Why bolt-on tools quietly fail

Most AI recruiting tools are a destination. You log into a new dashboard, import a slice of your candidates, and work there. That works for a fortnight. Then someone hires a candidate in the ATS and forgets to mirror it, the two systems disagree, and the team defaults back to the one that pays the invoices — the ATS.

The failure is not the AI. It is the second system. Any tool that requires deliberate, repeated human synchronisation loses to the tool that requires none.

What "native" actually requires

• Read access to the real pipeline — the assistant works from every candidate already in the ATS, including the hundreds who applied to older roles and were never revisited.
• Write-back to the same records — screening reports, stage moves and notes land on the candidate's existing ATS record, not in a parallel database.
• No new surface for the team — recruiters keep opening the tool they already open. The AI shows up as work that is already done.
• An audit trail — every API call the assistant makes into the instance is logged, so nothing is unexplainable after the fact.

The four jobs worth automating

Sourcing, screening, scheduling and replying are the four tasks that consume a recruiter's week and require no judgement calls. This is what Alphie takes over once it is connected:

1. Sourcing from your own pool. For each open role, Alphie surfaces the five strongest fits already sitting in your ATS. Most teams' best next hire already applied once.
2. 15-minute voice screens. Alphie interviews the shortlist by voice and writes up each conversation, so a human's first contact is with someone already qualified.
3. Interview scheduling. Alphie books the interview with your team directly, removing the back-and-forth that loses candidates.
4. Approval and rejection emails. Everyone hears back. Ghosting is a pipeline-quality problem, not just an etiquette one.

Every hiring decision stays with the company. Alphie prepares the work; humans choose.

Where candidate data lives

This is the question that decides most evaluations. Candidate data handled by Alphie — including interview recordings and reports — is stored on encrypted servers, processed and stored in the EU only, and covered by a signed Data Processing Agreement. It is never visible outside your company and never joins a shared pool. Organisations that require candidate data never to touch our servers at all can scope a zero-storage, in-memory-only architecture as a separate enterprise engagement.

What setup looks like

The integration is scoped on a 30-minute call and built against your ATS instance. Any ATS with a documented API can be supported; Greenhouse and Ashby are the two we integrate with most often. Commercially it's a one-off setup fee to build the connection plus a monthly subscription scoped to hiring volume — no per-seat pricing, no listing limits.