Skip to content
YC Root AccessYC Root Access

Alex: Your AI Recruiting Partner

Alex is an AI recruiting partner that automates busywork for recruiters, including phone screens, video interviews, note-taking, and more. The company recently raised a $17M Series A led by Peak XV Partners and already serves Fortune 100 companies, nationwide restaurant chains, and Big 4 accounting firms. In this interview with YC's Nicolas Dessaigne, co-founders Aaron Wang and John Rytel share their journey from building apps together in college to scaling one of the fastest-growing companies in recruiting. They talk about why it takes hundreds of applications to find that next job, what tools candidates are using to cheat in interviews, and how AI agents represent the future of how job seekers will find their next opportunities in days, not months. Chapters: 00:00 – Intro 00:35 – What Alex Does for Recruiters 02:00 – From College Projects to Starting Alex 03:50 – Why Recruiting Is Broken Today 05:40 – Automating Busywork in Hiring 08:00 – Customers: Fortune 100s, Restaurants & Big 4 Firms 10:10 – Why It Takes Hundreds of Applications to Get Hired 12:40 – Candidates Cheating with AI Tools 15:00 – Scaling One of the Fastest Growing Recruiting Startups 17:30 – AI Agents and the Future of Job Hunting

Nicolas DessaignehostAaron WangguestJohn Rytelguest
Sep 28, 202521mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Alex automates recruiting interviews, scaling hiring while improving candidate experience

  1. Alex is an autonomous AI recruiting partner that runs phone/video screens, scheduling, sourcing, and ATS updates across recruiting tool stacks.
  2. The founders argue recruiting is “broken” because application volume has tripled, time-to-hire is ~60 days, and recruiters can’t keep up with screening and matching.
  3. Alex is already conducting thousands of interviews per day, helping fill tens of thousands of open roles across staffing agencies and large employers, from software engineering to nuclear welding.
  4. The product focus is as much on candidate experience (reducing ghosting, instant first-round interviews, texting for updates/policies) as it is on recruiter efficiency.
  5. They describe an emerging “adversarial” dynamic in hiring, with candidates using AI to mass-apply or cheat (prompt injection, overlays, deepfakes), driving the need for guardrails and detection.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Recruiting bottlenecks are now primarily bandwidth and matching, not sourcing alone.

With applicant volume surging and time-to-hire around 60 days, recruiters struggle to screen everyone and connect the right people to the right roles; Alex targets both problems by interviewing at scale and using data-driven matching.

“Interview everyone” becomes feasible when screening is fully automated end-to-end.

Alex isn’t just a chatbot—it schedules, interviews (phone/video), sources, and updates the ATS autonomously, enabling high-throughput first rounds that most teams can’t operationalize manually.

Candidate experience is treated as a product moat, not a byproduct.

The founders emphasize eliminating ghosting, giving every applicant a first-round interview, and letting candidates text Alex for answers and status—positioning responsiveness as a differentiator.

Vertical AI agents require orchestration, guardrails, and evaluation at scale.

They attribute early success to building a low-latency, reliable voice agent orchestration layer and continuously improving prompts, guardrails, and agent evaluation based on real interview behavior.

Hiring is becoming an adversarial AI-on-AI environment.

Candidates increasingly use AI to mass-apply and to “cheat” during interviews (e.g., overlays), while attackers experiment with prompt injection and deepfakes—forcing platforms to add cheat/deepfake detection and tighter controls.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

“Alex is your AI recruiting partner that helps companies and staffing firms interview everyone and ultimately hire the best people.”

— Aaron Wang

“You can close a house in San Francisco faster than you can hire your next engineer.”

— Aaron Wang

“Every candidate gets a first round interview.”

— John Rytel

“We really eliminate ghosting.”

— Aaron Wang

“Candidates… try to talk in like XML or in Markdown… to try to prompt inject.”

— Aaron Wang

Autonomous AI phone/video screeningATS/HRIS integrations and workflow orchestrationRecruiting market inefficiency and high application volumeStaffing agencies as initial wedgeCandidate experience: no ghosting, always a first interviewCheating, prompt injection, and deepfake detectionStack-ranking, retention, and hiring-quality metricsSeries A use of funds and go-to-market emphasisRebrand from Apriori to AlexAI agents’ impact on the future of job hunting

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome