AI Candidate Sourcing in 2026 (Exa + Claude Stack)

Hey everyone, George Foley here. I coach over 500 six and seven figure agencies on how to better use AI within their business. Not how to build it, not how to sell it, specifically how to use it to get results. So today we're going to be taking a look at a workflow specifically for recruiters. This can be adapted for salespeople as well. We're going to be looking at a really powerful tool, Exa, which can be used in conjunction with Claude to basically do candidate sourcing on autopilot. So I'm just going to demo here with a search that would typically be really complex. You wouldn't be able to do this out of the box with LinkedIn. And you typically have to use Clay, but as you can see here, this is much faster than Clay as well. So if we're looking for female software engineers with 5 years experience based in London, working within fintech, for instance. Cool. So what we can see here is Claude is actually able to connect to Exa, and we can see it's gonna use this tool for us. So I'm gonna show you the results here in Claude first, and then we'll jump over and show you how you can use Exa. They also have another search function on Exa, which is called Websense. This looks like it's gonna be a bit of a competitive play, so it'll be interesting to see whether it takes off. The thing that's so appealing about Exa is of course it does connect to Claude. But also it's, it's cheap. So we're looking at $7 per 1,000 requests. So a really cheap way that we, we do this, and I recommend this, is have this installed into your Claude using these connectors here. So you've got Exa. So to manage these and add these, you can actually connect these, and this will be, this will be basically giving Claude access to that app. So if you want Claude to run your calendar, your Gmail, any of these things here, you would just connect them here and then it can connect and run it. But you can do this on the $20 Claude plan. So it's very cheap. Cool. Let's take a look at some of our results here. So here are the closest matches from the searcher's profile within the 5-year experience. So Hemna. That one appears to be a broken link. Does occasionally happen. It's probably the first time I've had that happen really, but sometimes links are broken. Okay. So we've got Renata, software engineer. Yeah, let's see that. Cool. And again, obviously the legality of running the search, I wouldn't recommend profiling people. I'm just showing this here as an example of what you can do with Claude and with Exa in order to, you know, run really difficult searches that you wouldn't normally be able to run. Cool. So we've got those there. I want to show you the websets within Exa. So we're just going to open this up. It's websites.exa.ai is the URL for this. I believe you can access it from the front page here. So we've got the API, which is basically what this is here. And then you've got websites that you can click into. I'm going to paste that same prompt in. And so what it's doing, it's doing that same search, but then it's also applying AI filters after that too. Now the, the point where it looks a lot like Cloze, you have these enrichments. So email, interest, seniority, custom, and you're spending credits, funny enough, for these things. If we start this search here, it's already broken down our filters and it looks similar to Clay because it's in a spreadsheet as well. Cool. So now it's actually ranking them based on these. And of course you could do this in Clay previously, but it was much slower. So you'd have to create these filters yourself. Now it's just doing it on autopilot. You can add and create the columns for the enrichments too. So it's very much, I mean, the whole design of it even looks, it looks like Clay. So they're definitely coming for Clay, but I think it's good to have the competition between the two of them because this is definitely an easier way to source and find people. You can use export as well. So if you wanted to push them directly into Lemlist, then you can do that or your CRM ATS, which is really powerful. And of course you're not paying $349 per month for for the, for the plan either. So yeah, really, really good tool. Keen to see how it evolves. For most people, I recommend just jumping in and connecting it to Claude because it's very simple. And then you've got these here. I know it's only found a couple people here. If I say, if I say find 25 people, it's going to just add 25 more people in. Now, obviously the next potential with this too is using this for client outreach. So you can actually use this as a tool. What I'll do after it finds 25 people, I can show you here how it can find the clients as well. And so you can say, based on these candidates, find 25 clients that are hiring, had recent investment, all of these different things. And then I'll actually run with that as well. Cool. So we'll just give it a minute here while it runs that search. It takes a little bit longer. And then I'll, uh, I'll show you the results. Okay, while that's loading those additional profiles, I'm actually just going to show you another conversation that I had earlier. So I actually typed in, find me 10 VPs of engineering at fintech companies in London who are hiring or recently funded. And so then Ekza ran the search and it found these profiles here, which are all really good profiles. I said, I'll provide you a list of relevant candidates and I want you to share these prospects from my recruitment agency. So these were the software engineers. Okay. Gave a run through once of creating the outreach. It wasn't amazing. So I asked it to lean into one specific candidate and personalize it. And then you can see here, it's connected the dots that they're both ex-Checkout and said, hey Hilda, or hi Hilda, saw you look, you took the role at Checkout last year. Congrats on the step up. One candidate on my desk. It's pretty good. So of course we can go a lot further with this. I'd tweak certain things on the copywriting, but out of the box, you can see it's pretty impressive. And it's just nice to be able to have everything in the one place. Now we've got our additional 25 profiles here as well. It's not going to hit it out of the park every single time. Of course, you're going to go through and check out some of these profiles. But in terms of like picking up new candidates quickly or just, you know, harder to find searches you can't run on LinkedIn, definitely a tool to use. So yeah, that's it. Exa.ai, give it a spin and let me know what you think of it in the comments below. If there's any questions. Chuck them down there. I'm going to answer any of them that come up. So comments, questions, chuck them down below. I'll answer every single one. And the only way for me to keep doing these videos is if you like the video. Otherwise, I don't know if I should keep doing them. And that's genuine. I'm starting, as you can see, like I'm starting these new videos here. So like the video if you want to see more of this, subscribe for our next videos coming up and drop any questions in the comments below.