Cobalt
Cobalt is an AI-first applicant tracking system and recruitment CRM built for European staffing firms and search agencies. It unifies semantic sourcing, automatic enrichment, meeting transcription, multichannel outreach and an autonomous AI agent on EU-hosted infrastructure.
What is Cobalt?
Cobalt is an applicant tracking system and a recruitment CRM combined into one SaaS platform, published by SKILLFORGE APP, a French company incorporated on 1 November 2025 and based in Coignières, west of Paris. Its founder, Grégory Hissiger, positions it as AI-first rather than a legacy platform with AI bolted on, and aims it at three audiences: IT services companies running 10 to 500 consultants, specialist and executive search agencies, and in-house recruitment teams.
The product follows the hiring chain end to end under five headings: source and prospect, qualify and enrich, present, engage, and manage. Sourcing rests on semantic embeddings, so a plain-language request, naming a technology, a level of experience, an availability window, a city and a daily rate, returns ranked profiles drawn from both the internal pool and the open market. Every match carries an explainable score whose weighting the vendor publishes: skills 40 percent, availability 25 percent, location 20 percent, seniority 15 percent.
Around that core sit an enrichment engine that cross-references public sources for verified work emails and direct numbers, CV parsing from PDF, Word or image files, competency dossiers built in about thirty seconds in the client's own format, multilingual transcription of interviews and calls that writes its findings back into the CRM, outreach sequences spanning email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp, a unified inbox, and Linear-style task and pipeline management.
Balt, an autonomous AI agent, is included in the subscription. It qualifies candidates, chases follow-ups, books interviews and updates records, with human validation required on every action. Balt is also sold on its own, on a separate site under separate terms.
The real differentiator for the French market is a two-way BoondManager integration covering candidates, companies, projects and placements. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Zoom, Docusign and Yousign connect as well, alongside a Chrome extension for one-click LinkedIn imports.
Data sits primarily in France with Scaleway and Vercel, and the publisher lists its fifteen subprocessors and offers a DPA on request. The interface is French and English, and CV parsing covers seven languages. One caveat: the site publishes three conflicting price lists, so the cost should be confirmed in writing.
What it does
- Search your own talent pool and the open market from a single plain-language query
- Enrich contacts automatically with verified work emails, direct phone numbers and detected skills
- Generate a client-ready competency dossier in about thirty seconds
- Run multichannel outreach sequences across email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp from a unified inbox
- Transcribe and summarise interviews and calls, then push the findings back into the CRM
- Synchronise candidates, companies, projects and placements both ways with BoondManager
- Delegate qualification, follow-up and interview scheduling to the Balt AI agent under human validation
When to use Cobalt / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Cobalt is the right fit.
When to use Cobalt
- IT services companies running 10 to 500 consultants who need to cut bench time and staff missions faster
- Specialist recruitment and executive search agencies that live off a candidate pool and long-term relationships
- Teams already running BoondManager, which Cobalt synchronises in both directions
- In-house talent acquisition departments looking for an AI-native ATS rather than an add-on module
- European organisations that need EU data residency, a published subprocessor list and French-language support
When not to use Cobalt
- Individual job seekers and candidates: the terms restrict the service to business use only
- Anyone needing a mobile app, as no iOS or Android application exists
- Developers wanting an openly documented API, which is gated behind the Business tier with no public documentation
- Organisations requiring SSO/SAML or a negotiated DPA without moving to the Enterprise tier
- Buyers who need a certified security posture today, since ISO 27001 is only announced as in progress
How to use Cobalt
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Book a 30-minute demo through the booking link that every call-to-action on the site points to
- Open an account on the permanent Free plan, or start the 14-day trial, which asks for no payment card
- Follow the guided onboarding, announced as taking under an hour
- Import your existing records by CSV or from your current ATS through the API, typically 10 to 30 minutes
- Connect your Google or Microsoft account by OAuth to sync mailboxes and calendars
- Install the Chrome extension to import LinkedIn profiles in one click
- Switch on the two-way BoondManager sync, set up in about ten minutes
- Set your pipelines, scoring criteria and outreach sequences
- Book a two-hour training session with a Cobalt specialist for the wider team
- For a full migration from another ATS, plan four to eight weeks of assisted, no-cost transfer
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Covers the whole chain from sourcing to placement in one system instead of six to eight stacked tools
- Primary data hosted in France and the EU, with GDPR compliance presented as standard rather than a paid option
- Publishes a full table of fifteen subprocessors with the location of the data each holds, which is rare
- Two-way BoondManager integration, genuinely specific to the French IT staffing market
- Explicit commitment not to train models on customer data, with a DPA available on request
- Permanent free plan, 14-day trial without a card, no setup fee and free assisted migration from thirteen ATSs
- Contractual availability target of 99.5 percent per month and French-language in-app support
Cons
- Three incompatible public price lists coexist on the site, which makes the real cost impossible to pin down
- Very young publisher: the company was incorporated on 1 November 2025 and first archived in March 2026
- No security certification actually held; ISO 27001 is only announced as in progress for 2026
- No mobile application, on either iOS or Android
- The REST API is restricted to the Business tier and has no publicly readable documentation
- Autonomous AI agents are absent from the Core tier, pushing agent use to at least 249 EUR per user per month
- Performance figures such as 95 percent email hit rate or 30 percent more placements are internal and unaudited
Pricing & Plans
Cobalt runs a freemium model. A permanent Free plan is available at no cost for a single user, and a 14-day trial requires no payment card. Under Article 4.1 of the terms and conditions, prices are quoted per user per month excluding VAT: the entry-level paid tier, Core, costs 129 EUR on monthly billing or 99 EUR with an annual commitment; Copilot costs 299 EUR or 249 EUR respectively; Enterprise is quoted individually. Two add-ons are billed per user per month, VoIP telephony at 20 EUR and AI Screening at 49 EUR, both included from the Copilot tier. Enrichment credits are sold in packs, from 49 EUR for 1,000 credits (0.049 EUR per credit) to 499 EUR for 25,000 credits (0.020 EUR per credit). Prices are subject to annual indexation on the Syntec index. Readers should be aware that two other, incompatible price lists remain published elsewhere on the same site.
- one user
- limited sourcing and prospecting
- 3 active projects
- 5 competency dossiers per month
- AI email templates
- help-centre support
- no payment card required
- unlimited sourcing and prospecting
- unlimited transcription
- unlimited customised competency dossiers
- multichannel sequences with limited workflows
- 500 enrichment credits
- multi-user
- standard support
- VoIP and AI Screening as paid add-ons
- everything in Core plus autonomous AI agents
- unlimited workflows
- 5
- 000 enrichment credits
- AI Screening and VoIP telephony included
- priority support
- everything in Copilot plus tailored training and onboarding
- dedicated support
- guaranteed SLA
- multi-entity management
- SSO/SAML and a custom DPA
- unlimited users and credits
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Cobalt handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR coverage is unusually concrete for a company this young. The publisher is established in France, names SKILLFORGE APP as controller with Grégory Hissiger as the contact point, and reaches privacy@cobalt-ia.com. The privacy policy, updated in August 2026, tabulates purposes against Article 6 legal bases, lists fifteen subprocessors with the location of the data each one holds, and documents international transfers under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and the 2021/914 standard contractual clauses. Access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection and withdrawal of consent are all offered, exercisable by email or from the application itself, with a one-month response commitment. The CNIL is named as the supervisory authority. A DPA is available on request. No Article 27 representative is designated, which is expected for an EU-based controller, and no DPO is named.
Who owns the data?
Customers keep full ownership of the content they import or create. Cobalt takes only a limited licence to host, store, display and process that content for the sole purpose of delivering the service. Where the platform handles candidate or prospect records, the customer is the data controller and Cobalt acts as a processor under Article 28 of the GDPR, working on documented instructions. Data can be exported at any time in JSON or CSV, and thirty days are granted after termination to retrieve everything before deletion. One asymmetry deserves attention: any feedback or improvement suggestion sent to Cobalt may be used freely by the vendor, without compensation or obligation.
Reuse rights
Customers may reuse their own records freely, without asking Cobalt for permission: ownership stays with them, one-click export in JSON or CSV is advertised, and a thirty-day window follows termination. The limits sit elsewhere. The acceptable-use clauses forbid reselling or sublicensing the service, scraping it outside the official APIs, and sending unsolicited messages. Customers also carry their own GDPR obligations for candidate data: establishing a lawful basis, informing the people concerned, honouring their rights, and refraining from special-category data without appropriate safeguards. Enrichment results come from third-party sources and are supplied without any accuracy guarantee, so verification before use falls to the customer. Cobalt states it never sells personal data and does not use customer data to train third-party models.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Primary data is hosted in France and the European Union. Scaleway, in the Paris region, holds the database and application infrastructure, and Vercel, also in Paris, serves the web front end and CDN. Product analytics run on PostHog in Frankfurt, Germany, and monitoring on Dash0 in AWS eu-west-1. AI processing is split between Mistral AI in France and Microsoft Azure AI Foundry in the EU, while transcription runs on Gladia and MeetingBaas, both French. Five subprocessors sit in the United States: Resend, FullEnrich, Clado, ZeroEntropy and Anthropic, covered by standard contractual clauses, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, or both. Stripe and Google Gemini straddle the EU and the US under the Framework. Data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, on ISO 27001-certified hosting infrastructure, that certification belonging to Scaleway rather than to Cobalt. Note that the FAQ's claim of no transfers outside the EU is contradicted by the privacy policy's own section on international transfers.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Cobalt.
- Pricing is the sharpest risk: three incompatible grids are published at once, so never budget from the site alone and insist on a written quotation
- Automated candidate scoring invites over-trust; the weighting is published and human validation is required, but the habit of accepting the ranking without reading the reasoning erodes recruiter judgement
- Enrichment builds contact files on people who never dealt with you, and the customer, not Cobalt, carries the GDPR duty to establish a lawful basis and inform them
- Enrichment data comes from third parties and is supplied with no accuracy guarantee, so acting on an unverified phone number or email is the customer's exposure
- Concentrating candidates, clients, notes, transcripts and mailboxes in one system raises the stakes of any breach, and Cobalt holds no security certification yet
- Recorded and transcribed interviews change what a conversation is; participants need to be told, and the customer must handle that consent
- The publisher is under a year old with no announced funding, which is a real continuity risk for a system meant to hold the whole recruitment memory
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for a first run. Cobalt is a web application with nothing to install, and the vendor announces guided onboarding in under an hour with productive use from day one. Importing existing records by CSV or ATS API takes ten to thirty minutes, connecting Google or Microsoft accounts is a standard OAuth consent, and the BoondManager sync is set up in about ten minutes. A Chrome extension must be installed for LinkedIn imports. There is no setup fee. A full migration from an incumbent ATS is a longer project, four to eight weeks depending on volume, but it is assisted free of charge, with two-hour training sessions for the team.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Cobalt
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Cobalt.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is Cobalt?
Is there a free plan or a trial?
How much does Cobalt cost?
Does Cobalt use my data to train its AI models?
Where is the data hosted?
What security certifications does Cobalt hold?
Is there an API and a mobile app?
What does Cobalt integrate with?
Which languages does Cobalt support?
Who publishes Cobalt, and how long has it existed?
Should you pick Cobalt?
Cobalt is a coherent and unusually well-documented proposition for a publisher barely ten months old. It attacks a real problem, the six to eight disconnected tools that most staffing firms and agencies stack up, and it does so with vocabulary that belongs to the French IT services market rather than to a generic global ATS: bench time, daily rates, competency dossiers, positioning on missions. The two-way BoondManager synchronisation is the clearest differentiator, and it is not one a larger foreign competitor is likely to match soon.
On compliance the record is genuinely strong. Primary hosting in France, a published table of fifteen subprocessors with the location of each, a DPA offered on request rather than sold with the top tier, an explicit commitment not to train models on customer data, and clearly tabulated retention periods place Cobalt ahead of many larger vendors. Scoring is explainable, with published weightings and mandatory human validation, which matters in a field where opaque ranking of people is a real hazard.
Two reservations should temper that. The first is concrete and immediate: the site publishes three incompatible price lists at the same time, one in the contractual terms, one in the FAQ and press kit, one on the homepage. No buyer should budget from the website; a written quotation is essential. The second is structural. The company was incorporated in November 2025, holds no security certification, has announced no funding, and its headline performance figures are internal and unaudited. For a system meant to hold an entire recruitment memory, that youth is a risk worth weighing.
For a European agency wanting EU hosting and BoondManager, Cobalt merits a demo, with the pricing pinned down first.
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