# Neuroscale at SHRM Annual 2026

> Four days in Chicago, one booth, and several hundred conversations about what recruiting teams are actually measuring. Here is how it went.

- Kind: Conference (In person)
- Date: Jun 28 to Jul 1, 2026
- Time: 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM CDT
- Where: McCormick Place, booth 1842, Chicago, IL
- Speakers: Dana Whitfield, Head of Product; Marcus Feld, Founding Engineer
- Status: Past event
- Canonical: https://neuroscale.ai/events/shrm-annual-2026

## How it went

SHRM Annual is the largest HR gathering in the country, and this year it felt like the first one where AI in recruiting stopped being a novelty and became a line item. Nobody asked us whether they should be using it. Everyone asked us how to tell whether it was working.

We ran the booth as a working demo rather than a pitch. Recruiters brought their own job descriptions, we wrote the criteria together, and Arbi scored a real stage against them while they watched. Over four days that happened roughly three hundred times.

## What people wanted to see

The single most common request was the evidence. Not the score, the reason for the score. A screening verdict that cites the line on the resume it rests on turned out to be the thing that made a sceptical talent lead lean in, because it is the same thing they would have to produce if a hiring manager challenged the shortlist.

The second was speed on a real stage. Four hundred profiles scored in the time it took to get a coffee is a different conversation from a slide that says it.

> **The question we heard most**
>
> Can I see why it rejected this one? Every time, the answer on screen was the same: the criterion, the evidence, and the gap between them.

## The roundtable

On the Tuesday evening we hosted a roundtable for twenty heads of talent. The theme was measurement: what a recruiting team can honestly claim to know about its own funnel. Three things came up in nearly every conversation.

- **Screening consistency is unmeasured almost everywhere.** Teams track time to fill and offer acceptance, and almost none track whether two recruiters reading the same profile reach the same verdict.
- **Reply rates are down and nobody agrees why.** The volume story and the personalisation story were both in the room, and the honest answer is that most teams cannot separate them with the data they keep.
- **Audit pressure is arriving before the tooling.** Several teams in regulated industries are being asked to explain hiring decisions they made with software that keeps no record of its reasoning.

## What we took home

A list of forty-one feature requests, most of them variations on one theme: show the work. The evidence layer is what people trust, and every part of the product that hides a decision behind a number is a part they trust less.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by, argued with us, and brought us a real stage to screen. See you in Las Vegas in October.