In 2015, when French President Emmanuel Macron was the country’s Minister of the Economy, a 29-year-old named Lea Peersman Pujol managed to convince him and other top French politicians to attend a Paris hackathon she organized called “Rendezvous Carte Blanche.” The goal was to develop digital tools to help students and workers with their career orientation.
Peersman, who at the time was working for the ESSEC Business School as executive director of the Edgar Morin Research Department on Complexity, handed Macron a blank card and told him it was his ticket to reinvent himself.
Now she wants Macron to give her “carte blanche” to orient the careers of France’s public servants with the help of AI talent agents created by Lign, the French startup she co-founded. But she doesn’t want to stop there. Peersman wants Lign to offer workers and managers everywhere the chance to benefit from AI-powered career agents built for business professionals and the companies who recruit and invest in them. The goal is to build a dynamic and fluid talent market.
“Think of Lign as the AI talent agency of the future,” says Peersman, who launched the company in January in collaboration with co-founder Pramod Thangali, an experienced Silicon Valley software engineer who previously served as vice-president of engineering at Grammarly, an English language writing assistant software tool.
“Big corporates are so bad at understanding and managing people,” says Peersman. “So, three things are happening: you have people who are completely lost, people who are not in love with their job and don’t know what to do next, and people who know what they want to do but need help to accelerate.”
Movie and sports stars have their own agents. So, she says, why shouldn’t everyone else? “Imagine if you always had the right information, the right opportunities, and the right people to support you at every stage of your career. That’s the future we’re building with Lign.”
Unlike many AI tools there is no training necessary for Lign’s mobile-first app. Employees just talk to their AI agent. These AI talent agents will help workers build their resume, provide career intelligence and move with them throughout their careers, she says.
Companies benefit because the agents give them a 360° dynamic view of the talent to help leaders recruit, compose, and set up their teams for success, says Peersman. “It is like having your own talent CRM,” she says.
Lign, which is just getting started, is tapping into an important trend. Collaboration between AI and humans is reshaping how the recruitment process works, helping workers forge new career paths and aiding companies to better tap into their own talent pool.
A March 28 article published on the World Economic Forum’s website talks about the effectiveness of AI-human collaboration in recruiting. Stanford researchers Emil Palikot, Ali Ansari, and Ada Aka conducted an experiment in collaboration with Nima Yazdani from the University of Southern California comparing two distinct recruitment methods to assess the effectiveness of this AI-driven recruitment approach. In the traditional method, a conventional automated system ranked resumes, and recruiters selected the top candidates for subsequent human-led interviews. In contrast, the AI-assisted approach required candidates to complete structured, AI-led interviews designed to evaluate both technical and soft skills, with only the top performers progressing to human interviews. Applicants were randomly assigned to either pipeline, and recruiters then selected top candidates based on either resume rankings or AI interview results.
The results were striking, says the article. Candidates who underwent AI-led interviews succeeded in subsequent human interviews at a significantly higher rate (53.12%) compared to candidates from the traditional resume screening group (28.57%). “This demonstrates that AI-led interviews provide a highly effective initial filter, enabling recruiters to focus exclusively on candidates with verified competencies,” says the article.
The AI-led interviews underwent a quality assessment, where a dataset of transcripts from interviews conducted by both AI and human recruiters were blindly and independently reviewed based on two criteria: quality of interview questions and conversational dynamics. AI-led interviews consistently outperformed human-led interviews. Specifically, AI interviews showed significantly higher conversational quality and more relevant, well-structured questions than their human counterparts, said the article. “Importantly, AI interviews exhibit a lower standard deviation in quality scores, ensuring higher consistency compared to human-led interviews, which in turn creates a fairer process for all candidates,” says the article.
The analysis also found that the conversational AI approach benefited younger candidates and those with fewer years of professional experience. Women also experienced a modest improvement in outcomes compared to the traditional hiring pipeline.
What’s more, user reviews indicate candidates enjoy the process, says the World Economic Forum article. “Rather than submitting a resume into a black-box system and hoping for a response, they engage in a transparent, interactive process that evaluates them holistically.”
That is exactly what Lign’s AI agents do, only they don’t stop at recruitment, says Peersman. The startup’s AI career agents are a great way for companies looking to augment their workforce with AI to get started because workers naturally speak with them in the flow of work, she says. An additional benefit is that conversational AI resonates with GenZ, she says.
Corporate executives are signaling their interest in harnessing agentic AI’s potential. Market intelligence firm CB Insights reported this week that mention of “agent” and “agentic” on earnings calls surged in the first quarter of the year – both hitting all time highs.
There are now some 170+ startups offering agentic AI across 26 categories, from customer support to vertical tools in healthcare and finance, says CB Insights. So, it is no surprise that Lign is not alone in using agentic AI for recruiting and talent management.
A California-based company called micro1 has developed a fully conversational AI interviewer to accurately assess both technical and soft skills through a dynamic, real-time process.
Eightfold, another California company, uses agentic AI to provide organizations the ability to match and hire job candidates, manage internal talent more effectively, reduce attrition and hiring expenses, and enhance workforce quality.
Gloat, which was founded in Tel Aviv, offers an AI-powered “Agile Workforce Operating System” which pairs a “Talent Marketplace” with a “Skills Foundation” suite, to provide full visibility into workforce capabilities.
“There is a lot of experimentation right now with AI human machine interfaces,” says Peersman, who since the 2015 hackathon earned a master’s degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and worked at the MIT entrepreneurship center, as the dean of a private university, and as head of talent development and organizational design for Chanel’s watch and fine jewelry division.
She currently defines herself as a people engineer, focusing on human intelligence and talent related technologies and solutions that will transform the future of career development.
“We are at the very beginning,” says Peersman. “We need to get this virtuous circle started.”
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