Collective operates a recruitment platform designed to connect talent with recruiters through AI-powered tools and a commission-free model. The company has built a two-sided marketplace serving over 10 million professionals and more than 10,000 recruiters, eliminating traditional commission structures while deploying technology to streamline sourcing and hiring processes. Headquartered in France, Collective combines software engineering, data analytics, and design capabilities to build tools that address friction points in recruitment workflows.
The platform's technical architecture centers on Sherlock, an AI-powered sourcing tool built to improve recruiter efficiency while respecting candidate time constraints. Development follows a rapid iteration cycle with real-world testing and feedback loops from both talent and recruiters informing product refinement. The engineering team emphasizes data-driven decision making and daily cross-functional collaboration between engineers, designers, and industry specialists to validate features against actual marketplace behavior rather than theoretical models.
Collective's technical domains span AI tooling, recruitment technology infrastructure, software engineering, UX design, and analytics. The company's operational model challenges conventional recruitment economics by removing commissions entirely - a structural change that requires rethinking platform incentives and success metrics. The team culture prioritizes radical transparency, continuous learning, and what they describe as courage to challenge established practices, with explicit expectations that "good enough" solutions won't pass review. This approach positions the company as attempting to rebuild recruitment infrastructure around different economic assumptions than incumbents.