Here's a truth nobody in recruiting tech wants to admit: hiring managers hate your ATS. They find it confusing, over-complicated, and designed for recruiters who live in it 40 hours per week—not for managers who check in once a week to review candidates.

Aeon is groundbreaking hiring experience software crafted exclusively for hiring managers, with AI-powered resume intelligence, collaborative feedback tools, and the unique Intelligence Score. It's not trying to replace your ATS. It's trying to make hiring managers actually use the recruiting tools instead of ignoring them and making decisions in Slack.

What Aeon Actually Does

Aeon sits on top of your existing ATS and creates a hiring manager-friendly interface for candidate review, feedback, and decision-making. Here's the workflow:

AI Resume Intelligence: Aeon analyzes resumes and surfaces key insights hiring managers care about—relevant experience, skills matches, potential red flags, and career progression patterns. Instead of reading 10-page resumes, managers get intelligent summaries.

Intelligence Score: Aeon assigns each candidate a score based on fit for the role, skills alignment, experience relevance, and career trajectory. Hiring managers can quickly identify top candidates without manually screening every resume.

Collaborative Feedback: Interview feedback is collected in a structured, easy-to-use format. Panel members can see each other's feedback, identify consensus or disagreement, and make data-driven hiring decisions.

Visual Candidate Comparison: Compare candidates side-by-side with visual scorecards, skills breakdowns, and interview performance. Makes decision-making faster and more objective.

Hiring Manager Dashboard: A clean, simple dashboard shows active roles, candidate pipeline status, pending feedback, and action items. Everything a hiring manager needs without the ATS bloat.

The key insight: hiring managers don't need all the features recruiters use. They need candidate evaluation, feedback collection, and decision support. Aeon strips away everything else.

What This Gets Right

Finally, a tool hiring managers will actually use. Most ATS platforms are so complex that hiring managers avoid them, then complain recruiters aren't moving fast enough. Aeon's simplicity drives adoption.

AI summaries save massive time. Reading 50 resumes for a single role is brutal. Aeon's AI-powered intelligence surfaces what matters in seconds, not minutes. Hiring managers can review more candidates in less time.

Intelligence Score creates accountability. When every candidate has a data-driven score, hiring decisions become less subjective. "I just like Candidate A better" is harder to justify when Candidate B has a 15-point higher Intelligence Score.

Collaborative feedback is transparent. Panel members can see each other's interview feedback in real-time, which reduces groupthink and makes everyone accountable for their evaluations.

Doesn't replace your ATS. Aeon integrates with existing ATS platforms (Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, etc.) rather than trying to replace them. Recruiters keep their workflow, hiring managers get a better interface.

What This Gets Wrong (Or Has Limitations)

Another tool to manage. Your recruiting stack now includes: ATS + Aeon + scheduling tool + sourcing tool + assessment platform. Each tool adds value individually, but collectively you're managing integration complexity and cost.

Intelligence Score can create false precision. A numerical score makes hiring feel objective, but AI scoring is only as good as the criteria it's trained on. If your role requirements are vague or wrong, the scores will be too.

Hiring managers still need training. Even with a simple interface, hiring managers need to understand how to evaluate resumes, give good feedback, and avoid bias. A better tool doesn't fix undertrained interviewers.

Visual comparisons can overemphasize metrics. When candidates are displayed side-by-side with scorecards, hiring managers might over-index on quantifiable metrics and underweight qualitative factors like growth potential or culture fit.

Pricing is likely enterprise-focused. No public pricing (classic HR tech move). Expect this to be positioned at mid-size to large companies, not startups.

When Aeon Makes Sense

Hiring manager adoption is your bottleneck. If your biggest recruiting problem is getting hiring managers to review candidates, provide feedback, and make decisions quickly, Aeon directly solves that.

High-volume roles with multiple stakeholders. When you have 5+ people interviewing candidates and need coordinated feedback across rounds, collaborative tools prevent communication breakdowns.

You have an ATS but hiring managers hate it. If recruiters are happy with your ATS but hiring managers refuse to log in, you need a manager-friendly interface layer on top.

Data-driven hiring culture. Companies that value structured decision-making and want to reduce hiring bias benefit from Intelligence Scores and collaborative feedback.

When Aeon Is Overkill

Small companies with simple hiring processes. If you're hiring 10 people per year and your hiring manager is also the CEO who's deeply involved, you don't need specialized hiring manager software.

Hiring managers who already engage well. If your hiring managers are responsive, provide timely feedback, and actively participate in recruiting, your problem isn't tooling—it's something else.

Limited recruiting budget. Adding a layer on top of your ATS increases costs. If budget is tight, focus on getting your core ATS right before adding supplementary tools.

Highly subjective hiring criteria. If your hiring decisions are primarily gut-feel and culture-based rather than skills-based, AI scoring and structured feedback won't add much value.

How It Compares to Alternatives

vs. Using Your ATS Directly: ATS platforms are designed for recruiters, not hiring managers. Aeon creates a manager-friendly interface. Think of it as a UX layer on top of your ATS.

vs. Spreadsheets and Email: Some teams resort to Google Sheets and email threads for candidate feedback because their ATS is too complicated. Aeon is infinitely better than that chaos.

vs. Slack/Teams for Feedback: Many hiring teams coordinate feedback in Slack channels, which is fast but unstructured and hard to track. Aeon formalizes feedback without slowing it down.

vs. GoodTime (Interview Scheduling): Different use cases. GoodTime handles scheduling logistics. Aeon handles candidate evaluation and decision-making. Potentially complementary tools.

vs. Peoplebox Nova (AI Recruiting): Nova automates recruiter tasks (screening, interviewing, shortlisting). Aeon improves hiring manager collaboration. Different parts of the hiring process.

Aeon's unique positioning is "the hiring manager's tool" in a market where everything else is built for recruiters or candidates.

The Hiring Manager Experience

Let's walk through what a hiring manager actually does in Aeon:

Monday morning: Log into Aeon dashboard. See 12 new candidates for your open role, each with an Intelligence Score and AI summary. Review top 5 in 10 minutes instead of 45 minutes of resume reading.

Tuesday: Three candidates interviewed. Panel members submit feedback in Aeon. You see real-time feedback as it comes in, spot consensus on Candidate A, notice concerns about Candidate B's technical depth.

Wednesday: Use Aeon's visual comparison tool to review all finalists side-by-side. Scores, skills, feedback, experience—all in one view. Make offer decision in 15-minute meeting instead of 3-hour debate.

Result: Hiring decision made in 3 days with clear data backing it up, instead of 2 weeks of email chains and scheduling conflicts.

This is why hiring managers actually use Aeon—it saves them time and makes decisions easier, which is what they care about.

The Recruiter Perspective

Recruiters might initially resist adding another tool, but Aeon solves problems that make recruiters' lives miserable:

• Hiring managers who ghost candidate reviews
• Interview feedback that takes 5 days to collect
• "I'll know it when I see it" decision-making with no clear criteria
• Candidates stuck in limbo while hiring managers debate

If Aeon gets hiring managers to engage faster and make data-driven decisions, recruiters benefit enormously. Faster time-to-hire, better candidate experience, and less recruiter frustration chasing feedback.

The trade-off is managing another integration and potentially another vendor relationship. Whether that's worth it depends on how bad your hiring manager engagement problem is.

Implementation and Rollout

What you'll need:

• ATS integration (Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, etc.)
• Defined interview processes and feedback criteria
• Hiring manager buy-in and training
• Role requirements and scoring criteria for Intelligence Score

Implementation timeline:

• Week 1-2: ATS integration and data sync
• Week 2-3: Configure Intelligence Score criteria and feedback templates
• Week 3-4: Train hiring managers and launch pilot roles
• Week 4+: Full rollout across recruiting team

Change management is critical. You're asking hiring managers to change their workflow, which means you need clear communication about why this benefits them. Lead with time savings and easier decision-making, not "we need better data."

The Bottom Line

Aeon is solving a real problem: hiring managers hate recruiting tools because they're not built for them. By creating a manager-friendly interface with AI intelligence, collaborative feedback, and visual decision support, Aeon drives engagement from the people who ultimately make hiring decisions.

This isn't a recruiter tool. It's a hiring manager tool. And if your bottleneck is hiring manager participation, responsiveness, and decision speed, Aeon directly addresses that.

The downside is additional cost and complexity in your recruiting stack. You're layering another tool on top of your ATS instead of fixing your ATS. But if your ATS vendor won't make hiring manager experience a priority, a specialized tool like Aeon is the next best option.

Rating: 7.5/10 (addresses a real pain point, but adds complexity to your tech stack)

Best for: Mid-size to large companies with hiring manager engagement problems, high-volume recruiting with multiple stakeholders, data-driven hiring cultures

Skip if: Small teams with simple hiring processes, hiring managers who already engage well, limited recruiting budget, highly subjective hiring criteria

Bottom line: Finally, someone built a recruiting tool for the people who actually make hiring decisions. If your hiring managers are ignoring your ATS and slowing down recruiting as a result, Aeon might be the UX layer you've been missing.