Why We’re Going “All-In” on All-In-One Recruiting Platforms — and Why is Nobody Building for Agencies?

All day, every day we speak to three types of people: in-house talent leaders, owners of world class recruiting agencies, and technology builders in the recruiting space and one thing has become abundantly clear: AI has cluttered the recruiting ecosystem with half-assed redundant solutions.

The entrepreneurs in the space are building variations of the same idea:

1. AI-powered interview transcription.
2. AI-powered resume ranking.
3. AI note-taking.
4. AI sourcing.
5. AI scheduling.
6. AI fraud detection.

While each of these solutions solve a problem, the problem is singular and unironically the solutions are all built on top of identical infrastructure: OpenAI’s API. The result? Dozens of point solutions producing the same outcomes with slightly different UIs. The signal-to-noise ratio is collapsing. Buyers are both overwhelmed and underwhelmed all at the same time.

As builders & investors, we believe this trend is unsustainable. The next winners in this space will not be feature wrappers.

They will be platforms — all-in-one systems that solve end-to-end workflows, not just single pain points.

The Era of Point Solutions Is Ending

Operators are starting to realize what we already see from 10,000 feet: if you're just solving one piece of the recruiting journey, you're replaceable and more importantly indistinguishable. Why would a buyer buy YOUR AI product powered by OpenAI APIs when there are a dozen other identical offerings?

The sales cycle has forced these builders into rapid pivoting, attempting to solve for the myriad of issues that recruiters experience while competing with new single-point solutions being built/launched in the space — it’s a land grab, but it’s also common sense: real value comes from solving for workflow, not features.

In other words: recruiting teams don’t want 20 tools. They want one system that actually works.

The future are platforms that unify the stack — where data, decisions, and automation live in the same ecosystem. That’s where things get interesting and that’s where real value will be created leveraging artificial intelligence.

Data Is the Next Battlefield

Every recruiting team is sitting on a goldmine of unique data: job reqs, candidate flow, hiring manager feedback, pipeline velocity, offer calibration, and more. This data is the DNA of a business and right now that data lives across spreadsheets, email chains, and disconnected/unintelligent SaaS tools.

The real opportunity isn’t just in AI — it’s in data intelligence.
The teams and tools that win the next cycle will be the ones that can:

• Aggregate data across the funnel

• Normalize it into usable patterns

• Deploy intelligent agents that make that data actionable

Companies realize the ocean of data they have acquired and are already finding agentic solutions to leverage their proprietary intelligence, the only department not doing this is recruiting. We want to see custom agentic solutions — AI agents purpose-built for recruiting orgs. We’re talking about copilots that understand historical pipeline success, candidate quality, offer decline patterns, and hiring manager behavior. This is the future — and we’re ready to back it or build it.

Builders Are Scared of Agencies

Here’s what continues to shock us:

90% of the startups we see are building for internal recruiting teams, despite the fact that internal recruiting is:

• The smallest segment of the recruiting world.

• The most saturated with tools.

• Often the slowest to adopt new tech since recruiters aren’t corporate decision makers are - non recruiters are.

The reason: Agency owners can’t be be bullshitted. They are sophisticated buyers with explicit needs and your single-point AI powered tool is not going to get budget. To sell into agency you need to build something that drives real ROI. Better UX, better UI, slightly better output - won’t cut it. Does your product drive revenue? Does it drive outcomes?

Why is Nobody Building For Both?
Where’s the platform that serves both internal and external recruiters?

If you can solve for both markets, you’re building a massive business. If you’re solving only for internal teams, you’re building in a box. This is the current Syelo obsession and a question we plan to spend a tremendous amount of time answering.

What We’re Building Next

Next month we will be announcing our very first incubated product targeted specifically at the “recruiter”. It’s called TalentDex and it has a really cool networking feature that empowers recruiters to create custom networks with their closest peers to share candidates in real time. TalentDex is not a B2B solution but rather sold directly to the professional. While most careers have tools built for professional development/empowerment (Figma for designers, Doximity for Doctors, etc.) recruiting has seemed to miss this boat. We’re excited to see if this category we have created has real legs and if so we will continue to double down, that said, we’re very intrigued by agency tooling.

After spending the last month recruiting agency owners into the Syelo ecosystem we have become obsessed with next-generation CRMs and ATSs designed for agency workflows. These firms don’t need bells and whistles — they need speed, automation, client control, candidate intelligence, and data leverage.

We want to design a system that does just that — not a "platform," but a power tool.

At Syelo, we believe in the collective buying power of recruiters. As a cooperative the future belongs to those who come together and build the future.

If you’re building in this space — or want to collaborate with the top operators in talent we’d love to talk.

-Syelo Ventures Team