The Platform That Almost Does Everything vs. The Tool That Does One Thing Very Well

Humanly is a Seattle-based AI recruiting platform founded in 2019 by Prem Kumar, Andrew Gardner, and Bryan Leptich. The company graduated from Y Combinator the same year and has raised approximately $24 million in total funding across a pre-seed, seed round led by Zeal Capital Partners, and a $12 million Series A led by Drive Capital. In October 2025, Humanly acquired three companies simultaneously, Sprockets, Qualifi, and HourWork, in a roll-up strategy to build what it calls “the most comprehensive AI recruiting platform on the market.” The company employs just over 50 people and reports over 100 customers including Microsoft, Rogers Communications, MGM, and Dish Network. It plans to raise a Series B in the first half of 2026.

That’s a lot of motion for a company that just turned six. And that motion, the breadth of it, the pace of it, the sheer number of things Humanly is now trying to be, is the central question a buyer should ask before choosing it over SageScreen.

What Humanly Actually Is (and Isn’t)

Humanly started as a conversational AI chatbot for candidate screening and scheduling. That was its original product: automated text-based exchanges that qualified candidates, answered their questions, and booked interviews. Over time, it added voice screening, SMS outreach, reference checks, and interview analytics. The AI Interviewer, the video-based product that puts Humanly in direct comparison with SageScreen, launched in 2025. It is the newest feature in the platform, not the foundation.

With the triple acquisition in October 2025, Humanly’s product surface now spans sourcing, screening, scheduling, interviewing, applicant tracking, CRM, onboarding, training, retention analytics, and hourly worker engagement. Sprockets brought an ATS and frontline manager app. Qualifi brought automated phone screening. HourWork brought post-hire retention tools for QSR franchises and hourly workforces. The company’s own leadership describes the strategy as a “roll-up,” acquiring complementary products and integrating them into a unified system.

SageScreen does one thing: conducts AI-powered behavioral interviews that reveal how candidates think, communicate, and solve problems. That’s the entire product. There is no ATS, no CRM, no sourcing engine, no chatbot, no retention tool, no onboarding module. The question is whether that focus is a limitation or an advantage.

The Breadth vs. Depth Problem

Humanly’s pitch is consolidation: one platform for the entire hiring lifecycle, from first contact to post-hire engagement. That’s appealing in theory. Every HR team has experienced the frustration of managing seven different tools that don’t talk to each other. But consolidation comes with trade-offs that rarely show up in the sales demo.

None of this means Humanly will fail. It means a buyer choosing Humanly today is placing a bet on a future state, a fully integrated platform that doesn’t exist yet, rather than evaluating a finished product. When you buy SageScreen, you’re buying a tool that does exactly what it does today. The interview capability you see in the demo is the interview capability you get in production.

The Interview Itself: Scripted vs. Adaptive

This is where the comparison gets specific. Both platforms offer AI-conducted interviews. But the architecture of those interviews reveals fundamentally different philosophies about what an interview is for.

Humanly’s AI Interviewer emphasizes structured consistency. Their messaging is explicit: “Every candidate gets the same questions, format, and experience.” This is framed as an equity feature; same questions means no bias in question selection. The interviewer follows a predetermined script. Candidates answer. The platform transcribes, scores, and ranks.

SageScreen’s Sages are adaptive. The AI asks an opening question, listens to the response, and generates follow-up questions based on what the candidate actually said. If a candidate mentions managing a team through a product pivot, the Sage will probe that: how they communicated the change, what resistance they encountered, what they’d do differently. If a different candidate for the same role mentions resolving a conflict between engineering and sales, the Sage follows that thread instead. The competencies being evaluated are consistent. The conversational path is not.

The structural difference matters because it determines what kind of signal you get. A scripted interview tells you how a candidate responds to a specific set of questions. An adaptive interview tells you how a candidate thinks, because the follow-ups are designed to probe beyond prepared answers into the reasoning, trade-offs, and judgment underneath.

Consistency vs. Depth: The False Trade-off

Humanly frames same-question-for-everyone as an equity mechanism. And there’s surface logic to that: if every candidate gets identical questions, you’ve eliminated one source of variability. But this conflates two different things: consistent evaluation criteria and identical conversational paths.

In a human interview context, asking every candidate the same questions makes sense because human interviewers are the variable. Different interviewers ask different follow-ups, go on tangents, have unconscious preferences, and evaluate inconsistently. Standardizing the questions compensates for the humans.

But when the interviewer is AI, the consistency problem is already solved. A SageScreen Sage evaluates every candidate against the same competency framework, with the same scoring rubric, using the same behavioral indicators. The evaluation criteria are standardized. What’s not standardized is the conversational path, and that’s intentional, because different candidates have different experiences worth exploring. Forcing everyone through an identical script means you’re getting uniformly shallow information rather than variably deep insight.

The “Interview Every Candidate” Promise

Humanly’s core narrative is throughput: interview 100% of candidates instead of the 5% that typically get screened. This is a real problem they’re solving. Most companies can’t interview every applicant; they don’t have the recruiter hours. An AI that conducts interviews 24/7 removes that bottleneck.

SageScreen solves the same throughput problem. A Sage can interview unlimited candidates simultaneously, any time of day, with no scheduling coordination. The throughput advantage isn’t unique to Humanly; it’s inherent to any AI interview platform.

Where the platforms diverge is what happens after the interview. Humanly offers three review modes: autonomous ranking (the platform shortlists for you), “stream review” (Humanly’s own recruiters review and shortlist candidates on your behalf), or self-review (you read transcripts and make your own decisions). The first two modes are essentially outsourcing the hiring judgment. The third puts you back where you started, reading through transcripts manually.

SageScreen produces a structured evaluation for every interview, organized by competency, citing specific evidence from the conversation, with transparent scoring that any hiring manager can read and evaluate without statistical training. The report doesn’t just rank candidates against each other. It explains why: what the candidate said, what it revealed about their capabilities, and where the evidence supports or contradicts fit for the role.

Transparency and Pricing

Humanly does not publish pricing. Their website offers no dollar amounts, no tier breakdown, no per-unit costs. Every review and third-party analysis confirms the same thing: you must book a demo and request a custom quote. Multiple reviewers note that the platform “can be costly, especially for smaller teams or startups with tight budgets.” The pricing is customized based on company size, hiring volume, and features required.

This isn’t unusual for enterprise software. But it means you can’t evaluate Humanly’s cost-effectiveness until you’re already in a sales conversation. You can’t compare it to alternatives on a spreadsheet. You can’t present your CFO with a clear cost-per-hire analysis until someone from Humanly tells you what they’ll charge, and that number may be different from what they charged the last company that asked.

The Roll-Up Question

Humanly acquired three companies in a single month. That’s not a criticism; it’s a fact that creates a specific set of conditions any buyer should evaluate. Here’s what the industry press noted:

Roll-ups can create powerful platforms. They can also create Frankenstein products, stitched-together acquisitions with inconsistent UX, redundant features, and an engineering team stretched across too many codebases. The outcome depends on execution, and execution takes time. Humanly’s CEO has said the next 12 months will be about “integration, optimization, and customer impact.” That’s an honest statement. It also means the fully integrated platform is a 2026-2027 deliverable, not a 2025 reality.

Where Humanly Has a Narrow Advantage

If your organization needs a single vendor for the entire hiring lifecycle, sourcing through retention, and you’re willing to bet on the integration timeline, Humanly offers something SageScreen doesn’t attempt. SageScreen is not an ATS. It’s not a CRM. It doesn’t source candidates, schedule human interviews, manage pipelines, or track post-hire retention. If you need those things and want them from one vendor, Humanly is building toward that.

Humanly also targets high-volume hourly hiring, QSR, retail, hospitality, where the throughput advantage matters most and the depth of behavioral assessment matters least. If you’re hiring 500 entry-level positions per quarter and the primary bottleneck is screening speed, Humanly’s chatbot-first approach may move candidates through the funnel faster than a behavioral interview platform.

Where SageScreen Wins Outright

The Real Decision

Humanly and SageScreen represent genuinely different philosophies about how AI should participate in hiring. Humanly believes the value is in breadth, one platform touching every stage of the candidate lifecycle, from sourcing to retention. SageScreen believes the value is in depth, one capability executed with enough rigor that it actually changes the quality of hiring decisions.

If your hiring process is broken because you have too many disconnected tools and not enough automation across the pipeline, Humanly’s vision addresses that. If your hiring process is broken because you’re making decisions about people based on resumes and gut feel, because you’ve never had a way to understand how candidates actually think before extending an offer, that’s the problem SageScreen was built to solve.

Most companies lose their best candidates not because they couldn’t source them, couldn’t schedule them, or couldn’t get them into a funnel. They lose them because the interview itself, the moment where you’re supposed to learn who this person actually is, was either too shallow, too inconsistent, or too dependent on whichever human happened to be in the room that day. SageScreen exists because that problem deserves a dedicated solution, not a checkbox inside a platform that does eleven other things.