Emerald Inc. connects US companies with top talent across Latin America. This is the story of how one portal, with AI working every stage, took the ceiling off their recruiting operation.
The company
Emerald Inc. connects US-based companies with top talent across Latin America. Their competitive edge is access. Partnerships with leading universities in the region give them a pipeline competing firms can't easily replicate.
The constraint
Scaling a recruiting operation means more requisitions, more candidates, more touchpoints. Emerald was growing, and the team was falling behind for a structural reason. Three platforms handled three stages of the hiring workflow, intake, assessment, and pipeline management, and none of them talked to each other.
The cost
Moving a candidate from intake to assessment to the pipeline required manual intervention at every stage. The team was spending its capacity on data entry and status checks that should have been automatic. Volume the business could win was volume the operations team couldn't handle.
Before building anything, we mapped how candidates moved between the intake platform, the assessment platform, and the pipeline tool, and where they fell out or stalled. The slowdown lived in the gaps between the tools, not inside any one of them.
We connected all three systems into a single recruiting portal and automated the candidate handoff at each stage. Intake data flows into assessment without re-entry, and assessment results update the pipeline on their own. Inside the portal, AI matches candidates with open roles the moment they enter.
AI agents with defined responsibilities run each stage of the flow, on infrastructure built to scale with the business. A unified operational dashboard gives the team one live view across what used to be three disconnected tools.
The model behind the build, in the same terms any engagement with Forja runs on.
Emerald hired Forja the way a business hires a fractional CFO. Senior engineers on the problem for the life of the project, without adding payroll.
The engagement opened with the audit and a defined scope. Emerald knew what was being built, and in what order, before the first line of code.
Emerald owns the portal and runs on it daily. The work held up, and a larger long-term project is now in scope.
Engagements start within two weeks.
The integration removed every manual handoff between the three platforms. Candidates move from intake through assessment to the pipeline without the team touching them between stages, and the hours that went to status checks and copy-paste work now go to recruiting.
Nothing falls through the gaps between platforms, because the gaps no longer exist. Emerald absorbs more requisition volume without proportionally adding headcount. That was the constraint that brought them to Forja.
“Emerald cut candidate delivery from 7+ days to 48 hours without hiring more recruiters.”
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