The AI platform built for the slowest corner of hiring - the C-suite. Ask in plain English, get a qualified shortlist before the coffee cools.
THE WORDMARK. QLU's logo, rendered in signal-yellow on the same navy its product wears. A four-year-old name that a 1956 search firm decided to trust.
For seventy years, that moment kicked off a familiar ritual: a rolodex, a phone, and three months of patience. Someone would build a spreadsheet of every plausible candidate, cross-reference LinkedIn, guess at who might be open to a move, and slowly - painstakingly - draw a map of the market by hand. The research was the job. The judgment came later, if there was time left for it.
Inside QLU.ai's product, that same brief plays out differently. The recruiter types a sentence - the way you'd describe the role to a colleague - and the system reads across millions of profiles, org charts, and live company signals. Under a minute later, a shortlist arrives. Not five hundred names to wade through. A short, qualified list. The two weeks of market mapping that used to eat the front of every search collapses into a few minutes.
That is the whole pitch, and QLU says it out loud on its homepage: find executive candidates in seconds, not three months. It's a bold claim in an industry that has resisted automation for good reasons - the higher the role, the more the human read matters. QLU's bet is not that AI replaces that read. It's that AI should do the digging so the human can spend their hours on the part that was always the point.
Most sourcing tools promise more candidates. QLU is built around a different unit: the finished search. It handles finding the person and winning the meeting, in one place.
Natural-language search across millions of profiles, org charts, and company data. A qualified shortlist in under 60 seconds, weighted by real-time company signals. No Boolean strings required.
Automated multi-channel campaigns across LinkedIn, Gmail, calls, and text - with personalized messaging, follow-ups, and engagement tracking so no warm candidate goes cold.
AI voice and manual calling that qualifies candidates and books meetings automatically - working 24/7 across time zones while the human team sleeps.
Automated competitive landscape reports that compress weeks of manual market mapping into minutes - drawn while you're still reading the brief.
A virtual office for the team - instant colleague connection, calendar sync, and hallway-style collaboration for a distributed search practice.
QLU.ai was founded in 2020 by Fahad Jalal, an operator with an unusual résumé for a recruiting startup: a master's in computer science from Stanford, an MBA from Wharton, and an electrical-engineering degree in circuit design from Queen's. Before QLU, he grew a business unit at Mentor Graphics from zero to roughly $100M in annual recurring revenue in about two years, and has exited multiple startups to Fortune 100 buyers.
He points that operator's instinct at a process nearly everyone had accepted as simply "how it works": executive search takes months. QLU's answer is to attack the part of the search that never needed a human - the finding - and hand the rest back.
Stanford CS · Wharton MBA · scaled a unit from $0 to $100M ARR. His public handle, "aiandjustice," hints at the other half of the mission - fairness in AI-driven hiring.
"Game-changer for recruitment - saved me countless hours on research."
"10x faster sourcing with better accuracy - we unearth top-tier candidates quickly."
"AI-driven matching drastically reduced the manual work."
"Saved us days of research mapping the competitive landscape."
Product walk-throughs and founder conversations - straight from QLU's own channels.
Return to that recruiter and the CRO brief. The ritual has changed shape. The two weeks of hand-drawn market maps are gone. The spreadsheet of maybe-candidates is a shortlist that arrived in under a minute. The follow-ups that used to slip through the cracks are running themselves, across four channels, around the clock.
What's left is the part QLU never tried to automate: reading the room, sensing the fit, deciding who actually belongs at the table. The recruiter still does that. They just get to it faster - and with their week back. That's the quiet trade QLU.ai is selling to an industry as old as the transistor: keep the judgment, hand over the digging. So far, firms from Kelly to Spencer Stuart have decided it's a trade worth making.