Rethinking Hiring Through the Lens of TAM, SAM, and SOM

In the world of startups and business strategy, every founder eventually learns the importance of sizing their market. Concepts like TAM (Total Addressable Market), SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market), and SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) are used to ground lofty ideas in reality. They help businesses determine the difference between what looks good on paper and what can actually be achieved.

Interestingly, the same framework can also be applied to hiring.

Recruitment teams, just like founders, often overestimate the pool of people they can successfully engage. The result is wasted time, missed opportunities, and an uphill battle to secure top talent. By reframing hiring through TAM, SAM, and SOM, companies can better understand where they stand and how technology can bridge the gap.

TAM: The Total Addressable Applicants

Your TAM represents every single person who could apply to your open role. Post a job online, and your TAM might look vast. After all, millions of people around the world could, in theory, click “apply.”

But TAM is misleading. It includes people who are unqualified, uninterested, or completely outside of your target requirements. Just like businesses cannot serve every single potential customer, recruiters cannot realistically consider every potential applicant.

TAM is useful only for showing scale. It gives you a sense of how broad the hiring pool might be — but it is not the pool you will hire from.

SAM: The Serviceable Applicants

SAM narrows the pool to the people who are realistically a fit. This means filtering for relevant experience, skills, industry background, and sometimes even geography or language requirements.

For example, if you are hiring for a software engineering role in Southeast Asia, your SAM would exclude candidates without technical experience, those unwilling to relocate or work remotely, and those who do not meet baseline requirements.

SAM provides more focus, but it still assumes that every qualified person is equally reachable and willing to engage with your company. That’s rarely the case.

SOM: The Serviceable Obtainable Talent

SOM is where reality sets in. It represents the candidates you can actually attract, evaluate, and hire.

Why is SOM smaller than SAM? Because the hiring process introduces bottlenecks. Some candidates drop out during long application processes. Others never get shortlisted due to recruiter bandwidth. Bias, inconsistent evaluation, and communication delays further reduce the number of people who remain engaged and interested.

This is the equivalent of a startup overestimating its market penetration. No matter how big your SAM looks, execution capacity and competition always limit your SOM.

Why Most Companies Overestimate Their SOM

Many organizations assume they are working with their full SAM when, in fact, they are operating with a fraction of their SOM. The reasons are clear:

Application bottlenecks: Too many resumes to review means qualified candidates often get overlooked.

Bias in evaluation: Subjective decision-making can unintentionally exclude strong candidates.

Time constraints: Recruiters cannot scale interviews fast enough to cover the full pool.

Poor candidate experience: Lengthy or inconsistent processes drive away top talent.

The result is a smaller SOM than expected, and often, slower time-to-hire.

How AI Can Expand SOM

This is where AI-powered hiring becomes transformative. At Screenz.ai, we help companies expand their obtainable market of talent by removing traditional bottlenecks and bringing structure to hiring.

Our platform:

Automates first-round interviews so every applicant is given a chance to be heard.

Evaluates communication, empathy, reasoning, and job fit with consistency and without bias.

Generates structured reports so hiring managers can move quickly from raw applications to qualified shortlists.

The effect is simple: companies stop chasing the illusion of TAM and SAM, and start focusing on the true obtainable pool of talent — their SOM. With AI removing inefficiencies, SOM grows larger, and organizations gain access to more of the people who could be the right fit.

The Future of Hiring

In today’s competitive talent market, the companies that understand their SOM — and act strategically to expand it — will always have the advantage. While traditional hiring funnels continue to shrink candidate pools, AI is opening a new path: one where fairness, efficiency, and scale allow organizations to reach and secure more of the right talent.

With Screenz.ai, that future is not theoretical. It is happening now.

Just as founders must learn to measure their real market opportunity, recruiters and HR leaders must learn to measure — and maximize — their real talent pool.

‍