Yesterday (September 29, 2026) LinkedIn announced Hiring Assistant 2, rolling out free from November to customers already using Hiring Assistant in English. That's the loudest news in recruiting AI this year, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the category: the biggest vendor still won't publish a price for its agent, and the thing it's selling is an AI that reads a job description, builds a shortlist, drafts outreach, and increasingly evaluates people.
There's no single best AI tool for recruiters. A solo agency recruiter, a 40-person startup, and a 5,000-person enterprise TA team need completely different things, and the prices run from $0 to "five figures per seat before the agent." So we sorted the seven tools worth your shortlist by job, priced them from the vendors' own pages where they exist, and flagged where each one breaks.
The short version
| Best for | Tool | Starting price (vendor-published) | | --- | --- | --- | | Teams that already live in LinkedIn | LinkedIn Recruiter + Hiring Assistant | Lite ~$170/mo; Corporate + agent quote-only | | Cheapest serious AI sourcing | Juicebox (PeopleGPT) | $99/seat/mo annual, free tier | | Solo recruiters who want depth | SeekOut Recruit Core | $149/mo annual, $179 monthly | | Agencies consolidating 4-6 tools | hireEZ | From $494/mo | | Sourcing + CRM, and staffing firms | Gem | $130/mo (1-10 FTE); staffing $99-$149/user | | Startups picking their first real ATS | Ashby | $300-$900/mo by company size | | Interview notes and scorecards | Metaview | Free (25 calls); Pro $60/user/mo |
The question that decides everything: does the AI find people, or judge them?
Every tool on this list does one of two jobs, and a lot of them now do both.
Finding is sourcing: searching a profile index, ranking matches, finding an email, sending a sequence. It's where AI has been genuinely transformative, and it's lightly regulated. New York City's Local Law 144, the one US law with real teeth here, explicitly says its bias-audit requirement does not apply when a tool is used to "scan a resume bank, conduct outreach to potential candidates, or invite applications" (per the city's own DCWP FAQ).
Judging is screening: scoring applicants, ranking your inbound pipeline, auto-rejecting, summarizing interviews into a hire/no-hire signal. That is the part that is regulated and litigated:
- NYC Local Law 144: any tool that "substantially assists or replaces" a hiring decision for an NYC-linked job needs an independent bias audit within the last year, a public summary, and candidate notice 10 business days before use.
- EU AI Act: employment AI is Annex III "high-risk." The Digital Omnibus (Regulation 1744/2026, applicable July 27, 2026) pushed those obligations from August 2, 2026 to December 2, 2027, but the Commission already opened its first formal investigations into hiring AI in June 2026. The runway got longer; the scrutiny didn't go away.
- Mobley v. Workday (N.D. Cal. 3:23-cv-00770-RFL): plaintiffs moved in September 2026 to certify four subclasses (African American applicants, women, applicants over 40, applicants with disabilities) who went through Workday's AI screening. The court's July 1 order already held that someone who applied only to Workday itself can be in the class if they were "subjected to the challenged discriminatory screening process."
So the practical rule: buy aggressively on the finding side, and buy carefully on the judging side. Before you turn on any "AI application review" or "auto-evaluate candidates" feature, ask the vendor for its bias audit, who's liable, and whether a human has to click reject. The tools below are ranked with that in mind.
1. LinkedIn Recruiter + Hiring Assistant
Best for: in-house TA teams whose candidates are on LinkedIn and who can afford the enterprise tier. Price: Recruiter Lite is sold self-serve at roughly $170/month (about $1,680/year annual), but LinkedIn's own product pages print no price for any Recruiter tier. Recruiter Corporate is quote-only, buyer-reported at roughly $8,999-$15,000 per seat per year. Hiring Assistant is a quote-only add-on on top.
The one real public rate card is LinkedIn's UK government G-Cloud 14 filing (dated October 2025): Recruiter at £8,925 per seat per year for 1-2 licences, and Hiring Assistant as an "Agentic AI Assistant Add-on" at a £6,350 standard list price per licence per year, with a launch promo that ran to June 30, 2026 at £2,079-£1,575. You can't hold more Hiring Assistant licences than Recruiter licences. You'll see "$35-$75 per seat per month" quoted around the web; we found no LinkedIn source for that, and it doesn't square with the government filing. Treat it as unverified.
What you're paying for is the network. No other index has LinkedIn's freshness, and the agent works inside the tool your recruiters already open every morning. Hiring Assistant 2 arrives free from November for existing English-language customers.
Where it breaks:
- Lite has almost no AI. The tier small teams buy to save money doesn't get AI-assisted sourcing, and Recommended Matches is throttled to roughly 10 a day. The AI worth buying is gated to Corporate/RPS+.
- You're buying a five-figure agent on top of a five-figure seat, without a list price. You negotiate against numbers other buyers leaked.
- The agent evaluates candidates. That puts it on the "judging" side of the line above. Your legal team should read the terms before it screens anyone for an NYC role.
2. Juicebox (PeopleGPT)
Best for: recruiters and startups who want natural-language AI sourcing without an enterprise contract. Price: Free (limited searches) · Starter $99/seat/month annual, $119 monthly · Growth $179 annual, $199 monthly · Business custom (annual only) · Juicebox Agents add-on $199 per agent/month.
Juicebox is the easiest way to see what modern AI sourcing feels like. Type "senior Rust engineers in Berlin who've worked at fintechs" and get a ranked list. Searches are unlimited on paid plans. It's also the cheapest serious entry point here, and it's the only one with a genuine free tier.
Where it breaks:
- The meter is contacts, not searches. Searching is unlimited, but contact and export credits cap at 500/month on Starter and 1,500/month on Growth. A busy agency recruiter burns 500 reveals fast.
- Agents cost extra, per agent. Autonomous sourcing is a separate $199/month line, so the "real" Juicebox bill for a hands-off setup is roughly double the seat.
- The pricing page disagrees with itself. Growth shows as $179 in the plan cards and $159 in the page's own structured data. Confirm at checkout.
3. SeekOut Recruit Core
Best for: solo recruiters and small TA teams who want enterprise-depth sourcing on a credit card. Price: 14-day free trial, no card · Recruit Core $179/month monthly, or $1,788/year upfront ($149/month) · higher Recruit tiers quote-only, annual.
SeekOut used to be enterprise-only. Recruit Core, launched in June 2026, changed that: 1B+ profiles, unlimited search, 500 verified contacts and 1,000 exports a month, cancel any time. It's especially strong for technical and diversity sourcing, where SeekOut built its name.
Where it breaks:
- 500 contacts is the ceiling. More than that means moving to the quoted Sourcing tier (750 contacts + 5,000 exports per seat), and that's annual-only.
- Everything above Core is a sales call again, including SSO and ATS integration.
- Annual is pay-upfront. The $149 figure means $1,788 paid on day one, not monthly instalments.
4. hireEZ
Best for: agencies and TA teams replacing several point tools (sourcing, contact data, sequencing, CRM) with one platform. Price: individual recruiters from $494/month, 7-day free trial. Team and enterprise are custom, and hireEZ openly prices against "the stack you're replacing."
hireEZ is refreshingly candid about its pricing: its own page says it used to publish per-seat rates and stopped because a flat seat price "stopped reflecting what we actually do." The pitch is consolidation. It covers an 800M+ profile index, AI matching, sequencing and CRM on top of your ATS, with a four-week verification before you sign.
Where it breaks:
- Highest published floor here. $494/month is roughly 3-5x Juicebox or SeekOut Core for a single seat. If you only need search and email reveal, you're overpaying.
- Consolidation pricing is a negotiation frame. Walk in with your current per-tool spend totalled and get credits, seats and renewal terms as separate written line items.
- Contact reveals are still metered on lower tiers, and the allocations are contract-specific.
5. Gem
Best for: teams that want sourcing, CRM and analytics in one place, and staffing firms that want published per-user pricing. Price: Gem All-in-One for 1-10 FTE shows $130/month annual (list $270). Under 30 employees get six months free, then 50% off. Staffing firms: Essentials $99/user/month annual (150 email credits, up to 3 users), Professional $149 annual / $199 monthly (750 credits, up to 10 users), Enterprise custom. Mid-market in-house is quote-only.
Gem's best feature is a pricing decision: unlimited AI sourcing per licensed recruiter, instead of credits. In a category where every other vendor meters something, that's worth real money to a team opening a lot of roles. The analytics are the best on this list.
Where it breaks:
- Staffing plans are staffing-only. In-house teams, and VC/PE firms, aren't eligible for the $99/$149 pricing.
- Email-finding is still credited. 150/month on Essentials goes fast.
- Mid-market is opaque. Buyer-reported ranges run from about $25,000 to $60,000+ a year. Gem doesn't publish those numbers, so treat them as anchors, not quotes.
6. Ashby
Best for: startups and scale-ups choosing an AI-native ATS with serious reporting. Price: All-In-One Foundations (up to 100 employees) is priced by company size: $300/month (1-10), $400 (11-25), $500 (26-50), $700 (51-75), $900 (76-100), 10% off for annual commitment. Plus (101-1,000) and Enterprise (1,000+) are quote-only. AI Notetaker and Advanced Scheduling are paid add-ons, texting is $90 per 1,000 messages, and outbound sourcing is capped at 1,000 messages/month on Foundations.
Ashby is the ATS we'd pick for a growing company in 2026. It gives you ATS, CRM, scheduling and analytics in one data model, with AI woven through rather than bolted on. One trap: the calculator loads on the 11-25 band, so the "$400/month" figure copied all over the web is the second band, not the entry price.
Where it breaks:
- It's priced by headcount, not recruiters. Your bill grows when the company grows, even if the TA team doesn't.
- Steep learning curve, with onboarding measured in weeks. It rewards committed users and punishes occasional hirers.
- The AI extras are add-ons. The notetaker you'd assume is included isn't.
7. Metaview
Best for: anyone who conducts interviews. It's the easiest win on this list. Price: AI Notes Free ($0, 25 calls/month) · Pro $60/user/month, unlimited calls · Enterprise custom. Application Review has its own free tier (50 applications/month) and a 500-review tier at $150. Sourcing agents are priced separately (the page shows $100 and $300/user tiers).
Metaview records, transcribes and summarizes interviews into scorecards, and it integrates with Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Workday. Notes regenerations and assistant questions carry no extra credits. Its application screening is built not to auto-reject, which puts it on the right side of the find-vs-judge line.
Where it breaks:
- Every agent bills separately, per user. Notes, sourcing and screening stack up with headcount.
- The pricing page opens on the sourcing tab, so a quick read gives you the wrong product's price.
- Sourcing doesn't replace LinkedIn. Metaview's own blog concedes most teams add it on top.
Sidebar: the tool we left off, and why
Paradox (Olivia) is the dominant conversational AI for high-volume frontline hiring: chat-based applications, screening questions, automatic interview booking. Workday completed its acquisition on October 1, 2025, and it's now sold as the "Workday Paradox Candidate Experience Agent." We didn't rank it because it's enterprise, quote-only, and increasingly a Workday module rather than a tool you pick on its own. We also think the pending Mobley v. Workday class-certification fight is reason enough for any buyer to ask hard questions before wiring automated screening into a Workday stack. If you hire hundreds of hourly workers a month, put it on your shortlist anyway.
The meter is the price, not the sticker
Almost every tool here meters something, and it's rarely the thing on the headline:
| Tool | What's actually metered | | --- | --- | | LinkedIn Recruiter | InMails (~30 Lite / ~150 Corporate per month); agent capacity tiers (sourced + evaluated candidates) | | Juicebox | Contact + export credits (500 / 1,500 per month); agents per unit | | SeekOut Core | 500 contacts, 1,000 exports per month | | hireEZ | Contact-credit reveals (contract-specific) | | Gem | Email-finding credits (150 / 750 per user), but sourcing unlimited | | Ashby | Outbound messages (1,000/mo Foundations), texts at $90/1,000, company headcount | | Metaview | Calls (25 free), application reviews (50 free / 500 at $150), per agent per user |
Before you buy, estimate how many contacts you reveal per month, not searches. That one number decides whether a $99 seat stays $99.
Head-to-head comparison
| | LinkedIn + HA | Juicebox | SeekOut Core | hireEZ | Gem | Ashby | Metaview | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Main job | Network + agent | AI sourcing | AI sourcing | Sourcing platform | Sourcing + CRM | ATS | Interview notes | | Published price | Lite only (~$170) | Yes | Yes (Core) | Floor only | Small co. + staffing | Foundations | Yes | | Free option | No | Free tier | 14-day trial | 7-day trial | 6 months free (under 30 FTE) | No | Free tier | | Monthly billing | Lite | Yes | Yes | Yes | Staffing | Yes | Yes | | Evaluates candidates? | Yes (agent) | Ranks | Ranks | Ranks | Ranks (AI review on Ent.) | Yes (AI features) | Screening, no auto-reject | | Replaces an ATS? | No | No | No | No | Small co. plan | Yes | No |
What we'd actually buy
- Solo agency recruiter (~$2,500-$4,200/yr): SeekOut Core annual ($1,788) + Metaview Pro ($720) + LinkedIn Recruiter Lite annual (~$1,680) if your candidates live there. That's about $4,200 all-in, or about $2,500 without Lite.
- Seed-stage startup, first recruiter (~$4,300/yr): Ashby Foundations at the 11-25 band with the annual discount (~$4,320). If you're under 30 people, run Gem's six free months first and compare. Add Juicebox Free for top-of-funnel sourcing.
- Series B, 3 recruiters (~$15,000/yr before LinkedIn): Ashby (quote), Juicebox Growth x3 annual ($6,444), Metaview Pro x3 ($2,160). Add LinkedIn Corporate only when you hire in markets your network doesn't cover.
- Enterprise TA: LinkedIn Recruiter Corporate + Hiring Assistant, plus Gem or hireEZ for CRM/consolidation. Budget time for a bias audit before any "judging" feature touches NYC or EU candidates.
Bottom line
AI sourcing is cheap, good and mostly unregulated: a $99-$179 seat from Juicebox or SeekOut gets you 80% of what enterprise sourcing did three years ago. AI judgment is where the price, the opacity and the legal exposure all go up at once. Spend freely on finding people, keep a human on every reject, and make any vendor selling "autonomous evaluation" show you its bias audit before you show it your applicants.
Disclosure: We have no affiliate relationship with LinkedIn, Juicebox, SeekOut, hireEZ, Gem, Ashby, Metaview or Workday/Paradox. Every tool here was reviewed independently. Prices are from vendor pricing pages and help docs where published, and from clearly labelled buyer-reported or government procurement data where not, checked September 2026. Recruiting software is re-priced often, so confirm at checkout.
Related Reading
- Best AI Meeting Assistants 2026: if you want interview notes outside a recruiting suite
- Best AI Agents for Work 2026: how agent credits and meters actually work
- Best CRM Tools 2026: for agencies weighing a general CRM against a recruiting CRM