The Cognitive Reviews & Product Details

The interview is the part I care about. I have trialled things described as AI interviewing where the candidate is really recording answers to a list. This is not that.

The conversation develops. A vague answer gets stayed with. Something important gets explored. Candidates have room to interact rather than talking into a form, which is the whole gap between this and a one-way video interview.

Watching the recording later, I usually understand the person and their experience in more detail than I expected. Our hiring managers have stopped treating the first round as something to redo Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would not make a hiring decision from an AI interview alone, and I do not think anyone should. For candidates in serious consideration I watch the recording and form my own view alongside the scorecard.

Some roles also need more time spent configuring what the interview should explore, because generic questions would tell us very little. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is very easy to get into. We describe the kind of person we need in normal language, look at what comes back and start working from real candidates. I do not spend time thinking about how to build the search.

Quality is consistent enough that we are not losing the first hour deleting irrelevant profiles. Enrichment and outreach sitting next to the search helps too. Once we find someone good there is barely any admin before we can contact them. Setting it up took an afternoon, not the week we had budgeted, and we did not have to touch Greenhouse to do it Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like more control over how results are organised when the pool is very large. Sometimes I know exactly how I want to slice a list and would prefer a few manual controls.

The normal workflow is straightforward though, and it took almost no training Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We have run several searches through The Cognitive where the best candidates did not have the obvious titles. That is where it earns its place. It works from the shape of someone's experience rather than whether their profile contains the exact words we started with.

Greenhouse is good at tracking people who already applied and no use for finding anyone outside that. Sourcing tools that work off keywords just do the same thing faster. This actually reaches sideways.

As a recruiter that is what I notice. I still know the market and I still read every profile. I am just not spending an afternoon on five keyword combinations to reach the same pool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Occasionally it makes a connection I do not agree with. Usually I can see how it got there once I open the profile, but not every unusual match is a good one.

It still needs recruiter judgment, which I am completely fine with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The scouting has been the most interesting part over time. At first we treated it as another sourcing tool. After using it across a few roles and reacting to what it surfaced, the results started landing much closer to what we would have picked ourselves.

It is especially useful when the ideal candidate is not one exact title. We reject someone who technically matches but is wrong, lean into a less obvious profile we like, and the next set reflects that.

Practically it means I am not writing and rewriting a Boolean search string for every variation of a role. I express what I want by choosing candidates instead, which is closer to how this actually works in my head. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We still correct its direction early in a search sometimes. If a role can be read several ways, the first group can be broader than we had in mind.

I would rather have that than an overly narrow search, but it does mean properly reviewing the first results Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What stood out over time is the scouting. It is not a search box where you rebuild the same filters for every role. As we use it and make decisions, the results move closer to the profiles we normally pay attention to.

That has mattered most on harder roles, where the right person is not obvious from a title or a few keywords. We have found people we would not have surfaced ourselves, and it got better as it saw more of how we work.

The rest helps too. Once someone looks interesting we move into outreach, scheduling and interviews without losing the context from the original search, which Ashby never managed on its own. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is still back-and-forth at the start of a role, especially when the profile is unusual or the hiring team has a very specific picture in mind.

We spend time on the first round and refine from there. After that it settles quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

How fast we get from an open role to candidates worth discussing. We describe who we want, work through the results, enrich the profiles and start outreach, instead of spending half a day building a list. It brings up people we would not have reached, which for us mostly means passive candidates we never had time to chase properly. It reads from Ashby rather than making us re-key everything, so getting started did not mean a migration project. It got more interesting once candidates replied. The interview is not the usual screen where everyone gets the same three questions. It stays with an answer, asks again when something is vague, and gives people room to actually talk. By the time we look at the recording and scorecard there is enough there for a proper internal discussion. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sourcing needs tuning at the start of a role. We adjust what we are asking for after the first set of candidates rather than expecting the first search to be right. I would also like more control in parts of the review workflow. Nothing that stops us using it, but the more we use it, the fussier we get about how candidate information reaches the team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interviewing surprised us most. We expected a fixed list of questions and a recording at the end.

What we got is a lot more involved. Candidates explain their experience, go deeper, ask things back, and the conversation follows what they are actually saying. If an answer is thin, it stays on the topic instead of moving to question four.

That makes the output more useful. We have the video interview, the scorecard and the feedback together, so we can see why someone was evaluated a certain way. Our hiring managers start their own conversations already knowing what is worth digging into. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Getting the role and interview criteria right upfront matters more than we expected. Too broad a brief gives you a broader evaluation, so we now spend longer on it.

There are also times we want to go past the scorecard and listen to part of the interview ourselves, particularly for stronger candidates. The recording makes that easy, but we still apply our own judgment before moving anyone forward. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use The Cognitive across most of our process, so sourcing, enrichment, outreach and interviews, and the thing that matters is that it stays connected.

We find candidates, get the contact details we need, run outreach and move people into scheduling without much manual work in between. We did not have to rip out Lever, which is honestly why it got approved internally.

Once interviews start, having the recording, scorecard and feedback in one place makes reviewing much easier. We are not left with just a transcript. We go back into the conversation, look at the evaluation and compare people with the role in mind. Everyone reviewing a candidate is working from the same thing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is real setup when we open a new role. Getting the requirements, interview flow and evaluation criteria right takes a proper session.

We have also learned to review the sourcing results and scorecards rather than treat them as final. The output is usually good, but there are always candidates where context matters more than a score. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What we liked most was having so much of the recruiting workflow connected in one place. We ended up using the platform a bit differently depending on the role, but the features we found most useful were sourcing, candidate enrichment, outreach, scheduling, and the AI interviewing process. The interview recordings, feedback, and scorecards were also valuable, especially when our team needed to revisit candidates later and make more consistent comparisons. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main thing we had to get used to was the initial setup and figuring out which parts of the platform made the most sense for our particular hiring process. We didn’t use every feature for every role, so there was some trial and error in setting up the workflow. Once we had that figured out, the day-to-day use was fairly straightforward. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The quality of the AI-driven sourcing has been impressive. It identifies profiles matching our technical requirements more accurately than other candidate sourcing software we have tried.

The data enrichment gives a very clear picture of a candidate's background, including contact details and previous project history, which makes the initial outreach much more personalised. We also lean on the scheduling tool to move sourced leads into a first interview round.

For technical sourcing, where the right person rarely has the predictable job title, this is where it earns its place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It would help to have more customisable reporting. The platform tracks candidate movement well, but building specific data visualisations for our weekly leadership meeting requires manual exporting.

That export is the one job we still do by hand every week. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.