Carv Hands the Recruiter's Dullest Work to AI

A candidate submits a CV, waits for a reply, and minutes later finds themselves talking to an AI agent that asks questions, books the next step and keeps the process moving. For the employer that can mean less admin and faster hiring. For the candidate, the same encounter can feel either impressively smooth or fairly impersonal, depending on how the company has built the experience. That gap is much of what makes Carv interesting from a brand perspective.

Amsterdam-based Carv appears on Wired UK's list of Europe's hottest startups. The company develops AI for recruitment and has moved from automating administrative tasks around interviews and candidate data to offering AI agents that can take over large parts of the workflow in high-volume hiring. Carv now describes its service as a system where AI agents can handle screening, scheduling, candidate contact and administration, among other things.

Giving the recruiter the people back

Carv's core idea is easy enough to grasp. Recruiters have chosen a profession where people ought to be most of the job, yet they spend a significant share of their time writing notes, moving information between systems, booking meetings and keeping candidate data up to date. Carv wants to hand that kind of work to AI and let recruiters spend more time on relationships with candidates and hiring managers.

It is a good product story, because the technology is not positioned as a replacement for the human but as a way to let the human do more of what she is actually good at. Carv uses the phrase "zero-admin recruitment", which makes a fairly technical offering easy to understand. The company has also stated that the business grew more than tenfold during 2024, and has since broadened its offering through, among other things, the acquisition of the conversational AI platform Recrubo.

There is a clear link to retail and other people-intensive industries. Carv works with companies including Carrefour, DHL, ManpowerGroup and G4S, and Carrefour has together with Carv communicated how AI is used to shorten the time from application to hire in recruitment with large candidate volumes.

For a retailer that needs to hire hundreds of people, that is obviously interesting. For anyone working with brands, there is another question that matters at least as much: what happens to the employer brand when the first person a candidate meets is no longer a person?

The AI agent becomes part of the employer brand

Companies have long invested heavily in how the store looks, how customer service sounds and how products are packaged. Recruitment, on the other hand, has often been left to its own devices, even though for many people it is the first real encounter with the organisation.

As AI takes on more responsibility in the process, that becomes harder to ignore. An AI agent contacting a candidate represents the employer just as much as a receptionist, a store manager or a customer service agent does. Tone of voice, pace, the questions, the information and the way a rejection is delivered therefore become brand questions, not just technical settings.

Carv has itself started speaking more clearly about candidate experience, and runs seminars on how consumer brands can treat candidates more like their best customers. I find that an interesting direction, because recruitment technology is otherwise easily reduced to efficiency and cost savings.

A fashion, beauty or retail company can spend twenty years building a distinctive tone of voice towards its customers, and then let the recruitment system write to future employees in language that sounds like a municipal parking authority. The logic is hard to see.

BBMB's recommendation: make candidate experience a bigger part of Carv's position

Carv already holds a clear functional position around automation and efficiency, but BBMB would push the brand further towards the interplay between AI and human experience. The company could become the player that not only promises faster hiring but also helps clients ensure the candidate recognises their culture and personality throughout the process.

In practice, that would mean building tone of voice and employer brand into the implementation of the AI agents. A candidate applying to an international fashion house should not have exactly the same experience as someone applying to a logistics centre, even if the underlying technology is identical. How the AI agent expresses itself, which information it prioritises and how it follows up should be able to reflect the employer's own identity.

This sits close to BBMB's work with strategic brand development, storytelling and personal brands: it is not enough to articulate an identity on a presentation slide, it has to be felt in every encounter with the company.

Carv also needs to watch the AI vocabulary

Carv currently uses terms like "agentic AI", "AI agents" and "AI transformation", which makes sense given what the company sells. The problem is that the same vocabulary appears across much of the tech industry and quickly loses its ability to distinguish any single company.

Carv's more interesting story, to my mind, is not about how many AI agents you can install but about what recruiters can do once the admin disappears. The brand grows stronger if the technology is allowed to be the engine while the human remains the story.

That instinct already shows in Carv's own content, where the founders return again and again to the relationship between recruiters and candidates. Co-founder Matthijs Metzemaekers writes and appears regularly in content about how AI is changing recruitment work, and the company runs its own podcast on the future of talent acquisition.

The founders can own a bigger conversation

BBMB would also develop the founders' personal profiles here. Matthijs Metzemaekers and Barend Raaff already have a relevant platform, since the question of AI in recruitment touches almost every larger employer, but they could take a broader position than mainly discussing recruitment technology.

They could, for instance, lead the conversation about what happens to the relationship between companies and candidates when AI becomes the company's first representative, which parts of recruitment should never be automated, and why employer branding has to keep pace as the technology develops. Questions like those are comprehensible even to people who have never opened an ATS, and they give Carv the chance to become a voice in a larger business conversation.

It is also considerably more interesting than another LinkedIn post about how AI will change everything. Most people have absorbed that news by now.

The best AI agent should feel like the company it works for

Carv has a product that solves a concrete problem and clients that show the technology works in large organisations. The next opportunity is to make the candidate a clearer part of the whole brand story, and to help clients see recruitment AI as one more point of contact where their identity is at stake.

If Carv succeeds, it can move from being the company that reduces recruiter admin to being the company that defines how people should meet employers at a time when first contact is increasingly made with a machine.

That is a far more interesting position to own.