Our price wasn't decided by feeling

Here’s the thing: “cheap” and “expensive” are feelings about a number. They tell you about the person reading the price, not about the price itself. The number only means something once you know what it stands in for. So before the number, the perceived value.

Starting with what NoesisHiring actually does, we planned the pricing with a method.

Noesis Hiring changes the outcome of hiring processes.

For businesses, it gives in-house recruiters a process they can finally trust - reliable enough, run after run, that talent acquisition stops being a hopeful guess and starts being effective. Not a faster version of the old pipeline. A more reliable one. A bad hire is one of the most expensive mistakes an organisation makes without noticing, and the hours saved were never the prize. The reliability is.

And for the people looking for work, the market becomes fairer. But the fairness is a consequence, not the lever. What actually changes is the relationship underneath - between the organisation offering the work and the person seeking it. Treat that as a real relationship, with both sides seen and both sides able to speak, and a fairer market is simply what follows. I put this second on purpose, because it is the part that matters most.

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I’m an economist. Pricing isn’t a vibe I land on after a good day. A price is a claim about value - and there is more than one honest way to make that claim.

1. Price it cost-plus - what it takes to run, plus a margin - and it would come out cheaper than it is today.

2. Price it on the value created - what the outcome is actually worth to the buyer - and we’d be charging what an outsourced recruiter charges: several thousand per hire, sometimes tens of thousands.

Same product. Two honest methods. A vast gap between them.

Cost-plus is not a bad method. It is the right method — for a commodity. And the modern ATS has quietly become exactly that: strip the logos and they are nearly the same software, sold to do one thing only: make hiring faster. Price that by its cost, by all means.

We did not split the difference to keep everyone half-satisfied. A number chosen to offend no one usually convinces no one - it manages to be wrong in both directions at once.

We chose something else: a price that puts high-value outcomes within reach for a fraction of what that value costs everywhere else.

• That price sits above a commodity ATS — deliberately. Not because a bigger number feels better, but because NoesisHiring does far more than tidy a workflow, and charging for it as if it were one would misprice what it actually is.

• But it sits far, far below the recruiter’s invoice — also deliberately — because the purpose is to widen access to good hiring, not to capture all the value the market would let us take.

There is one cost no method on that list can see. Cost-plus, in particular, quietly prices it at zero: the decades it takes to build this right. Because effort was never the thing people pay for. They pay for what the effort produces — and AI has split those two apart for good, letting a small input create outsized value.

It means that anyone can ship a hiring platform nowadays. And many have already done so. Almost none of them carry the mix of understanding, knowledge and know-how underneath Noesis Hiring.

• The judgment about what to build and what to refuse

• The theory of ARM made operational

• The economics and human design fused into its ultimate purpose

None of these shows up in a software features list. All of them are the reason why the value created is real.

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We can’t expect a price to pay that back. We don’t try to. But they are the platform’s true and ultimate value, and it is the one thing a competitor cannot clone by copying the buttons.

• So when someone tells you the price is way too cheap, they are usually measuring against the value perceived, and they are right.

• When someone tells you the price is too expensive, they are measuring it against a commodity tool. And they were also right.

Noesis Hiring was intended to be neither a recruitment agency nor a commodity ATS software.

We priced Noesis Hiring to its purpose - a reliable, accountable, human led process and a relationship building method operationalised to treat both sides as we should - not to the maximum a formula would allow.

A job market that works better, and works fairer, is the natural consequence of getting hiring right. That is the only number that holds. When the value is real, the price is just telling the truth about it. And telling the truth is the discipline Noesis Hiring is built on.

Antonio Specchia is the founder of NoesisHiring, an AI-powered recruitment platform. He is a researcher, Routledge author, and the creator of the Applicant Relationship Management (ARM) framework. His first book, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Medium and Small Enterprises (Routledge, 2022), laid the foundation.

A forthcoming book, Applicant Relationship Management (ARM): Human–AI Collaboration in the Agentic Economy, is in preparation for Routledge. His research on Applicant Relationship Management has been widely accepted among academics and HR professionals.