They Tested the Market. Then They Came Back to Alex.

Tech Holding's VP of Talent Acquisition did what every diligent buyer should: he piloted Alex, then spent 90 days testing the strongest alternative he could find. Alex won him back. Today the same four-person recruiting team runs thousands of AI interviews a year, and Alex has become the standardized first round for every niche role the firm fills worldwide.

The Customer

Tech Holding is a technology-first consulting company founded in 2016, headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, with roughly 250 employees and contractors across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Its clients span media and entertainment, healthcare and wellness, retail and e-commerce, education, real estate, financial services, hospitality and live events, technology, and nonprofit organizations, and the roles are correspondingly demanding: niche, senior, technical, and on tight client-driven deadlines, often requiring qualified, vetted candidates to be ready for client review within a week.

Andrew McAlister, VP of Talent Acquisition, leads a deliberately lean global team: four recruiters, including himself, covering every market outside India, plus three dedicated recruiters for the India business. As Andrew shared, "At Tech Holding, our recruiting environment is very dynamic because we support different clients, different technologies, geographic locations, and specialized skill sets."

The Challenge

Before AI screening, Tech Holding was not short on candidates. It was short on qualified signal.

• Screening niche roles by resume meant keyword matching, and no recruiter can master every specialty. Polished resumes, including AI-generated ones, could reach technical interviews and miss the mark.
• Interviewer time came straight off client projects. As Andrew shared: "Our interviewers' time is very expensive because we're consultants. Every time they're pulled to interview, that means they're not working on a project."
• Manually working through hundreds of applicants for one urgent role could take a recruiter multiple days the deadline did not allow.

Alex solved this from the first pilot. But before committing to a year, Andrew wanted proof he had picked the best tool on the market, not just the first good one.

The Solution

Andrew spoke to five more providers and ran a full 90-day pilot with the one that advertised the deepest Greenhouse integration. The comparison was clarifying, "Before I locked into a year, I wanted to date a few AIs and make sure we were choosing the right long-term partner. But, I pretty much started to miss Alex pretty quickly, because everything was a lot slower and it didn't feel as intuitive."

Side by side, the differences showed up everywhere that mattered to Tech Holding:

1. Interview quality. The competitor AI constantly cut candidates off and felt robotic. "I didn't think the quality of the interview was matching the quality of what we're looking for and who we were as Tech Holding," Andrew shared. Alex's interviews felt human, asking follow-ups Andrew says he would have asked himself.
2. Workflow fit. Tech Holding's roles change constantly. Editing questions and job details in the other platform was slow and jumbled; in Alex it is fast and linear.
3. Integration. Even the competitor's "advanced" Greenhouse integration offered no more than Alex, and Alex kept improving. "Now it's really a partnership between the two versus two completely different systems that I'm having to manage independently. They're actually working together on their own."
4. Fraud and cheat detection. Tech Holding has had candidates turn out not to be who they said they were, and manual checks (scanning LinkedIn, listening for someone in the background) could never keep up. Alex flags VPN use, location mismatches, and even the minutes of an interview where a candidate appears to be reading answers, giving the team hard data points, "[Alex] doesn't make the ultimate decision, but it allows me to… be a private investigator."
5. Partnership. During the competitor pilot, support questions went unanswered. Meanwhile, Alex kept sending updates on features built from Andrew's earlier feedback.

"We felt a little homesick. We missed Alex."

The competitor agreed to end the pilot early, and Tech Holding came back. Alex is now the standardized first evaluation layer for every role, screening 24/7 across time zones, with fraud detection flagging VPN use, location mismatches, and candidates reading answers as data points for human review.

The Results

Since returning, the same-sized team has produced dramatically more, and gotten back time, protection, and peace of mind along the way.

• 15 hires from candidates who interviewed with Alex in 2026.
• More than 2,700 AI interviews completed in 2026 alone, with no added headcount.
• A 500-applicant urgent role screened in about 30 minutes, with dozens of completed interviews waiting the next morning, versus the multiple days one recruiter would have spent reviewing resumes manually.
• Human time is spent more intentionally. Alex handles the first gate, recruiters apply "human eye and judgment" to scored, recorded interviews, and only higher-caliber candidates reach the firm's technical interviewers, protecting billable consulting hours. As Andrew wrote in his own summary, "I don't see AI as replacing recruiter judgment. I see it as helping us use human time more intentionally."
• Progress never stops. With hiring across multiple regions and time zones, interviews run while the team sleeps, so mornings start with results instead of a queue.
• The business is protected. Fraud flags such as VPN use, location mismatches on on-site roles, brand-new LinkedIn profiles, and reading detection now surface risks before a candidate ever reaches a client engagement, saving investigation time and protecting the trust clients place in the firm's people.
• Candidate feedback on Alex interviews has been overwhelmingly positive, protecting the white-glove experience the firm is known for.

"It's like having a person that just never sleeps, that can interview multiple people at once. It is that all-star on your team that's always available."

Having tested the market himself, his advice to peers is simple:,"I think this is a tool where if you're not using it, you're losing. You're missing out."

‍