Hiring the right person takes more than finding someone with the right job title.
You need to know where they've worked, what they've worked on, and whether their experience matches what you're looking for. But professional information is scattered across company websites, databases, and platforms with varying levels of accessibility.
Your AI assistant can help write a job description or prepare interview questions. Finding the right people to fill the role is another challenge. We think your agent should be able to help with that, too.
Today we're introducing Directory, a new collection in Alexandria with more than 240 million professional profiles, including employment histories and work contact information. It helps AI agents find and research potential candidates directly in ChatGPT and Claude through the Firecrawl plugin. It's free to start.
Professional knowledge belongs in Alexandria
Alexandria is Firecrawl's library of data providers, specialized indexes, and the live web. It's built to give AI agents access to the information they need to do useful work, rather than relying on what they already know.
Directory brings professional profiles into that library, with a focus on recruiting.
Through providers including Apollo, FullEnrich, and Data Legion, agents can search for people by job title, company, location, and keywords. They can retrieve available information about someone's current role, previous employers, professional background, and work contact details.
That gives recruiters a way to go beyond keyword searches and start finding people based on the experience they're actually looking for.
And because Directory works inside ChatGPT and Claude, you can research candidates in the same conversation where you're defining a role, comparing backgrounds, and building a shortlist.
Five things to ask your agent
1. "Find engineers who've worked on problems like this."
You're hiring a senior backend engineer to help scale your infrastructure. A job title alone won't tell you whether someone has solved the problems your team is facing.
Ask your agent to find engineers with relevant experience, using job titles, companies, locations, and keywords to narrow the search. Directory can return professional profiles and employment histories to help you identify promising candidates.
For example, a search for senior backend engineers in New York returned 142 matches in a single free search.
That's a starting point for a shortlist built around the experience you need, rather than a list of people who happen to have the right title.
2. "Find people who've worked at companies like ours."
Sometimes the best candidates have experience you wouldn't think to search for directly.
Maybe you're looking for someone who's helped a startup grow into an enterprise business, built a developer platform, or worked on infrastructure at scale.
Your agent can search for people based on their current and previous employers, roles, and professional backgrounds. You can explore different combinations and refine your search as you learn more about the candidate pool.
3. "Help me build a shortlist for this role."
Give your agent a job description and ask it to find people whose backgrounds match the requirements.
It can search Directory, organize relevant profiles, and help you compare candidates against the experience you're looking for.
You can refine the search as you go, whether that means narrowing by location, looking for a particular technical background, or finding people who've held similar roles.
The goal isn't to automate hiring decisions. It's to make the initial research less manual, so you can spend more time evaluating the people who look promising.
4. "What has this person actually worked on?"
A profile is a useful starting point, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
Once you've found a potential candidate, your agent can use Firecrawl's web search capabilities to look for additional public information, including technical writing, conference talks, open-source contributions, interviews, and projects.
That context can help you understand someone's work beyond their job titles and employment history, and give you better questions to ask during an interview.
5. "How can I reach this candidate?"
Once you've found someone worth talking to, your agent can look up available professional contact information.
That helps you move from identifying potential candidates to beginning an outreach process, without manually switching between multiple tools to find their details.
You can spend less time assembling contact lists and more time writing thoughtful, relevant introductions.
Find the right people. Then learn more about them.
Recruiting is a research problem as much as it is a hiring problem.
You need to find people with relevant experience, understand their backgrounds, and decide who might be a good fit for the role. That work often means moving between databases, company websites, professional profiles, and search results.
Directory gives your agent a place to start. Combined with Firecrawl's web search capabilities, it can help you go from a description of the person you're looking for to a shortlist of people worth researching further.
It's not a replacement for talking to candidates or evaluating their work. It's a better way to get to the point where those conversations can happen.
Search for free. Get the details when you need them.
Directory searches are free. Your agent can explore profiles, refine searches, and identify relevant people without using credits.
Credits are used when retrieving detailed professional information, including available contact details. Every account includes 1,000 free credits per month, so you can get started without another subscription.
Get started in ChatGPT or Claude
Install the Firecrawl plugin and try a prompt like:
"Find senior backend engineers in New York who've worked on infrastructure at scale. Show me their current roles, previous employers, and relevant professional backgrounds."
Your agent can search Directory, organize the results, and help you research potential candidates.
If you work with an AI agent in your terminal, install the Firecrawl skills using:
npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest init --all --browserThen restart your agent to load the skills.
Explore Directory in Alexandria →
The right hire starts with finding the right people.
AI agents are getting better at helping us do the work around recruiting. But before you can evaluate a candidate, you have to find them.
Directory brings professional profiles into Alexandria, giving AI agents a way to search for people based on their experience, explore their backgrounds, and identify candidates worth a closer look.
Less time searching across disconnected sources. More time finding the people who can do the work.
