By Grégory Hissiger, founder · April 2026
The recruiting market still runs on broken data, a dozen tools that don’t talk to each other, and teams who spend their day re-entering information instead of selling and hiring. Here’s what we’re building to change that.
The starting point
Before Cobalt, I was a business manager at Prime Engineering. My day-to-day was made of repetitive, low-value tasks: re-entering info into the CRM, hunting it down elsewhere because it wasn't there, following up with a candidate by hand, reformatting a CV to match a client's template.
It wasn't an execution problem. It was a structural problem the entire market shared, without naming it.
Stacking SaaS has never been a strategy
Around the CRM, we stacked tools: one for sourcing, one for enrichment, one for sequencing, one for calling, one for tracking. Each one expensive on its own. None of them really talking to each other.
There are no economies of scale in piling up SaaS. The stack grows, costs accumulate, and value doesn't follow.
The CRM is empty, and it is not an accident
CRM data is empty, incomplete, or plain wrong. That's no accident: we ask business managers and recruiters to manually type in what their tools should capture on their own. They don't. They do their real job.
The company's most valuable data — interactions with clients and candidates — ends up recorded nowhere.
AI on fragile foundations produces nothing
The moment you try to add an intelligent layer on top — AI, an agent, anything slightly ambitious — you realize it has nothing solid to stand on. Missing data, missing context, mediocre output.
The action is doomed before it starts. Without shared context, AI is just a gimmick.
Start from the data, not the tools
That's why I founded Cobalt. The idea is simple: bring all of your company's data into one place — your current CRM, your ERP (Boond Manager and others), calendars, mail, messaging.
We don't replace your stack. We make it finally useful.
Every interaction is data
Cobalt captures in real time every interaction of your day: phone calls, video meetings, in-person meetings, via transcription and enrichment. Internally, with candidates, with clients.
No one re-enters anything. Context accumulates on its own. And it becomes the raw material AI can finally stand on.
Search humans, not keywords
The moment a need is identified, Cobalt queries your internal database and multiple job boards in parallel, in one place. Search is semantic, not keyword-based.
You find the best profiles — not the ones who happened to write the right sentence on their CV.
Anticipate, stop waiting
Radar continuously scans the market to surface prospects ready to start your bench, or to welcome your top candidates.
Outreach sequences are built from the variants that actually convert for you. Iteration is automatic: messages refine themselves as more data comes in. You stop waiting for needs to land in your inbox.
The role is shifting
The world is changing, and the pace is accelerating. Tomorrow our role will be less about executing and more about supervising. Our value won't sit in raw action — it will sit in judgment, in relationships, in the decisions that require real discernment.
Cobalt is built for that shift. We orchestrate all your actions so you can focus on the ones that really matter. That's it.
— Grégory Hissiger