PEARCH AI FAQ
What If Your HR Tech Product Had the Best Candidate Sourcing API Built In?
Learn how PEARCH AI powers HR tech tools with a semantic sourcing API. Natural language search, real-time profiles, flexible pricing — all your questions answered.
Pearch AI is an API that powers candidate sourcing for HR tech platforms. It lets developers of AI recruiting apps and applicant tracking systems integrate natural‑language search without building their own search engine or maintaining a talent database. The API returns candidate profiles with work history, education, skills, contact information and more; you can then apply your own filters or ranking on top.
Pearch has the most accurate candidate search engine on the market. Its proprietary search technology outperforms traditional tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, Juicebox (PeopleGPT) and Gem in blind tests. In an independent study (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02463), recruiters judged Pearch’s results far more relevant than those from major platforms. Whereas keyword searches on LinkedIn and generative searches on Juicebox scored low on relevance, Pearch’s semantic search API yields much higher match rates.
Building a candidate sourcing engine and maintaining a large, fresh talent database is both expensive and time‑consuming. Even established platforms struggle with search relevance despite big budgets. Matching Pearch’s performance would likely take millions in R&D and 18–36 months of development with no guarantee of success. By integrating Pearch’s scalable sourcing API you get immediate access to a world‑class candidate search engine, speeding your time‑to‑market and eliminating the cost and complexity of developing and maintaining your own infrastructure.
Building a candidate sourcing engine and maintaining a large, fresh talent database is both expensive and time‑consuming. Even established platforms struggle with search relevance despite big budgets. Matching Pearch’s performance would likely take millions in R&D and 18–36 months of development with no guarantee of success. By integrating Pearch’s scalable sourcing API you get immediate access to a world‑class candidate search engine, speeding your time‑to‑market and eliminating the cost and complexity of developing and maintaining your own infrastructure.
Other vendors—such as Apollo or People Data Labs—act primarily as recruitment data providers. They sell data with standard filters (job title, location) but lack a sophisticated semantic search API or AI‑powered recruiting backend which leads to extremely low candidate relevance. Pearch is a natural language candidate search API built specifically for AI recruitment: it accepts conversational queries, ranks candidates semantically and supports dozens of parameters to tailor search in your product.
Pearch works with companies of all sizes—from early‑stage startups to large enterprises. Although many clients are mid‑sized HR‑tech companies, the platform scales to enterprise needs for talent sourcing backend API integration.
Pearch maintains a massive global talent database API with roughly 800 million people and 30 million companies. This coverage makes it a robust alternative to LinkedIn’s dataset and eliminates the need for your own scraping or data‑collection efforts.
Pearch’s dataset spans worldwide markets — https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24339193/. It focuses primarily on the USA (~190 million profiles) and Europe (~150 million) but includes candidates from other regions as well (i.e. 89 million profiles from India or 47 million from Brazil), providing global reach for your hiring needs.
Pearch has a unique capacity of providing realtime candidate data to ensure the latest job changes and skills are reflected whenever you call the API.
Traditional recruiting platforms like LinkedIn Recruiter or SeekOut focus on end‑user interfaces and don’t offer a people search API. Pearch is purely a candidate sourcing API—a backend service that you embed into your own product. You retain control over the user experience.
Filter‑based vendors let you query a database using static fields. Pearch goes further: it’s an AI recruiting API that understands full text and offers hybrid/semantic candidate search and ranking which leads to higher candidate relevance and better results for the most complex/difficult search queries.
Enrichment tools verify a known email or phone and append extra data. Pearch is a candidate discovery API: it helps you find new candidates via natural‑language search and can include contact info and other data on demand. You can combine Pearch with enrichment services for further validation, or you can trust us both the search and contact data enrichment.
Closed platforms offer a UI but no API. Pearch provides an open API for finding candidates from publicly available data sources, giving you control over the interface and workflow in your own recruiting tool.
Developing an equivalent deep candidate search engine requires enormous data, AI research and infrastructure investments. Even companies with much larger budgets cannot match Pearch’s relevance. By leveraging Pearch, you avoid these costs and benefit from continuous improvements.
Product & Data Capabilities
Pearch uses AI to interpret natural‑language queries and rank candidates by relevance. It can handle complex searches—for example, “find all engineers who joined Stripe before their Series B” or “senior computer vision engineer from Ohio with fintech experience who led a team of five”—and return strong matches. Instead of just matching keywords, the engine evaluates context like skills, experience, seniority and even the companies a candidate has worked for, making it far more accurate than basic filtering.
Pearch has built a proprietary blend of large language models, unstructured data retrieval, neural ranking algorithms and semantic indexing. Pearch’s AI sourcing API delivers superior relevance in comparison to simple RAG, filter-based search, Elasticsearch and other vector‑embedding solutions.
Each result includes a relevance score; candidates are ordered by how well they match your query. Pearch also offers insights explaining why a candidate meets your criteria.
Yes. The candidate discovery API can return verified professional emails and phone numbers. You can choose whether to include contact details.
Yes. You can perform a search across multiple talent databases—combining your proprietary data with Pearch’s global index. Reach out to us and let’s see how we can help you get the most out of your data: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/15-min-intro
No. Pearch’s global talent database API has over 800 million candidates and is ready to use. If you have your own resumes or CRM data, Pearch can search it too; our candidate matching API supports unstructured data.
Yes. Results include insights highlighting why a candidate is a good match, such as particular skills, tenure or experience that align with your requirements.
Pearch offers a fast, low‑latency mode and a smart mode with deeper AI analysis. You choose the mode based on whether you need instant results or more precise matching.
Absolutely. You can mix free‑text queries with filters like location or seniority, creating a precise yet conversational search.
Yes. Pearch AI offers an endpoint that enables conversational candidate sourcing. Although this feature isn’t yet listed in the public docs, it’s already live; our team can demonstrate a product built on it. To see a quick demo or discuss how to integrate a conversational UI into your own app, please book a call through this link: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/15-min-intro
Yes. Pearch’s API can accept search queries in any language, and its AI will interpret your request to return relevant candidates. Your users can describe their ideal candidates in whatever language suits them.
Integration & Customization
Initial integration is super quick—around ten minutes—thanks to simple REST endpoints and available SDKs. We also support MCP (https://github.com/Pearch-ai/mcp_pearch), n8n integrations (https://github.com/Pearch-ai/n8n-nodes-pearch) and have a ready-to-use Python client (https://github.com/Pearch-ai/pearch-client).
Yes. Check out our API docs here: https://apidocs.pearch.ai
The API is highly configurable. You can adjust search depth vs. latency, tune relevance, decide whether to include contact details and choose output fields as well as add custom filters for higher control over search results. This allows a tailored user experience for any talent search integration.
Yes. You specify which fields you want, which helps minimize payload and control costs.
Pearch can serve as the search engine for HR/recruiting tools. It supports custom integrations with ATS/CRM systems and can search unstructured candidate data in your system. Contact us to discuss specifics: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/15-min-intro
Yes. Pearch can attach its search engine to your database (structured or unstructured) and combine results with its own. Reach out to Pearch to explore custom integrations for your use case: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/hrachik-vlad-30m
Pricing & Plans
Pearch’s REST API candidate search is billed via credits. You buy credits, and each API call that returns candidate data uses credits proportional to the number of profiles returned.
The starter packages provide 2,000-10, 000 credits. This tier is suitable for initial testing or low‑volume usage. If you’d like to know more about pricing, please book a call: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/hrachik-and-jerry-15min
Yes. Our pricing scales with volume — larger packages include millions of credits and offer up to 10× better value compared to the smallest plan, with mid-sized options available as well. You can get all the details on a call here: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/hrachik-and-jerry-15min
Unused credits may expire in 1-12 months depending on the package tier. Contact the sales team for details: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/15-min-intro
Yes. Packages can be tailored to match your expected usage.
Long‑term commitments are optional. Annual contracts include bonus credits and huge discounts.
Yes. Contact data and deeper AI analysis consume additional credits.
Normally, customers start with a starter credit package to test and implement Pearch. If you’re an early-stage startup without funding, we may be able to provide a complimentary free trial to support your development. Just reach out and tell us your story — we’d love to help you succeed.
Pearch’s candidate sourcing API is designed to be flexible enough for a variety of business models, including subscription, usage‑based, or hybrid approaches. Many customers bundle a set number of credits into each subscription tier so their users can run a fixed number of candidate searches or job postings each month. This allows predictable costs while still leveraging Pearch’s AI recruiting API and candidate matching engine. You can also meter API requests behind the scenes to align credit consumption with your existing plans. Pearch has extensive experience working with subscription‑based models and is happy to tailor a solution—reach out via https://calendly.com/all_pearch/hrachik-and-jerry-15min to discuss how our candidate discovery API can integrate seamlessly with your pricing structure.
Support & Operations
We take a very hands-on approach with every customer, even small teams. During onboarding we guide you through the integration, provide direct developer support, and make sure your product is up and running quickly. After integration, we remain available for troubleshooting, feature guidance, and even custom endpoint adjustments if your use case requires it. Our goal is to make Pearch.ai feel like part of your own engineering team.
Yes. We provide an SLA that guarantees at least 99.5% uptime or higher. If uptime guarantees are critical for your product, please contact us to discuss the specific SLA terms available for your plan.
We keep support very hands-on and responsive. If you run into problems—from bug fixes to API endpoint customization needs—our team is quick to step in. You can reach us directly at f@pearch.ai or book a call with us here: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/hrachik-vlad-30m. We’re committed to making sure your integration and ongoing use of Pearch.ai run smoothly.
Because Pearch.ai operates as a white-label sourcing API, most of our customer implementations aren’t public. Many AI recruiting platforms rely on us as their default sourcing backend, but those details stay behind the scenes. What we can share is that our technology also powers matching in consumer-facing products like Boardy.ai, showing the flexibility of our engine across both B2B and B2C use cases. If you’d like to explore examples that are closer to your use case, reach out to us directly.
We only work with publicly available data and support data deletion requests at pearch.ai/gdpr-compliance. We are also finalizing our full compliance with both GDPR and CCPA to give our customers confidence that our candidate sourcing API meets international data privacy standards.
Yes, like any API, we do have some technical rate limits in place. In practice, even our largest B2C customers have never hit them. If you expect to run extremely high volumes of API calls, please reach out—we’re happy to work with you to support your scale. You can book a call here: https://calendly.com/all_pearch/hrachik-vlad-30m