100Networks is a three-sided hiring marketplace. Companies send the roles that stay open. Vetted specialist recruiters — independents and boutique search firms who have filled that exact kind of role before — compete to fill them. Anyone with a good person in their network can make an introduction and be paid when that person joins. Six AI agents run underneath every search. There is one fee: a percentage of the hired person's salary, invoiced on the day they walk in.
That is the whole model. The rest of this post explains why it is built that way and what actually happens when you send a role.
Why a marketplace and not a tool
Job boards, sourcing tools and AI outreach platforms all made the same bet: that the right person is looking.
Mostly they are not. The best engineer for your hardest role is already employed, already well paid, and already known to someone in your industry — a CTO who worked with them, a VP who hired them once. Posting a job does not reach that person. Neither does a sequence that opens with "I came across your profile."
Three things are missing, and only one of them is a software problem.
Reach is a specialist who already knows the role — who can name the six companies where that skill set actually lives, and who has placed into them.
Judgment is a human who can convince a senior engineer to leave a job they like. No model does this. It is a conversation about scope, ownership, the person they would report to, and what they would be giving up.
Follow-through is staying with the candidate through sixty-two days of notice, spotting the counter-offer before it lands, and not invoicing until they walk in.
Agents are very good at the first one and useless at the other two. So 100Networks puts agents on the search and humans on the convincing, and only charges when someone actually joins.
What happens when you send a role
One. A thirty-minute call becomes a brief. We take the role apart with your hiring manager: what the person will own, what strong actually looks like, and what you say when they ask why they should leave a job they like. That becomes a working brief the same day — must-haves, deal-breakers, target companies, comp band, the pitch. You approve it before anyone is approached.
Two. The role is matched, not broadcast. It goes to recruiters in the network with a track record on that exact seat at that seniority — not to everyone. Confidential and leadership searches go to a restricted, named subset who have signed an NDA; the brief, the hiring plan and the comp bands stay inside that group and the role is never published.
Three. A shortlist arrives. Each candidate comes with a scorecard, written evidence, and compensation, notice period and location already confirmed. You interview. You are not reading CVs to work out whether someone is worth a call.
Four. You pay when they join. Not on offer. Not on acceptance. There is a joining guarantee — if an accepted candidate does not turn up, there is no fee — and a 90-day replacement guarantee if they join and it does not work out.
It runs non-exclusively, alongside your in-house team and any vendors you already use. We only earn if our person is the one who signs.
The six agents, and what they are for
The agents are the engine behind the recruiter, not a product you license. Internally we call the sequence the Loop.
- Brief turns the client call into a structured, gradeable brief before anyone is approached.
- Search works LinkedIn, Naukri, GitHub, publications, portfolios and the 100Networks talent graph at once, screens every profile against the criteria, then critiques its own coverage per criterion and re-sources the gaps over several rounds. It returns ranked profiles with per-criterion evidence written out as full sentences, not a match percentage.
- Outreach writes to the person rather than the profile, across email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and voice, choosing the entry channel per person and escalating automatically. It stops the moment someone replies, so a human picks up the conversation. It discloses that it is AI when asked.
- Screen runs the structured screen against your rubric and returns a transcript, a scorecard and a written case.
- Schedule coordinates panels across calendars, sends reminders, handles reschedules and chases feedback after every debrief.
- Close watches every accepted offer through the notice period, flags counter-offer risk, and escalates the moment a candidate goes quiet.
Conducting them is Pilot, an agent with 122 tools. Everything it does that changes something is staged as a proposal a human confirms; supported actions can be undone for up to 24 hours; there is a company-wide kill switch; and every action is written to an append-only audit log. Per-skill autonomy defaults to suggest, so nothing runs on its own unless someone deliberately turns it on.
That gating is not decoration. A recruiter's judgment is the product. The agents exist so that judgment is spent on the twelve people who matter instead of the four hundred who do not.
The recruiter side
Independent recruiters and boutique firms lose roughly half their week to business development and invoice chasing. The network removes both.
Roles arrive already qualified, from funded startups and global capability centres, with a brief the hiring manager has approved. No procurement, no empanelment, no cold client outreach. One contract with the client, one invoice, one collection.
The split is 30% of the placement fee as standard, 40% once your track record on the network is verified, paid within fifteen days of the candidate's joining date. The six agents come free on every role.
Joining is deliberately gated: a two-minute application, verification of the roles you have actually closed, then a first three submissions reviewed for calibration before they reach a client. After that the board opens.
The rules exist because clients rely on them. A candidate is yours from the moment you claim them on a role — timestamped and visible to the network, so nobody else approaches them for that role. The person confirms they want to be considered before anything reaches the client. No bulk uploads and no scraped lists. If someone is already in a live process, you find out before you invest any effort, and the earlier claim stands.
The referral side
You do not have to be a recruiter to be paid for knowing someone.
Make one introduction — paste a LinkedIn URL and you will know within seconds whether that person is already in the network, so an introduction is never wasted. A specialist recruiter handles everything after that: the outreach, the screening, the interviews, the offer. You are not cc'd on anything unless you want to be.
If your person joins, you earn 25% of the placement fee, up to ₹1,00,000, within fifteen days of their joining date.
What we work
Software engineering (backend, frontend, platform, SRE, security), AI and data, forward deployed engineering, GTM and sales, robotics and hardware, and engineering leadership. The common thread is roles that stay open — the ones where the right person is not applying.
Typical engagements are GCC build-outs in India, seed-to-Series-D startups hiring their first senior engineers, and enterprises adding capacity beside an in-house TA team.
What 100Networks is not
It is not an applicant tracking system and not a job board. We sell placements, not seats. If you want software to manage a pipeline you already have, this is the wrong product.
It is also not an AI that hires people. Every judgment call is made by a recruiter, and every action an agent takes that changes something is approved by a human first. The AI makes a specialist faster. It does not replace them.