Getting Started
This page covers the two ways into Recruiter — the self-serve free trial and the Recruiter AI Employee — and the one-time setup outreach needs (connecting an email and LinkedIn sender).
Beta. Recruiter is in beta. The signup flow, quotas, and integrations described here may change.
Starting a free trial
The fastest way in is the self-serve trial. The signup page lives at /signup/recruiter and walks you through a short, email-verified flow:
- Enter your work email. A personal email (Gmail, Outlook.com, and similar consumer domains) is rejected — Recruiter trials require a work domain. If your domain already belongs to an Ema customer, signup routes you to contact
[email protected]instead of creating a duplicate trial. - Verify with a one-time code. Ema emails you a six-character code. Enter it before it expires; you can request a new code if it lapses.
- Accept the trial agreement. Scroll the agreement to the end, check the box, and confirm. You can't accept until you've scrolled through it.
Once you confirm, Ema provisions your trial in the background — it creates your Recruiter AI Employee, seeds it with sample candidates so you have something to look at immediately, and sends you a welcome email. You're then dropped directly onto your new Recruiter AI Employee.
If you return to the signup page after your trial is already active, verifying your email signs you straight back in to your existing Recruiter AI Employee — no second agreement.
What a trial includes
A trial tenant gets a Recruiter AI Employee with a stripped-down dashboard — only the Searches and Configuration tabs — and capped usage. By default a recruiter trial allows roughly 5 searches and a 10-candidate shortlist (per-tenant configurable). The two caps are:
| Limit | Default | What it caps |
|---|---|---|
| Search quota | 5 | Searches the tenant can run during the trial. |
| Shortlist limit | 10 | Candidates the tenant can shortlist. |
These defaults are not hard limits in the product — they are the out-of-the-box values in Recruiter's per-tenant configuration, and Ema can adjust either one for an individual tenant. When you hit a cap, Recruiter shows an upgrade prompt that links to Ema's upgrade-request page. You can check your remaining searches at any time; the dashboard tracks searches used against your quota.
Roles
Recruiter is gated by the same role system as the rest of the platform. Any authenticated role except no_access can use Recruiter's search, project, scoring, and outreach surfaces. Self-serve trial users are provisioned with a dedicated recruiter_trial_admin role, which has access to Recruiter but not to the broader builder. Trial users are also blocked from opening non-Recruiter AI Employees.
Finding Recruiter on an AI Employee
Recruiter is presented as an AI Employee whose interaction type is recruiter. Open it from your list of AI Employees the same way you open any other.
What you see depends on whether you're on a trial:
- Trial users see a focused, two-tab dashboard:
- Searches — the Recruiter surface itself: your list of searches, candidate review, and outreach.
- Configuration — where you connect the email and LinkedIn senders that outreach uses.
- Full-access users see the complete Recruiter AI Employee, including the standard AI Employee tabs (such as Permissions and Details) alongside the Recruiter surfaces.
The Searches tab is the heart of Recruiter. It opens on your list of searches, where you create new searches and open existing ones. Selecting a search takes you into its candidate list; from there you can edit the search setup or jump to its outreach configuration.
Connecting senders
Before any search can send outreach, the Recruiter AI Employee needs at least one connected sender. Senders live on the AI Employee, not on an individual search — once you connect a mailbox or LinkedIn account, every search in that AI Employee can use it. You connect them from the Configuration tab.
Connect an email sender
- Open the Configuration tab on the Recruiter AI Employee.
- In the email section, start the connection and choose your provider — Gmail or Outlook.
- Complete the OAuth flow with the mailbox you want to send from.
Recruiter sends outreach email from your real, connected mailbox via the provider's API, so messages appear in your own Sent folder. Credentials are stored encrypted.
Approve every permission during OAuth. Partial scope grants are the most common cause of a sender that connects but can't send. If you have several Google or Microsoft accounts signed in, run the connection in an incognito window so you authorize the right one.
Connect LinkedIn
- Open the Configuration tab.
- In the LinkedIn section, start the connection.
- Authorize the connection in the LinkedIn flow.
LinkedIn sending is brokered through Ema's LinkedIn integration. LinkedIn sessions can drop — for example, if you log out of LinkedIn elsewhere — and a dropped session shows the account as expired. Reconnect from the Configuration tab; any paused sequences resume once the connection is healthy again.
What's next
- Candidate Search — create your first search and turn a description or JD into a candidate pool.
- Scoring Criteria — review the scorecard Recruiter generates and understand candidate scores.
- Outreach — build a sequence and start contacting shortlisted candidates.