Are hiring managers being left out of HR tech?

July 3, 2026

So much energy and investment is being poured into AI-powered recruitment technology. Vendors are racing to automate sourcing, screening, scheduling, and scoring. Recruiters are getting smarter tools, faster workflows and AI assistants trained to make their lives easier.

And hiring managers? They’re still muddling through systems they were never really trained on, sending messages to their recruitment team for status updates, and waiting to hear back on where their candidates are up to in the process. They’re watching the talent tech transformation happen around them, without being considered as part of it.

It’s a frustrating cycle for hiring managers, and it eats into recruiters’ time that could be spent elsewhere. A quick question that should be easily answerable turns into a back-and-forth, multiple times a day, across every open role. It shouldn’t be this way.

Hiring managers are stakeholders in every single hire. They define what good looks like, they conduct interviews, and they make the final decision. Yet they’re often treated as peripheral in the hiring process and the HR tech built around them. This results in a visibility gap and friction on both sides of the fence. Recruiters have to field the “any update?” question multiple times a day, and hiring managers get frustrated by a process that feels opaque from the outside.

AI that helps hiring managers: Meet Paige.

This is the gap that Paige (PageUp’s agentic AI hiring assistant) was built to close. Rather than another tool within the ATS, Paige sits on top of the entire hiring ecosystem. It’s built to work for everyone in the hiring process and gives hiring managers direct, easy access to the answers they need, in plain language, without going through the recruitment team for every query.

With Paige, hiring managers can ask things like:

Where is this candidate up to?
Who are the strongest applicants for my role?
What’s the next step in the process?
How does this candidate’s experience compare to the role requirements?

And get a clear answer in seconds: source-cited, and pulled directly from the hiring system, the application, the assessment, or wherever the information lives.

It’s not just status updates, either. When a hiring manager needs to open a new role, Paige can guide them through it step by step. It can prefill details from similar roles and prompt for anything that’s missing, so a job goes live in minutes instead of sitting in someone’s inbox for days. Stuck on a process question, like how many interview rounds are standard, or what the next approval step is? Paige has that answer too, pulled straight from internal policy. No need to navigate the ins and outs of the ATS, and no need to wait on the recruitment team for a response.

Ready to see Paige in Action? Take a tour.

Informed, not automated

It’s worth being clear about what Paige is, and what it isn’t. Paige doesn’t make hiring decisions. There are no auto-rejections, no mystery candidate scores. A human must always make the final call. What Paige does is give hiring managers and recruiters access to all the information within the ATS, collated and served up on-demand. The goal isn’t to replace a hiring manager’s judgement, but to sharpen it. It gives hiring teams greater visibility, so they can move through every interview, every shortlist review, every final decision, fully informed.

Recruiters get their time back too

Every “any update?” message a hiring manager doesn’t have to send is also a workflow interruption a recruiter doesn’t have to handle. Multiplied across a team, across a year, that’s a meaningful amount of time returned to recruiters to do more meaningful things like nurturing candidates and building pipelines.

Hiring with Paige

The challenge	Without Paige	With Paige
Candidate status updates	Hiring managers message recruiters and wait for a response	Instant, source-cited answers on demand
Role creation	New roles created manually from scratch, slowing time to advertiseadvertize	Step-by-step guidance with details prefilled from similar roles
Candidate comparison	Limited visibility into how applicants stack up against requirements	Direct comparison of candidate experience against role requirements
Recruiter time	Frequent “any update?” interruptions across every open role	Recruiters freed up for higher-value work like pipeline building
Decision making	Hiring managers make calls with incomplete or hard-to-access information	Fully informed decisions with all relevant data surfaced on demand, with the source to back it up
Hiring manager experience	Treated as peripheral to the process and the tech built around it	Direct access to the hiring ecosystem without needing to go through recruitment

The hiring manager experience is due for an update

The HR tech revolution has delivered a lot these past few years. Smarter sourcing, faster screening, sharper recruiter workflows. But often, the hiring manager experience has been treated as a secondary concern. With Paige, hiring managers get visibility and answers on demand. Ask a question, get an instant, source-verified answer, and move on with your day.

The hiring manager experience has been waiting for an update, and this is it. Explore what Paige can do for your organisationorganization today.