What hiring looks like when agents do the heavy lifting

The future of hiring will still lean on the same core principles. Malcolm Burenstam Linder, CEO and founder of Alva Labs, said it plainly in his closing keynote at Meeting of the Minds 2026:

"The formula for accurate hiring is about something as sexy as structure."

Define what great looks like in the role. Attract the right people. Assess every candidate consistently, with the most predictive methods. Decide by combining all the evidence. Then improve, so every hire makes the next one better.

Olivier Sibony and Paul Sackett had spent the afternoon showing why that works. Yet most hiring processes still don't run this way. Malcolm's explanation: done properly, structured hiring has always been the expensive, tedious and painful path.

His keynote was about why that's changing, and what Alva launched on the day to change it.

From muggle to wizard

Malcolm started at home. His three kids are working through the Harry Potter films, and it struck him that he used to be a muggle at work.

Before AI, you did all the work yourself. Every email, every document, every spreadsheet. Then ChatGPT arrived at the end of 2022. It felt like magic, but the impact on daily work was limited. You asked a question, got an answer, copied, pasted and started again.

The models have become far stronger since. What most people actually do at work, the workflows and processes, has changed much less.

In 2026, agents change that. Malcolm defined an agent as software you can delegate real work to, from start to finish. It works in loops until the job is done. And that turns everyone into a manager of agents: you plan, instruct, review, give feedback and approve, just like with a capable new colleague.

His own example: at five in the morning, his agents had gone through his inbox, Slack, documents and live projects, written his daily brief and started on his to-do list. They stopped only where they needed his input or a decision. The time he gets back goes to his team, customers and product.

"My kids may still call me a muggle at home, but at work I feel that I'm graduating to wizard."

What agents mean for TA teams

For hiring, the shift is concrete. The repeatable, administrative work can go to an agent: the chasing, the scheduling, getting back to the hundreds of candidates who may never have heard back.

TA teams keep the high-value work: judgment, relationships, time with hiring managers and candidates, and the final call on who joins the company.

Malcolm highlighted three opportunities:

• Be in every room. The agent holds the structure you designed, for every hiring manager and every role.
• A better experience for every candidate. Timely, personal and, ideally, constructive feedback for everyone who applies, including the candidates who don't reach the final round.
• Best practice in every role. Same criteria, same measurement, evidence over gut feel. That's what makes hiring fair, accurate and efficient at once.

Four questions to ask any AI you use in hiring

Hiring is a high-risk domain. Malcolm suggested four questions for any AI you bring into it, whether it's Claude, ChatGPT or Alva:

1. Is it compliant? Does it follow GDPR and the EU AI Act?
2. Is it built on validated science? Does it follow what the research says predicts performance?
3. Is it accurate and fair? Or does it amplify the noise and bias already in the process?
4. Does your whole team get it? Or is it limited to one person who hacked a workflow together over the weekend?

Meet the Alva Hiring Agent

Those four questions shaped what Alva launched on stage. The Alva Hiring Agent is compliant, auditable and secure, and a person makes every decision. Evidence-based structure is built into how the process works and how the agent behaves, with Alva's validated assessments at the core. And it's built for multiplayer, so every recruiter and hiring manager works on the same shared standard.

There are two ways to put it to work:

• Agentic Psychometrics. The agent on top of the tests you already run. Malcolm's description: a PhD-level I/O psychologist in your pocket, which reads results, explains them in your context, compares candidates and helps draft custom reports.
• Agentic Hiring System. Everything in Agentic Psychometrics, plus Alva's ATS. The agent carries the process from intake meeting to offer. You set, instruct, review and approve every decision.

"The agent helps you create consistency, and the science creates quality."

Picture your next role. You and the hiring manager align on what great looks like. By the end of the call, the agent has drafted the role description, the assessment plan, the interview scorecard and the scoring rubric. You review, edit and approve. From there, every candidate meets the same standard. While you sleep, the agent handles scheduling, interview prep and draft feedback. You decide who moves on, and spend your time with people.

"For as long as I've done this, structured hiring has always meant doing more work. More scorecards, more meetings, more chasing. Great hiring meant heroic effort. But from today, the best way to hire is now the easy way."

"Just because we could doesn't mean we should"

After the keynote, Malcolm was joined on stage by Antonia Brandberg Björk, EVP People & Communications at Vend. She has more than 25 years in the field across four countries, and Vend was among the first to use the new system.

She named three reasons she's excited. First, the time TA teams lose on scheduling, follow-ups, notes and reports. Second, consistency for the hiring managers who only hire once every couple of years and aren't experts. Third, what happens when that time comes back.

"When we free up this time and we remove the administration and the clutter and all this noise, that's when we can really lean in and do our job properly."

So why not build it in-house? Vend's leadership team discussed it. Her answer:

"Just because we potentially could doesn't mean that we should."

Two things decided it. The research behind the assessments is something she doesn't want her team dabbling in. And compliance: every recruitment means handling personal data, across countries inside and outside the EU. A system that takes care of that lets her team sleep at night. It's also important for Vend to make it their own, with their leadership principles, values and success criteria built in.

Malcolm added Alva's own experience. As an AI-native company, the Alva team builds a lot with agents. Getting from a single-player workflow to something a whole team can rely on every day takes a lot of maintenance. Alva's conclusion: for most companies, building their own agentic hiring system won't be worth it.

What comes next

The list is long, Malcolm said. The design challenge the team keeps coming back to is balance: the rigour of a structured, science-based process, with room for the open-ended creativity agents make possible. One example available from launch day: you can build your own reports in about half an hour and teach the agent to send them to you every Friday.

"Once you've seen it, once you've experienced what the agent can do for your hiring, you simply can't unsee it."