title: Recruiting co-pilot for Claude Code — open-sourcing the tools I use to hire at YC
author: Ryan Choi
contenttype: bookfacepost
source_url: https://bookface.ycombinator.com/posts/99362
word_count: 922
Recruiting co-pilot for Claude Code — open-sourcing the tools I use to hire at YC
I built a set of Claude Code skills to run YC’s eng recruiting process.
https://github.com/yc-software/recruiting
I’ve been using it for the last couple of months, and it’s saved me a ton of time. We’re now open-sourcing it for
anybody who wants the same setup.
You talk to Claude Code in natural language — I use
AquaVoice
— and it handles the operational side of recruiting: triaging your inbox, reviewing applicants, drafting outreach,
scheduling interviews, sending rejections, and keeping your pipeline up to date.
It plugs into Work at a Startup (WaaS), Gmail, Google Calendar, and optionally Ashby. It also works well with free form
recruiting in your email – like Jack and Jill candidate recommendations, warm intros and more.
A few examples from my last session (both using skills and just talking to my co-pilot):
“/triage” → pulls in inbox, WaaS applicants, ATS candidates, calendar, sent mail, and drafts in one pass, then
sorts what actually needs attention
“Show me profiles for the people who applied to my open product engineer role. Rank them based on my open role.”
→ reviews candidates, scores fit according to my own rubric, and lets me reject a batch with personalized outreach
in minutes
“Reschedule David for Thursday.” → looks up the right David in my ATS, checks my calendar, suggests a time,
moves the invite, syncs the ATS, and emails the candidate
To get started:
Pull the repo: https://github.com/yc-software/recruiting
Set up your user.md, and run Claude from the repo root. Tell it to install itself; skills
auto-discover.
For the underlying Waas MCP, you’ll need to run waas login to authenticate
If using Ashby, Claude should download a fork I made of the Plenish Ashby
MCP. Ask Claude to introspect your setup for configuration IDs
(jobs/stages/etc)
We also open-sourced a WaaS MCP, built on top of a new WaaS API. It gives you
programmatic access to your applicant pipeline — listing and filtering applicants, viewing full profiles, sending
messages, updating stages, and adding notes. The recruiting skills use it natively, but you can also use it on its own
if you want to build it into your own tools.
I have a Slack channel if you want to give feedback, get help with recruiting, and to share best practices with other
founders. Leave a comment or email me if you want to be added.
These skills removed a lot of the drudgery and click-a-million-buttons of recruiting. It freed up my time to spend more
energy talking to great candidates and get excited about building the YC software team. I hope you find the same. We’re
in it together.
Comments
Keith Schacht (Formerly Mystery.org (S17)) (about 7 hours ago)
Ryan Choi, I love seeing this. This here is a new kind of software. I’m not in need of an ATS right now, but it’s still fascinating for me to see where your head is at with this stuff.
I’ve seen a few repos going around where the github repo is just one big prompt you copy and paste. That’s “claude code” as compiler (rather than sharing the source code, people are sharing the prompt they use to generate the source code). But I think what you’ve built here is much closer to what a lot of software is going to start looking like.
I have my own version of this for “claude code as executive assistant”, and I structured it quite a bit differently. It’s very interesting to compare. Thanks for sharing this!
Jacob Vogan (CB Therapeutics (S18)) (about 21 hours ago)
Wow, Claude Code called this “one of the best examples of how to structure a non-trivial Claude Code skills project.” Thanks for sharing.
Y Combinator (about 21 hours ago)
I think Claude has to get on twitter and learn about gstack;)
Louis Lecat (Upstream (S23)) (1 day ago)
Looks amazing
Ryan Choi!
Y Combinator (1 day ago)
Only amazing if you use it. Let me know how it works for you!
Yolanda Cao (Everest (F25)) (about 2 hours ago)
This is gold. Is there a way for us to plug it onto LinkedIn too?
Y Combinator (about 1 hour ago)
Thanks — let me know how it works for you!
I think you can extend it to use
Crustdata, Harmonic or other tools to get enriched Linkedin data.
I would imagine that people would also be tempted to use headless chrome + Playwright, but I’ve found that Linkedin is pretty good about making this difficult.
Otherwise, if you’re getting inbound, the resume + structured data parsed from a profile has been enough for my use cases.
Michael Schroeder (Overdrive Health (W26)) (about 19 hours ago)
Would love to be added to the slack channel, this looks awesome
Leila Clark (Stardrift (S24)) (1 day ago)
Whoa - a WaaS MCP server is amazing!
Y Combinator (1 day ago)
Maybe a bit late to the game, but hope it’s useful!
Erik Dahl (Parrot (F25)) (1 day ago)
Amazing Ryan! Thank you for coming out with this.
Y Combinator (1 day ago)
Definitely let me know what we could improve. One of the benefits is that anyone can fork and create their own customizations — based on vendors, tools, their own process, and their specific roles.
Seemed like a far more flexible and equitable way to enabled teams to recruit and hire.
Cooper Newby (Bluecrew (S15)) (1 day ago)
Ooo would love to add our AI phone screener to this! https://www.classet.ai/