Elly pairs recruiters with AI on every search, promising faster hiring at half the cost

Why it matters

Elly is testing a practical AI business model: automate recruiting's repetitive work, keep an expert accountable for the outcome, and retain the resulting data for the next hire.

Kristen Habacht, Elly's CEO and co-founder, launched a recruiter-plus-AI search model on September 10, placing a human recruiter on every assignment while software handles much of the sourcing, screening and coordination.

The New York-based recruiting platform says its AI searches for candidates, evaluates experience and fit, flags potential concerns and ranks matches. Recruiters calibrate the search, assess candidates and guide hiring managers through the final decision. Elly claims this combination completes searches twice as fast as a traditional agency at roughly half the cost, though Elly has not published the methodology, sample size or measured search periods behind those figures.

The model reflects the operating problems Habacht encountered before becoming a recruiting founder. She was Trello's first revenue hire and served as vice president of sales as the work-management software maker moved toward its 2017 acquisition by Atlassian. Habacht later held sales leadership roles at Atlassian, became president and COO of ecommerce software maker Shogun, and served as chief revenue officer at Typeform.

That career made Habacht a frequent hiring manager before it made her a recruiting executive. Her thesis at Elly is that hiring software has left recruiters managing a collection of disconnected systems while the useful context from interviews, scorecards and past searches gets scattered or forgotten.

"AI is changing recruiting, but we don't believe the answer is to take humans out of the process," Habacht said in Elly's launch announcement. Elly's bet is that customers will pay for automation more readily when an accountable recruiter remains attached to the work.

A service layer around the software

Elly already offered an applicant tracking system, AI sourcing, application review, structured interviews, scheduling and searchable hiring records. The September 10 launch defines how Elly intends to package those tools: customers can bring Elly into an existing recruiting function or have Elly run a search from the initial role definition through a shortlist and offer.

Each engagement begins with a recruiter helping the hiring manager define the role and its evaluation criteria. Elly says its sourcing system scans more than 10,000 profiles before narrowing the field, while recruiters curate the pipeline. AI can also review inbound applications and conduct structured screening interviews. Elly then sends hiring managers three to five finalists with scorecards, according to Elly's description of the service.

Elly's software remains with the customer after the search. Candidate records, interview feedback, hiring decisions and company preferences can be reused when another position opens. A finalist passed over for one role can be resurfaced months later with the earlier interview context intact.

That retained data is central to Elly's pitch. A conventional recruiting agency generally charges for each new assignment and rebuilds the candidate pool around the current job. Elly says agencies typically bill $30,000 to $50,000 per role. Elly wants the first paid search to create a system that lowers the work required for the next one.

The structure also gives Elly a route into early-stage companies that need recruiting help before they can justify a full-time talent function. A founder gets a recruiter for the active search and keeps the software afterward. Elly gets service revenue, product usage and a growing store of hiring data tied to that customer.

Built after watching recruiters coordinate calendars

Elly co-founder and COO Nic Mahaney has said he conducted roughly 300 conversations in six weeks while studying recruiting workflows. In one session, he watched a recruiter spend about 20 minutes coordinating a single interview across eight calendars, an applicant tracking system, email and Slack.

That observation pushed Elly beyond the meeting-notetaker Mahaney had initially considered. The resulting platform covers job descriptions, pipelines, sourcing, application review, interviews, notes, scheduling and scorecards in one system.

Elly describes its founding vision as giving recruiters and interviewers enough time to pay attention to candidates. The argument is straightforward: software should carry information between steps so candidates do not repeat the same answers and recruiters do not reconstruct decisions from scattered notes.

Habacht and Mahaney funded that build with $8 million in pre-seed financing announced on February 25. Sorenson Capital led the round, with Atomic and Next Wave Capital participating. Elly did not disclose a valuation.

The February announcement introduced Elly's broader hiring platform. Elly followed in June with AI Sourcer, a conversational tool for finding candidates and managing outreach. The September release moves the focus from individual product functions to the combined search service.

Elly is selling accountability with the automation

Recruiting technology vendors have taken several routes into the same workload. Alex automates outreach, screening, interviews, verification and scheduling while leaving recruiters involved. Findem emphasizes a talent-data layer assembled from public and licensed information. Elly is choosing a more service-heavy entry point by assigning a recruiter to every search and leaving the underlying system with the customer.

That makes Elly closer to a software-enabled agency than a self-serve recruiting tool. It also creates a harder operating model. Elly must maintain recruiter quality while improving the software enough to preserve the promised speed and cost advantages. Revenue and capacity remain partly tied to people even as the product automates more work.

Elly has not published customer count, completed-hire volume or revenue. The claimed speed and cost improvements therefore remain marketing assertions rather than independently tested benchmarks. The more durable part of Elly's proposition is the shared memory: each search produces structured information that can shorten later searches and help a recruiter understand how a customer actually makes hiring decisions.

Elly is also inviting 100 job seekers to complete interviews and be matched with employers through an application program. The figure is a launch target, rather than a count of people already placed. The program gives Elly another way to demonstrate the model while adding candidates and interview data to its system.

Habacht is betting that hiring managers do not want a machine making the final call. They want fewer resumes to review, fewer calendars to reconcile and a recruiter who can explain why a candidate belongs on the shortlist. Elly's latest launch packages that preference as the product.