Firecrawl launches Directory with 240 million profiles for recruiting in ChatGPT and Claude

What Directory offers

Directory is part of Alexandria, which Firecrawl describes as its library of data providers, specialized indexes, and the live web. The idea, according to the company, is to give AI agents access to the information they need to do useful work, rather than relying on what they already know. Directory adds professional profiles to that library, with a focus on recruiting.

Through providers including Apollo, FullEnrich, and Data Legion, agents can search for people by job title, company, location, and keywords. They can retrieve available information about a person's current role, previous employers, professional background, and work contact details. Firecrawl says this lets recruiters go beyond keyword searches and find people based on the experience they are actually looking for.

Because Directory runs inside ChatGPT and Claude, users can research candidates in the same conversation where they define a role, compare backgrounds, and build a shortlist.

Five ways to use it

Firecrawl's announcement lists five example requests a recruiter might give an agent:

• Find engineers with relevant experience. A search for senior backend engineers in New York returned 142 matches in a single free search, according to Firecrawl.
• Find people who have worked at similar companies. Agents can search by current and previous employers, roles, and backgrounds.
• Build a shortlist from a job description. The agent searches Directory, organizes relevant profiles, and helps compare candidates.
• Research what a person has worked on. Using Firecrawl's web search, the agent can look for public information such as technical writing, conference talks, open-source contributions, interviews, and projects.
• Look up contact details. The agent can retrieve available professional contact information to help start outreach.

Firecrawl stresses the limits of the approach. "The goal isn't to automate hiring decisions," the company writes in its blog post, adding that the aim is to make initial research less manual so recruiters can spend more time evaluating promising people.

Pricing and setup

Directory searches are free, according to Firecrawl. Agents can explore profiles, refine searches, and identify relevant people without using credits. Credits are used when retrieving detailed professional information, including available contact details. Every account includes 1,000 free credits per month, so users can start without another subscription.

To get started, users install the Firecrawl plugin in ChatGPT or Claude. Firecrawl suggests a prompt such as: "Find senior backend engineers in New York who've worked on infrastructure at scale. Show me their current roles, previous employers, and relevant professional backgrounds." Users who work with an agent in the terminal can install the Firecrawl skills with the command npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest init --all --browser and then restart the agent to load them.

What it means for recruiters

Firecrawl frames recruiting as a research problem as much as a hiring problem, one that often means moving between databases, company websites, professional profiles, and search results. Directory is meant to give an agent a starting point, and combined with web search it can take a description of the desired person to a shortlist worth researching further.

The company is clear that the tool does not replace talking to candidates or evaluating their work. It is, in its words, a way to get to the point where those conversations can happen. For recruiters already using ChatGPT or Claude, the free search tier and monthly credit allowance lower the barrier to trying this kind of agent-driven sourcing.