Puck takes a unique approach to recruiting by using audio across candidate attraction and screening. The process can start with employer-branding content: employees participate in recorded conversations that Puck's team turns into polished podcasts and short-form social clips in roughly 2 business days. Those podcasts can be mapped to specific roles, departments, and locations on the career site, allowing employers to tailor their messaging to different openings.

Once candidates apply, Applicant Match can help recruiters prioritize who moves into screening. The platform generates evaluation criteria from job descriptions and ranks inbound applicants against them, which can be useful for teams dealing with large applicant pools. From there, SMS invitations from Puck’s AI Recruiter lead candidates directly into a short AI phone interview without requiring scheduling, a video call, or a camera.

We see the strongest use case in hourly and in-person roles. The vendor specifically designed their phone-based workflow around candidate populations where fraud tends to be lower, and the economic incentive for candidate misrepresentation is limited. Removing scheduling and camera requirements can also make interviews easier for candidates to complete. The trade-off is that audio-only screening may provide less verification for high-skilled or fraud-sensitive roles (a video platform could be a better choice for those).

We also like that, after the interview, Puck’s AI Recruiter scores candidates against your set criteria and provides reasoning rather than just a single overall score. You'll also receive recordings and summaries and, importantly, can override an AI grade. The vendor says those overrides create a feedback loop that helps their system develop a more company-specific scoring approach. We like the human-in-the-loop design, although we wish the vendor provided more detail about how that learning process is managed and monitored.

A few other things to keep in mind about this AI recruiting tool: First, Puck doesn’t have the kind of robust outbound candidate sourcing you would find in Juicebox, and its lightweight ATS cannot replace dedicated systems like Workable or Greenhouse. Second, native ATS integrations are restricted to Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, iCIMS, and Pinpoint. Finally, administrative functionality remains desktop-only today, with mobile access still on the roadmap.