Referrals, past applicants and walk-ins: hiring the people you already know

Not every role should go on a job board. A founder's former colleague, a referral from your best engineer, the runner-up from last quarter's search, a confidential replacement nobody else should know about yet — some of the best hires come from people you already know. They still deserve a proper process. That's what internal jobs are for.

What an internal job is

When you create a job on HireXAI you choose who can see it. A public job goes on your careers page and the HireXAI job board, and anyone can apply. An internal job is never advertised anywhere — not on the careers page, not in the job feed, not in job alerts. Only your team sees it, and candidates arrive only when you add them.

Everything else is the same: the stages, the AI review, assignments, interviews candidates book themselves, scorecards and the offer. You get the whole process without broadcasting the role.

Bringing your candidates in

• Add one person by hand with their name and email, and note who referred them — the source stays on their profile.
• Upload a CV and it's read into a profile for you, the same as if they had applied.
• On Starter and above, upload a whole folder of CVs at once, or import a spreadsheet of candidates.

Each person you add goes into the job's first stage and gets the same AI read as any applicant, so a referral is judged on the same criteria as everyone else — which is fairer to them and to the rest of your pipeline.

Don't lose last quarter's near-miss

Your strongest candidate for the next role may be someone you rejected for the last one — second place in a close final, or the right person at the wrong time. On Growth, HireXAI keeps a talent pool of past candidates, and when you open a role they fit, they surface so you can invite them straight into the new pipeline.

Keep it personal

People you already know should hear from a person, not a no-reply address. Connect your Gmail or Outlook — free on every plan — and every email in the pipeline goes out from your own address, so their replies come straight to your inbox. Edit the templates once and the wording is yours everywhere.

And if your team lives in Slack, connect it too: a summary of what moved in the pipeline lands in the channel you choose every morning at nine, so nobody has to open a dashboard to know where things stand.

What it costs

Internal jobs are included on every plan. Free runs one internal job alongside its one public job, and every paid plan has unlimited internal jobs. If you only use HireXAI to manage hiring you already do — no job ads at all — you can start today without paying anything.