Hiretual no longer exists under that name. The company rebranded to hireEZ in February 2022, and if you are searching for Hiretual today you are almost certainly looking for hireEZ.

The original product was easy to describe: a browser extension and a search engine that pulled candidate profiles from dozens of public sources, stitched them into one profile, and tried to attach an email address. That is the "multi-platform sourcing tool" people remember.

The 2026 product is a different and much more expensive animal. This guide covers what hireEZ actually is now, what it costs, where it genuinely wins, where it does not, and what to use instead if you only wanted one half of it.

From Hiretual to hireEZ: what changed

Hiretual launched as a sourcing extension and grew into a passive-candidate search engine. In February 2022 it announced $26 million in funding led by Conductive Ventures and rebranded to hireEZ at the same time. That round was an extension of the $13 million Series B from August 2020 and took total funding to about $45.5 million - PR Newswire, February 2022.

The rename came with a repositioning: from "sourcing tool" to "outbound recruiting platform". Since 2025 the positioning has moved again. hireEZ now sells itself as "the agentic AI recruiting platform built on your ATS" - hireez.com.

This matters more than a marketing refresh, for one practical reason: the price went with it. The tool that used to be a search seat is now sold as a platform that replaces four to six other tools, and it is priced accordingly. More on that below.

What hireEZ actually does

Strip the agentic language away and there are three things underneath. It is worth separating them, because most buyers only actually need one.

1. Multi-platform search (the original product)

This is still the core. hireEZ indexes public profiles from across the open web and merges them into a single candidate record, so one person's LinkedIn headline, GitHub activity and conference talk end up on one profile instead of three tabs.

The company claims 1 billion open web profiles aggregated from 45+ platforms, which it calls the largest passive candidate database in recruiting - hireEZ, July 2026. Treat that as a vendor claim, not an audited number. Nobody has independently counted it, and profile counts are the easiest metric in this industry to inflate: a stale duplicate still counts as a profile.

The real question is never "how many profiles" but "how many of my candidates". Those are very different numbers.

2. Contact data

Search gets you the person. Contact data is what lets you actually reach them, and it is metered by credits on every hireEZ plan.

This is also the most common complaint in user reviews: contact data accuracy is inconsistent, and recruiters report burning credits on emails that bounce or on numbers that reach a relative rather than the candidate. hireEZ holds a solid 4.6 out of 5 across 264 reviews on G2, so the platform is well liked overall, but data quality is the recurring theme in the critical reviews.

3. EZ Agent (the 2026 layer)

EZ Agent is hireEZ's agentic AI layer. It sits on top of your existing ATS rather than replacing it, and it covers research and intake, sourcing and qualification, engagement and nurturing, matching and screening, and interview scheduling. Around it sit a Talent CRM, an Applicant Review module, a conversational AI voice screener and an AI scheduler. hireEZ lists 50+ integrations across ATS, email and calendar - hireEZ platform.

Be precise about what "agent" means here. It is semi-autonomous: it drafts, ranks, screens and schedules, and a recruiter reviews and approves. If you are buying it to remove headcount you will be disappointed. If you are buying it to make one recruiter meaningfully faster, that is the realistic case.

In July 2026 hireEZ also announced partnerships with Nexxt (adding 150+ million nurtured candidate profiles, live now) and Talroo (performance job advertising for high-intent applicants, launching with design partners in 2026). The strategy is clear: own the whole top of the funnel, passive plus nurtured plus active, in one workflow.

What hireEZ costs

hireEZ publishes exactly one price, and everything above it is a sales conversation.

The published tier is a solo recruiter plan at $494 per month, with a 7-day free trial and no permanent free plan - hireEZ pricing.

Team and enterprise pricing is custom. hireEZ says pricing is "configured to the stack hireEZ replaces rather than a flat per-seat rate times headcount", which in plain English means the anchor is what you are already spending on other tools. The more tools you say you want to consolidate, the higher the quote.

For a planning number, buyer data is more useful than a rate card. Vendr puts the median hireEZ contract at about $13,000 per year, with typical deals running roughly $7,000 to $25,000.

One warning if you are researching this: the $169 and $199 per user tiers quoted all over the internet are dead. They were the old startups and professional packages. Any page still listing them has not been checked in years. The entry point roughly tripled when hireEZ moved to platform pricing. We keep a fuller breakdown in our hireEZ pricing guide.

Where hireEZ is genuinely strong

Three things it does well, in our experience and in the review data:

1. US coverage of technical and passive talent. If you are sourcing engineers in the US and you do not want a LinkedIn Recruiter license, hireEZ's aggregated profiles are a real alternative rather than a worse one.
2. Profile merging. Pulling one candidate's presence across LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow and personal sites into one record is genuinely useful, and it is the thing X-ray search cannot do for you.
3. ATS rediscovery. Searching the candidates you already have alongside the open web is the most underrated feature on the platform. Most teams have already paid to acquire thousands of candidates they never contacted again.

hireEZ also claims 70+ Fortune 500 customers, a 50% reduction in time-to-fill and a 7x larger qualified candidate pool. Those are vendor figures from its own marketing site, not independent research, and should be read as such.

Where it falls down

The honest list:

1. Coverage outside the US is noticeably thinner. This is the single most common reason European teams churn off it.
2. Contact data accuracy is inconsistent, and you pay in credits for the misses as well as the hits.
3. Pricing is opaque. One published number and a sales call for everything else makes budgeting hard and makes renewal leverage worse.
4. It is priced as a platform, not a tool. At a $13,000 median you are buying the CRM, the scheduler and the agent whether or not you wanted them. If you only wanted search, you are overpaying by a lot.

How to test it in 7 days

The trial is short, so do not spend it clicking around the UI. Do this instead:

1. Take your three hardest live roles, not easy ones. Easy roles make every tool look good.
2. Count genuinely relevant profiles returned, not total results. Result counts are vanity.
3. Of those, count how many have a working email or mobile number. That is the number you are actually buying.
4. Send a small batch and measure the bounce rate yourself rather than trusting a published accuracy figure.

If steps 3 and 4 come back weak, no amount of agentic AI on top will fix it. A coverage gap underneath is not solvable by automation over it.

Hiretual (hireEZ) alternatives

The right alternative depends on which half of hireEZ you wanted: the search, or the contact data. Very few teams need both at $13,000 a year.

1. HeroHunt.ai

One alternative is HeroHunt.ai. Instead of being another sourcing database, it functions as an autonomous AI recruitment agent: it sources across professional and technical platforms, evaluates candidates against the role, and runs the initial outreach and conversation itself rather than handing you a list to work through manually.

The difference from hireEZ is the unit of work. hireEZ gives you better search results faster. An AI recruiter is aimed at removing the manual step after the search: the reviewing, the writing, the following up. Which one you want depends on whether your bottleneck is finding people or contacting them.

2. Google X-ray

X-ray search finds profiles on a specific site via Google. Searching site:linkedin.com/in java amsterdam gets you candidate profiles for free, and the same technique works on GitHub, Stack Overflow or any indexed site. See our X-ray search guide for the full method.

It costs nothing but time, and time is the catch. X-ray gets you the profile and never the email, so budget for a contact-data tool alongside it.

3. A dedicated contact-data platform

If the reason you are looking at hireEZ is really its contact credits, a dedicated contact database like Apollo.io does that one job for roughly a tenth of the solo plan. Pair it with X-ray or a cheaper search tool and you have rebuilt hireEZ's two core jobs for a fraction of the money.

What you give up is real: the single pane of glass, the ATS-native workflow, the profile merging, and the agent that chases candidates for you. For a solo recruiter or a small agency that is usually a trade worth making. For a 20-recruiter team already living inside Workday, it usually is not.

So should you buy it?

hireEZ is a good product that is now sold to a specific buyer: a US-based team with real sourcing volume, an ATS it wants to keep, and a budget around $13,000 a year that is currently spread across four or five tools it would rather consolidate. For that buyer, it holds up.

If you are a solo recruiter, a European team, or someone whose only real problem is finding email addresses, the 2026 hireEZ is not priced for you, and the Hiretual you remember is not what you would be buying.