From the McDonald's Counter to the Future of Work

Thirty years ago, I walked into a McDonald's to apply for my first job in America. The manager handed me a paper application and a clipboard.

That moment changed my life.

But here's what's surprising: not much has changed in 30 years.

Yes, the paper application moved online in most places. The clipboard became a web form. But the process? Still slow. Still manual. Still fragmented.

HR leaders are juggling a Frankenstein stack of vendors. Managers are buried in paperwork instead of leading their teams. And great candidates? They're gone. In frontline work, most applicants who aren't hired within 24 hours accept another offer. Days-long hiring processes aren't just slow — they're bleeding talent and revenue.

I kept thinking about that McDonald's manager. How many great people did she never get to hire because the process got in the way?

That's why we built Cleo.

Traditional software wasn't the answer. Dashboards don't hire. Forms don't verify. Logins don't move people forward. We needed something that could actually do the work — not just track it.

So we didn't build another chatbot. We built an orchestration agent.

Cleo sits between the candidate's phone and your HR system. She talks to a qualified applicant, verifies their credentials in real-time, initiates a background check, and moves them into onboarding — while the candidate is still interested and your manager is still on shift. What once required a clipboard, five emails, two logins, and a week of follow-ups now happens in one intelligent flow.

This isn't automation for the sake of automation. It's technology finally catching up to the frontline.

Managers get their time back. Workers get a clear, instant path to a paycheck. Companies get the teams they need, when they need them.

"2-Click Hire" isn't just a feature. It's where hiring is going.

— Mo Saeed
Co-Founder & CEO, CleoHR