recruiting stories and I'm not afraid to use them.
— Vadym Lobariev
Founder, MindHunt AI