Will Kramer

A recruiter's inbox, fed to a machine that never gets tired of reading.

Every month, more than fifty thousand technical job applications pour into a single platform built in Buffalo, New York. Will Kramer built the thing that reads them. He is the CEO and co-founder of Laila Technologies, and the product at the center of his days is HireGPT - an AI recruitment engine that screens, scores, and matches candidates so a human recruiter can spend the afternoon talking to people instead of skimming PDFs.

The pitch is unusually grounded for an AI company. Laila does not promise to fire the recruiter. It promises to give the recruiter a tireless colleague. Kramer calls the combination an Intelligent Recruitment Ecosystem: an on-demand marketplace of seasoned tech recruiters working shoulder to shoulder with AI agents that handle the repetitive first passes. The agents do the reading. The humans do the judging, the calls, the relationships. Both get to do what they are actually good at.

It is a deliberate answer to a familiar complaint. Technical hiring is slow, expensive, and weirdly impersonal at exactly the moments it should be human. Laila's claim is that pairing the two halves cuts recruitment costs and timelines by more than half, across roles that run from junior developers all the way up to C-level leadership. The platform plugs into the applicant tracking systems companies already use, so the AI shows up where the work already lives.

Two decades of shipping software before the AI gold rush arrived.

Kramer did not parachute into machine learning when it got fashionable. He spent more than twenty years writing and leading software, a stretch that ran through startups and Fortune 500 firms, including leadership roles at Paychex, the payroll and HR giant headquartered just down the Thruway in Rochester. That is a useful detail. The man building software to fix hiring spent years inside the machinery of payroll and human resources, watching how companies actually pay and manage the people they hire.

He is a graduate of Cornell University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts. The Ivy League degree and the corporate resume sit a little against type for an AI founder - no dropout mythology, no Bay Area pilgrimage. Kramer stayed in Western New York and built the company there, with backing from The Research Foundation for The State University of New York. Buffalo, it turns out, grows AI founders too.

That regional loyalty is not just biography. He mentors founders at the University at Buffalo, passing along the scar tissue of two decades to people who are one product away from their first hard lesson. The teaching instinct shows up in his public work as well.

Three moves, one ecosystem.

AI for people who think AI is not for them.

In June 2025, Kramer stood up in front of a room at the Lakeside Country Club in Penn Yan, a small town in New York's Finger Lakes, and ran a workshop called Practical AI for Business for the Yates County Chamber of Commerce. The audience was small business owners with no technical background. The promise was to strip out the jargon and point them at free and low-cost tools - building custom GPTs, automating workflows, even preserving a brand's voice - without writing a line of code.

It is a telling choice of stage. A founder running a 50,000-resume-a-month AI platform could spend that Thursday almost anywhere. He spent it teaching shopkeepers and contractors how to use the same kind of technology he sells to the enterprise. The man who automates hiring at scale also wants the corner business to feel less afraid of the future.

On Product Hunt he carries the quiet badges of a long-timer - Tastemaker and Veteran - and spends some of his attention upvoting other people's early-stage launches. Not the loudest founder in the room. The kind who has been in enough rooms to know the launch is the easy part.

The next hire might be screened by a machine he built.

There is a real argument inside Laila's product about fairness and speed. Done badly, automated screening hardens bias and slams doors. Done well, it reads everyone, surfaces the candidate a tired human would have skimmed past, and hands time back to the people doing the hiring. Kramer's framing puts the human firmly in the loop - the AI proposes, the recruiter decides. Whether that line holds as the platform scales is the open question every AI hiring company is being asked. He has staked his company on answering it the careful way.

For now, the scoreboard reads like this: a Buffalo startup, an Ivy-trained engineer who never left Western New York, a platform reading more resumes in a month than most recruiters see in a career, and a founder who still finds Thursdays to teach a chamber of commerce how to build a chatbot. It is a coherent story. It just happens to be unfolding 350 miles from the nearest venture cliche.