Most applicants never hear back. We started there.

Novexhire started in a shared office on Congress Avenue in 2021. Priya Raghavan had spent nine years running technical delivery at Ardenfield Talent Group, where her teams filled roughly 1,400 engineering roles a year. Daniel Okafor had built conversational voice systems at Quillon Labs, then spent two years watching recruiters paste interview notes into spreadsheets by hand. They kept arriving at the same complaint from opposite ends of the process. Recruiting had gotten very good at collecting applicants and very bad at talking to them.

The math was the problem. A single senior engineering req at their clients pulled 300 to 600 applications, and a recruiter carrying 18 open reqs could give each one about six seconds. Screening collapsed into keyword matching on the resume, so strong people with nonlinear careers, career gaps, bootcamp training or foreign degrees were filtered out before anyone spoke to them. An internal audit at Priya's last employer put it plainly: fewer than 8 percent of applications were actually read, and roughly 80 percent of applicants never got a response of any kind.

So they inverted the order of operations. Instead of reading resumes faster, they built agents that could hold a real screening conversation with every applicant, at 2 a.m., in Spanish or Tagalog, over WhatsApp. Signal Screening went live in 2022 with Kestrel Freight Systems, a Chicago logistics operator hiring about 200 warehouse technicians a quarter. It talked to all 4,100 applicants in the first month. The shortlist came back with 31 people the old resume filter would have discarded, and 9 of them were hired.

Novexhire is two businesses running on one system. The platform gives in-house teams sourcing, screening, interviewing and scoring through five AI agents. The agency puts our own recruiters on the req when a client would rather buy the outcome than the software. Today 84 people work from Austin, Chicago, Bogota, Madrid and Manila, and every hiring decision still ends with a human name attached to it.