Alex vs. Building It In-House

Building your own screening agent on a general-purpose model is more achievable than it was two years ago, and a competent engineer can have a working structured interview within a few days. What the prototype doesn't include is carrier-grade telephony, WhatsApp Business approval, connectors for 100+ ATS platforms, integrity detection against an adversary who improves monthly, and GDPR, SOC 2, CPRA and TCPA landing on your company rather than a vendor's. If you have engineering capacity and a genuinely unusual process, build it. If you'd rather own the hiring outcome than the infrastructure, buy. Here's the side-by-side.

What each option actually is

Building in-house is DIY on general LLMs. You compose a model, a prompt architecture, a voice or chat layer, storage, a review UI and whatever integrations you need, and you own the whole stack. Your recruiters still own all the interviews and follow up.

Alex is an AI recruiter. It conducts interviews over video, phone or WhatsApp, scores it against the role, verifies integrity and identity, coordinates scheduling against live calendars, and writes results back through 100+ ATS integrations, so your recruiters wake up to a vetted shortlist.

Head-to-head

full  ·  partial or limited  ·  not publicly stated

Where building in-house fits

Total control. You set the question flow, the rubric and the retention policy and own all three at every audit.

Fast prototypes. Teams do get something working on real requisitions in weeks.

If control over screening logic is your only constraint, building it will do the job.

Where Alex pulls ahead

The channels are infrastructure, not features

Reaching candidates where they'll answer means telephony with real carrier behaviour, a WhatsApp Business account that has cleared approval, SMS deliverability, and video that works on a five-year-old Android on patchy data. Each of those is a project with its own failure modes, and none of them is interesting engineering work.

Alex ships with video, phone and WhatsApp — calls and messages both — with SMS handling invitations, reminders and scheduling. Coordination is in the same bucket: automatic time-zone detection from area codes and configurable blackout hours so nothing lands at 11pm. So is write-back: 100+ ATS connectors that somebody has to keep working every time a vendor changes an endpoint.

Integrity detection is an arms race, not a feature

This is the piece most builds skip and then discover. Cheat detection scores video, audio and transcript for external assistance, AI-generated answers, multiple speakers, eye and head movement and voice-changing tools, with a threshold you set from 0 to 100 per role. Fraud verification scores identity from email, phone, IP and digital-footprint signals; ID verification adds a document-and-selfie check.

Self-built detection that works this quarter degrades next quarter, which makes this an ongoing research commitment with a permanent headcount attached. Ask whether you want that on your roadmap forever.

Compliance ownership moves to you

The truth is blunt here: GDPR, SOC 2, CPRA, TCPA, and state, local, national, and international law are all your responsibility.

Alex takes care of GDPR, SOC 2, CPRA, and TCPA. Price the build against that honestly: inference is the cheap part, and the real cost is the engineers, the auditors, and the legal review you now carry permanently.

What to scope before you commit

• Engineering weeks for v1, then a maintenance estimate signed by the person who'll own it
• Which channels you need, and who gets WhatsApp Business approval
• Which ATSs you must write back to, and whether anyone will maintain those connectors
• Your integrity detection plan for twelve months from now, not today
• Who in Legal signs off on GDPR, CPRA and TCPA
• Your true cost per screened candidate, including salaries, not just inference

The verdict

Build it if your process is genuinely unusual, you have engineering capacity to spare, and your legal team is comfortable owning candidate-data and outbound-contact exposure directly. Choose Alex if what you want is screened, verified candidates in your ATS next month, and you'd rather your engineers spent the quarter on something only your company can build.

See Alex on your own roles

Before you scope the build, it's worth seeing what you'd be rebuilding. In 30 minutes we'll run Alex on a requisition you're actually struggling to fill, show you the integrity signals on a live interview, and connect to your ATS — then you can price the build against it with real numbers.

Book a demo →

Compare Alex with other tools

Asendia · BrightHire · Bullhorn · ConverzAI · Eightfold · HeyMilo · HireVue · Metaview · Paradox · Phenom · Ribbon · SmartRecruiters · Tenzo · Your ATS's native AI

See the full comparison grid →