Manifesto
Hire smarter, stay human
“The best recruiters spend their day with people. Everything else should run in the background, and show its work.”
I got my first recruiting desk in London in 2008. Since then I've recruited agency-side in London and Sydney, led a headhunting team across EMEA and APAC, and hired in-house through two scale-ups. That's more than 15 years of it.
The best part of the job has never changed. It's the candidates: earning their trust, catching the small signals in a conversation, and going the extra mile for someone when it matters.
The worst part hasn't changed either: admin, red tape, slow processes and tools that don't talk to each other. Every hour that goes on that is an hour you're not spending with a candidate. Most good recruiters I know would go the extra mile for every candidate. They just don't have the time.
So I started building my own tools on the side. Every one of them came from a bottleneck I'd hit myself while recruiting. Agentiv is what happened when I stopped building fixes and built the whole thing.
The work around the work
A recruiter's week goes on searching, copying, chasing, scheduling and writing things up. The parts that actually decide a hire, the conversations, the judgement calls and the trust you build with a candidate, get whatever time is left over.
That ratio is upside down. Agentiv exists to flip it.
Agents do the legwork, people make the call
Agentiv's agents search, reach out, schedule, take notes and draft scorecards. They're good at it and they don't get tired.
They don't decide who gets hired. A hiring decision is a decision about someone's life, and that belongs to a person who can explain it. Agents prepare. People choose.
Show the reasoning, not a score
I don't trust a black box that says a candidate is 87% right for a job, and neither should you. So Agentiv doesn't hand out "AI scores". It tells you how well someone fits, in plain bands, and shows you why: the evidence from their profile, the moment in the interview, the question they nailed or missed.
If an agent did something, you can see what it did, why it did it, and undo it.
Candidates never got a vote
More than 100 people have written me recommendations over the years, and most of them say the same things: he went the extra mile, he was always available, he was honest and transparent. None of that is a talent. It's time. Time to message candidates on WhatsApp, to give them my personal number, to answer their questions when they actually need answering. And the tools make it the first thing to go when you're running 30 searches at once.
So Agentiv brings your LinkedIn and email conversations into one inbox, with WhatsApp next, and suggests a reply for each one. You always have something to start from, and you're still the one who sends it. Every part of Agentiv started like that, as a problem I hit in recruiting day after day.
Agentiv should give every recruiter that time back, so every candidate gets the same treatment.
Recruiting software is bought by companies and filled with people who never signed up for it. That's a responsibility, not a data asset. So candidate data is stored in Europe and used to hire, never to advertise. It comes in, goes out and gets deleted when it should. And every email sent through Agentiv says who sent it and why.
Fast is a feature, calm is a feature
Recruiting is stressful enough. The software shouldn't add to it. Agentiv should feel quick and quiet: fewer clicks, fewer tabs, fewer notifications shouting at you, and nothing that makes you guess what just happened.
Built in the open, with real talent teams
Agentiv is early, and I'd rather you hear that from me. We build it with design partners, real teams running real pipelines through it every week and telling us what breaks.
We ship most weeks, and we write every change down. That's what agentiv.md is for: release notes, the reasoning behind them, and this page. It's in plain words for people, and in plain Markdown for the AI tools they ask.
What we believe
- People decide. Agents prepare the work, people make the call.
- Show the reasoning. Evidence over scores, every time.
- Every action is visible and reversible. No silent automation.
- Every candidate gets the good version. Kept informed, treated with respect, and their data used only to hire.
- Fast and calm. Speed matters, and so does peace of mind.
- Write it down. If it shipped, it's on agentiv.md.
Hire smarter. Stay human. That's the whole idea. 💜
Tony James Founder, Agentiv. Helsinki.