USE CASE

AI Recruiter: Replace Lever, Greenhouse, and Workable

Build an AI recruiting team that screens candidates, schedules interviews, and keeps your pipeline moving—without per-seat ATS fees.

December 2025•USE CASE

ATS platforms charge $300-500/month for what's essentially a candidate database with email templates. For a growing company, that's $3,600-6,000/year—and you still need recruiters to do the actual work.

What if AI agents handled the screening, scheduling, and follow-ups—so your recruiters could focus on actually talking to candidates?

Modern ATS software charges premium prices but still requires humans to review every resume, send every email, and manage every calendar conflict. You're paying for a glorified spreadsheet with automation features you could build yourself.

The ATS Tax

Let's look at what you're actually paying for. Here's the monthly cost breakdown for popular applicant tracking systems:

Tool	Price	Annual Cost
Lever	$400/mo	$4,800
Greenhouse	$500/mo	$6,000
Workable	$149/mo	$1,788
Ashby	$300/mo	$3,600

Prices for standard business tiers as of December 2025. Many require annual contracts.

You're paying $300-500/month for software that still requires humans to review resumes, send emails, and coordinate interviews.

What ATS Software Actually Is

Strip away the marketing. Here's what your ATS subscription actually buys:

Feature You Pay For	What It Actually Is
Applicant tracking	A database that stores resumes and lets you move candidates between stages
Resume parsing	Text extraction that fills form fields—still requires human review for accuracy
Interview scheduling	Calendar links that candidates must navigate and coordinators must manage
Pipeline reports	Charts showing how many candidates are at each stage—not why they're stuck
Candidate communication	Email templates that someone still has to personalize and send manually

You're paying enterprise prices for a sophisticated database. The actual recruiting work—screening, scheduling, communicating—still falls on humans.

What an AI Recruiter Actually Does

An AI recruiter doesn't just store applications. It processes them:

Screens candidates automatically

The agent reads resumes, compares against your job requirements, identifies must-haves and nice-to-haves, and ranks candidates by fit. No human review needed for initial screening.

Schedules interviews instantly

Coordinates calendars across interviewers, sends confirmations to candidates, handles reschedules and cancellations—all without back-and-forth emails.

Keeps candidates warm

Automated status updates, personalized check-ins, and next-step reminders. Every candidate feels informed, even when you're juggling 50 open roles.

Maintains your talent pipeline

Past candidates, silver medalists, referrals—all organized and searchable. When a new role opens, the agent surfaces relevant candidates instantly.

Generates hiring reports

Time-to-fill, source effectiveness, stage conversion rates, interviewer feedback patterns—insights without building dashboards or running queries.

The Killer Feature: Your Talent Pipeline, Organized

Here's what makes file-based AI agents fundamentally different from traditional ATS software:

/recruiting
  /positions
    senior-engineer.md
    product-manager.md
    sales-rep.md
  /candidates
    pipeline.csv
    /applications
      john-doe-engineer.md
      jane-smith-pm.md
  /templates
    screening-email.md
    interview-confirmation.md
    offer-letter.md
    rejection-kind.md
  /reports
    weekly-pipeline.md

Your recruiting knowledge lives in organized files—job descriptions, candidate profiles, interview templates, feedback forms. The agent reads these files directly, understanding context and taking action. When you update a job description, the agent immediately adjusts its screening criteria.

Update a file, update the process

Change your requirements for a role? Update the job description file. The agent immediately screens new candidates against the updated criteria.

Candidate profiles that grow

Each candidate gets a file that accumulates everything—resume, interview notes, feedback, communications. The agent uses this context for every interaction.

Templates that learn

Your outreach templates, rejection emails, and offer letters—all version-controlled and improvable based on response rates.

Institutional memory preserved

Why was this candidate rejected last year? What feedback did we give? The agent remembers everything, so you never lose recruiting knowledge when people leave.

This isn't an ATS with AI features bolted on. It's an agent that actually recruits—screening, communicating, and coordinating.

Watch It Work

See how an AI recruiter handles real hiring scenarios:

Automated Candidate Screening

Email — Daily Digest

📋 New Applications Summary

I've screened 23 new applications for your open positions. Here are the top candidates:

Candidate	Role	Match	Recommendation
John D.	Senior Engineer	92%	Interview immediately
Sarah M.	Senior Engineer	87%	Strong—schedule screen
Mike R.	Product Manager	78%	Review experience
Lisa K.	Sales Rep	45%	Does not meet requirements

I've moved the top 2 candidates to the interview stage and sent them scheduling links. Should I send rejection emails to candidates below 50% match?

Yes, send rejections. And schedule John for Tuesday if possible.

Done. John is confirmed for Tuesday at 2pm with your engineering team. Rejection emails sent to 8 candidates with personalized feedback.

Interview Coordination

#hiring — Slack

📅 Interview Scheduled

I've coordinated the interview panel for the Senior Engineer role:

Detail	Info
Candidate	John Davidson
Role	Senior Engineer
Time	Tuesday, Dec 17 at 2:00pm
Panel	Sarah (Eng Lead), Mike (CTO), Lisa (HR)

All calendar invites sent. Do you want me to send the interview prep guide to the panel?

Yes, and include his GitHub profile

Sent. I've included John's resume, GitHub contributions summary, and the interview scorecard template.

Pipeline Review

#hiring — Slack

What's our current pipeline looking like?

Here's your current hiring pipeline:

Position	Active	Bottleneck
Senior Engineer	12	3 pending final interview
Product Manager	8	5 in technical screen
Sales Rep	23	15 need initial screen

Note: The Product Manager role has been open for 6 weeks. The 5 candidates in technical screen have been there for 10+ days—might need a nudge to the hiring manager.

Want me to send a reminder to the PM hiring manager about pending decisions?

Weekly Recruiting Report

Email — Weekly Report

Weekly Recruiting Summary

Metric	This Week	vs Last Week
Applications received	47	+ 18%
Candidates screened	18	+ 25%
Interviews scheduled	12	+ 50%
Average time-to-screen	18 days	- 40% (faster)
Offers extended	3	+ 2

Top source this week: LinkedIn (42% of qualified candidates)

2 candidates declined due to compensation. Consider reviewing salary bands for Senior Engineer role.

Build Your AI Recruiter in 15 Minutes

Here's how to set up an AI recruiter for your company:

Create the agent

Define your AI recruiter's responsibilities and give it access to your recruiting workspace.

You are my recruiting assistant. Screen all applications in /recruiting/inbox/. Schedule interviews with qualified candidates. Send status updates to applicants. Generate weekly pipeline reports.

Define your screening criteria

Create files that describe what makes a candidate qualified for each role. Must-haves, nice-to-haves, and disqualifiers—the agent uses these to screen automatically.

Connect your calendar

Give the agent access to interviewer calendars. It will find available slots, coordinate panels, and handle all the scheduling logistics.

Set up your templates

Create email templates for outreach, screening invites, interview confirmations, rejections, and offers. Your voice, the agent's delivery.

Review and decide

The agent handles the process. You make the hiring decisions. Review the candidates it surfaces, conduct the interviews it schedules, and extend offers to the people you choose.

From first application to signed offer—the agent handles the process while you make the decisions that matter.

Scale to a Multi-Agent Recruiting Team

As your hiring needs grow, deploy specialized agents for different stages of the recruiting funnel:

Agent	Role	Workspace
Sourcing Agent	Finds and reaches out to passive candidates	/recruiting/sourcing/
Screening Agent	Reviews applications and qualifies candidates	/recruiting/applications/
Scheduling Agent	Coordinates interviews and manages calendars	/recruiting/interviews/
Pipeline Agent	Tracks progress and generates reports	/recruiting/pipeline/