Make your hiring as rigorous as your research.

We design and run hiring systems for research organizations and deep tech startups.

01 / The problem

The tragedy of context.

Hiring well requires context and judgment — an understanding of what "good" looks like in your domain. But that understanding lives in the heads of people with high opportunity costs.

Technical experts
Don't scale.
Their time is the constraint you're trying to relieve. Using more of it for hiring is the problem in reverse.
Recruiters
Hit and miss.
Lower context than your team, plus inconsistent judgment — different recruiters reach different conclusions on the same candidate.
AI tools
Lack judgment.
Even given your full context, they apply rules consistently but can't recognize when a rule shouldn't apply. The unconventional candidates that need a human eye slip past.

We build the system that captures your judgment once, applies it consistently across candidates, and routes human attention to where it actually matters.

02 / What we do

Three ways to work with us.

AI-resistant work tests

Assessments candidates can't paste their way through. We build original problem worlds with measurable ground truth — AI use is allowed and expected, and the score still measures the human's judgment. Every assessment is calibrated against frontier models before a candidate ever sees it.

How we build them →

Sourcing

Ecosystem-fluent search for specialized fields. Criteria extracted from your experts rather than keyword lists, and outreach that reads like it came from inside the field.

How we search →

Embedded recruiting

An operator and a system, installed in your pipeline. We extract your bar, encode it, and run your funnel end to end — your team gets weekly decision packets it can act on in minutes.

How the engagement works →

Clients

Anthropic
METR
iCapital
Solid

Team

Vaishnav Sunil

Founder & CEO

Vaishnav founded Clout after writing about talent markets and incentive design through his Substack newsletter Optima & Outliers, which led to his first client and an Emergent Ventures grant from economist Tyler Cowen. Previously, he worked at JP Morgan Asset Management and as CFO of SolarHome, a pay-as-you-go solar company in Southeast Asia. He holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Nanyang Technological University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Jordan Rubin

Advisor

Jordan is Director of External Alpha at Trexquant Investment LP, after building the systematic buy-side alpha capture business at Two Sigma Investments. He writes Future Tokens, a Substack on LLM affordances and human-AI collaborative thinking. Jordan received a BS/BA in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and advises Metaculus on commercialization.

Writing

Vaishnav writes on talent markets, evaluation, and incentive design at Everything is a Trolley.

Contact

For inquiries: vaishnav@cloutcareers.com