Manifesto · August 2026
There is a part of hiring no machine should touch.
The conversation, and the call you have to defend in a debrief afterwards. Vouch is built for everything around that, and it stops at the edge of it. Written down here so you can hold us to it.
How we got here
We tried the smaller versions first. They hit the same wall.
Vouch did not set out to be an ATS. It became one because everything short of it could only see a single step of the job.
- First
A marketplace for people who were not looking. Tips, referrals, vouching. Getting someone hired through the person who already knew them worked well enough that it is still in the product.
- Then
AI screening, sold on top of whatever system the customer already ran. SmartRecruiters, SuccessFactors and the rest. It helped. It never changed how the day went, because it could see the candidate and nothing else.
- So
Once you can say in ten seconds whether someone fits a role, the application flow, the interview guide and the shortlist all want rebuilding around that answer. That is not work you can do from a sidebar.
Around a thousand recruiters have shaped this, four hundred of them in interviews over two months. What they told us was the same every time: the tracking is fine, the help is thin, and the data already sitting in the system never comes back out.
What we don't build
The refusals are the position.
Anyone can list features. Each of these has been asked for by a customer, could ship this quarter, and was decided against. If we change our minds, this page changes first.
AI interviewers.
We will not put a model in the chair across from a candidate. An interview is two people reading each other, and the judgement running in both directions is the point of it. The assistant prepares you, sits in, takes the notes and remembers what was said. It does not take the seat.
Agents that work candidates on your behalf.
No bots opening conversations in your name, and no outreach sent at volume. The assistant helps you write the message and sharpen it. You send it, and you own every word of it.
A notetaker that updates the record by itself.
After an interview you get a mail asking for your assessment, with a button that fills in what the AI heard. You have to press it. That friction is deliberate: a transcript can read like a strong match when the candidate was reading answers off a document, and you are the one who caught that.
Sourcing sold as a solved problem.
The web search finds people and prepares the approach. It does not do the persuading. Getting a passive candidate to consider a move is a relationship, and we are not going to claim a model handles that. It is one more way to find good people, and we sell it as exactly that.
Channel recommendations we get paid for.
We suggest the channels that fit the role, including the ones we have no commercial deal with, and tell you how to post there yourself. A recommendation you cannot trust is worth nothing.
Lock-in as a business model.
The price is on the website. Seats, roles, candidates and storage are unlimited, unused credits roll over, and the AI can be switched off entirely so Vouch runs as a plain ATS. If you stay, we would rather it were because the thing works.
What we believe
What we build, and the thinking under it.
- 01
Take the admin off the person, leave the judgement.
Drafting, screening, scheduling, transcription, summaries, translation. The unglamorous middle of the day is where the hours disappear, and where a model earns its keep. Clear it and you get back the part of the job you were hired for.
- 02
Every search should start where the last one finished.
The expensive thing a recruiter produces is the thinking around a candidate: the transcript, the read, the reason you passed in March. Most systems keep the CV and lose the rest. Vouch keeps both and brings them back when a similar brief opens. When someone leaves the team, the searches they ran stay behind.
- 03
Understand the job before you judge the person.
A sales lead for a call centre and a sales lead for a five-person startup can share a requirements list and be nothing alike. So the work starts with the client and the role in real detail, in a conversation rather than a form. The ad, the screening questions, the interview guide and the shortlist are never better than that first hour.
- 04
Show the evidence, or say there isn't enough of it.
Every verdict arrives with the quote it rests on and reasoning you can read. Where the evidence is thin the wording is thin, and "not enough here to say" is an answer the system is allowed to give. You should be able to defend a shortlist in a debrief without rebuilding it from memory.
- 05
Override anything. It stays overridden.
Vouch does not write over a manual change. Adjust a rating, a ranking or a note and it stands, including next week. The override is logged, and the reasoning you gave carries into the next role. The audit trail is a screen in the product, open whenever you want it.
- 06
An assistant that agrees with you isn't helping.
Left to themselves these models tell you what you want to hear. We build against that. The assistant asks where a brief is still vague, says what a rating has no evidence for, and marks what should be tested in the interview. Agreement is cheap.
- 07
Your data is yours, and the law is a screen.
Candidate data never trains foundation models, and that sits in the data processing agreement rather than on a page like this one. Retention rules you set, the right to information for candidates you sourced instead of received, erasure, objection, and a route to a human for anyone who would rather not be assessed by a model. Written into the data model by people who read the regulation before they built.
The person who knows the candidates should win. Everything above is our attempt to make what they know survive longer than one search.
Some of this will look different in a year. We will update the page when the world moves or our own thinking does. We will not update it because a feature turned out to be hard to ship.
Meet the founder
Building Vouch, the AI-native ATS for the Nordic recruiter.
Book a chat →- Håkon's family has a long tradition with mattress production. Ask about spring vs foam mattresses and he'll talk for an hour straight.
- Studied in Bath, big fan of British alternative rock. Radiohead and Arctic Monkeys are usually on repeat on his headset.
- Hosts his own podcast about founder journeys, Støttehjulet. Maybe you're the next guest?
- Has a million side projects on the go. Currently football coach, marathon runner, pizza baker, and slide producer in his spare time.