Duke Talent moved its specialist recruiting operation onto a Claude-powered platform built by Linkt. Claude has scored more than 30,000 designer and architect profiles against Duke's criteria. In the first two weeks after launch, 65 users were active and weekly searches exceeded 850, up 36.5% from the first week.
designer and architect profiles scored by Claude
active users in the first two weeks after launch
weekly searches, up 36.5% from the first week
About Duke Talent
Duke Talent is a specialist recruiting firm serving the architecture and interior design industry, a world where the right placement comes down to things a job board can't see: design sensibility, project type, studio culture, career arc. Duke Talent's edge has always been judgment: knowing which designer belongs at which studio, and having the network to make the introduction.
The problem with that kind of judgment is that it doesn't scale. Every hour the team spent screening resumes, cross-referencing spreadsheets, or combing job boards was an hour not spent with designers and studios. So rather than simply hiring its way out of the bottleneck, Duke Talent partnered with Linkt to encode its expertise into intelligent systems and scale the judgment itself.
The challenge: judgment that couldn't be everywhere at once
Duke Talent's matching criteria were sharp. The team could tell quickly whether a candidate fit a studio. But applying that judgment meant manual work across a scattered landscape: candidate and company records in the firm's existing marketplace, LinkedIn profiles and resumes in every imaginable format, portfolio PDFs, job listings spread across industry boards, and spreadsheets, notes, and institutional memory.
Every candidate needed a manual first pass. Every search started from scratch. The knowledge that made Duke Talent valuable lived in its recruiters' heads, and the day only has so many hours.
The solution: Duke Talent's expertise, powered by Claude
Working alongside Duke Talent's team, Linkt's engineers captured how the firm evaluates candidates, ranks studios, and decides what a great match looks like, then built that thinking into three connected systems. Anthropic Claude powers the entire platform, automating much of the back office work involved in screening candidates and matching talent with job placements.
A unified talent platform brings more than 31,000 candidates, 6,200 studios, and 960 job listings into one clean, searchable system, kept current by automated pipelines that run nightly with no manual upkeep.
The Duke Console lets the team search the way its recruiters think: in plain English (“mid-size residential firms in Austin that do modern design”), across interactive map views, opening any role to a ranked pool of best-fit candidates, and working every inquiry through a structured pipeline.
Duke Connect is the candidate-facing experience. Designers submit a LinkedIn profile or upload a resume and get back the kind of review a Duke Talent recruiter would give, scored across eight dimensions with editorial, recruiter-voice feedback, plus ranked studio matches built on the firm's “Big 3” placement criteria (location, discipline, and project type) and a personalized action plan for every studio they pursue. It went from zero to production in eleven weeks.
The intelligence underneath is Duke Talent's, formalized: candidate scoring tuned to the firm's standards, company classification that ranks studios the way its recruiters would, and plain-English fit summaries that explain each match like a recruiter would. To ensure fairness, every candidate is reviewed against the same criteria, applied the same way. The team reviews the system's assessments side by side with its own and tunes them, teaching the platform the firm's taste over time.
On September 15, Duke Talent retired its former Sharetribe marketplace and moved roughly 4,200 members to the new platform in a single evening. Members now sign in through Clerk with an emailed code or password. Duke Connect is the community's primary home, rather than an add-on to the old marketplace.
Refined through a continuous feedback loop
A firm's judgment doesn't fit in a requirements document. What began as a matching prototype grew into a full product suite, shaped throughout by the people using it: every major capability started with a written design spec, direct input from Duke Talent's team set the priorities, and when a better approach emerged, Linkt rebuilt. The original graph-based matching engine, for example, gave way to a faster search-and-ranking system as the platform matured.
The result behaves less like a vendor deliverable and more like a product built by an embedded team, because it was.
The result: less time screening, more time with designers
Work that used to consume the day now runs in the background. Every candidate gets a thorough, expert-level first review in minutes, including the ones who apply at midnight. Recruiters open a role and start from a ranked shortlist instead of a blank search bar. Every expression of candidate interest lands in an actionable queue, with the person, the role, and a fit summary side by side. And the data stays current on its own.
Claude has scored more than 30,000 designer and architect profiles against Duke Talent's criteria. The platform now makes more than 31,000 candidates, 6,200 studios, and 960 job listings searchable in one place. In the first two weeks after launch, 65 users were active and weekly searches exceeded 850, up 36.5% from the first week. Roughly 4,200 members moved onto the new platform in one evening.
Duke Talent projects 60% time savings across its back-office processes from the Claude-powered platform. The automation has enabled the team to focus more on working with clients and candidates and growing the business. Duke Talent reports that 2026 has been its fastest growth year to date.
Claude has been pivotal in making Duke Talent's judgment available across every search, review, and placement match. This platform and the outcomes it delivers would not have been possible without Claude.
Why Linkt
Generic recruiting software is built for the average staffing firm, and averages are exactly what Duke Talent isn't. A specialist firm's edge is its taste, criteria, and network: the hardest thing to put into software, and the most valuable.
That's what Linkt's forward-deployed model is for: engineers embedded with the client's team, turning how its experts actually work into production systems, and refining them continuously as the business evolves.
Linkt took the way we evaluate talent, the judgment we've built over a decade in this industry, and turned it into systems that work around the clock. Our team now spends far less time screening and searching, and far more time where we create real value: with designers and studios.
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