New Year, New Tofu

Hey, it’s Jason Zoltak. 👋 If this is your first time reading The Final Interview, here’s where you can subscribe so you don’t miss future breakdowns on navigating AI in recruiting and talent management. 

It’s been a few months since I’ve written anything, but for good measure. We’ve completely changed Tofu, our product and the business. Let me explain.

Our Vision for Tofu When We Started

When we first launched, Jon and I saw Tofu first as a hiring marketplace first: a way to capture the wasted information produced by companies during the interview process and connect great companies with top talent. 

How we saw the problem

How we saw the solution

I still believe in this mission, for the record. The truth is, however, the marketplace on its own wasn’t enough. Hiring demands have evolved and as we spoke to our users and folks in the industry, our thinking evolved along with it.

Why Tofu is Evolving

You’ll hear people often say recruiting is broken— and they’re likely referring to their experience with it driven by bad process. It’s true it’s broken, but because of inefficiencies in how we manage systems, data, and other inputs that lead to this bad process.

After working with 300+ Tofu clients, we’ve uncovered a few issues we believe are worth tackling:

1️⃣ System design: Ineffective workflows waste time and energy.
2️⃣ Data management: Recruiters lack actionable insights from their tools.
3️⃣ Signal filtering: Sourcing the right applicants fast is a constant challenge.

A talent marketplace alone can’t help recruiters solve these underlying problems. And with all the capabilities surrounding Agentic AI, the opportunity to leverage Agents to solve these problems became too exciting to ignore.

So, we shifted our focus towards optimizing for how agents can help teams filter, qualify, and engage with candidates (heads up, the marketplace is still running… keep reading).

We spent the last 5 months reimagining Tofu into a powerful, Agentic AI-first platform that works as an extension of your inbound team, performing tasks that enable you to:

✅ Screen smarter: AI-powered resume reviews customized to your hiring needs. Review 1,000 resumes in seconds with 96% accuracy.

✅ Search deeper: Enrich your ATS with actionable, searchable data that surfaces the best-fit candidates faster than ever.

✅ Filter faster: Detect and eliminate fraudulent applicants seamlessly, saving your team valuable time.

Our mission has always been to equip teams with better signals, but the extent of that signal is vast. So how do you define it, or at least, where do you start? At least for us, we believe it’s best suited to enable the offloading of mundane tasks and bring better signal to these processes so in-house recruiters can focus on what they do best: building great teams.

The New Tofu: Built for Today’s Hiring Challenges

Tofu is no longer just a hiring marketplace—it’s now an AI-first hiring solution to transform your top of funnel recruiting.

Here’s what’s new:

• AI Resume Review: Review 1,000 profiles in 20 seconds with 96% accuracy. Custom bots ensure unbiased, bespoke screening to surface top candidates. Learn more here.

• Applicant Enrichment: Turn your ATS into a treasure trove of actionable insights. Search candidates by attributes, company stage, and more.

• Fraud Detection: Save time with AI-driven fraud filters powered by 3+ billion data points to verify candidates. Learn more here.

These tools empower recruiting teams to save time and focus on what truly matters—building connections with exceptional candidates.

The marketplace our users love isn’t going anywhere. Candidates are still being invited to it. Companies are still hiring from it. Alloy made an offer to someone last week. EvenUp hired someone the week before. But Tofu now scales with your hiring needs to ensure no great candidate slips through the cracks, with powerful models and agents to support your workflows.

We’re already helping 100+ companies—including Veza Security, Luxury Presence, and Garner Health—automate their most time-consuming hiring tasks.

Luxury Presence is reducing their recruiting contractor resources by 70%+ and replacing it with Tofu. You can read more about it here.

We’re giving teams more leverage. We’re here to make your recruiting smarter, faster, and more effective while maintaining the magic of your team’s human spirit. 

I hope you’ll give the new Tofu a chance to be part of your stack and grow with us to build something amazing.

Here’s to changing the way we do things, so we can keep doing the things we love - together🚀.

Warmly,
Jason