Why Aptly exists, in four parts.
The problem nobody asked me to solve.
I'm Louis. Since 2013 I've worked inside recruitment companies, and since 2020 I've consulted as a Salesforce and Bullhorn developer for agencies in South Africa, the UK, and a few other places along the way. I've built candidate scoring tools, automated communication flows, custom CRM workflows, integrations between job boards and ATS platforms, and reporting dashboards that actually got used.
I have a recruitment industry view that most software founders don't. I've sat next to recruiters at their desks. I've watched them open their inboxes on a Monday morning. I've seen what a single posted role does to a small team's week.
When generative AI hit the candidate market in late 2023, I started seeing the same conversation play out across every client I worked with. The CV volume was tripling. The quality signal was collapsing. And the candidates who didn't progress, the ones recruiters used to at least send a brief reply to, were quietly stopping getting any response at all. There just wasn't time.
My clients weren't asking me to fix this. They'd accepted it as the new normal. But it was clearly the most important problem in recruitment right now, and nothing on the market was actually solving it. The big ATS vendors were bolting on AI scoring. Nobody was thinking about the candidate side of the loop.
So I started building Aptly.
Why "Aptly" exists, and what it actually does.
Aptly is built around two ideas that should be obvious but somehow aren't:
First, that AI screening is only useful if it's accurate against your specific role and your specific client, not against a generic match score. Aptly takes the role spec, takes the client's actual values, and ranks candidates with reasoning you can read. No black box. No magic number with no explanation.
Second, that every applicant deserves a real reply. Not a template. Not silence. A specific, personalised response that respects the time they spent applying. The technology to do this at scale exists. Almost nobody is using it. Aptly does it by default.
Those two ideas were the start. They turned out to be the way in to something larger. Every CV you screen builds your candidate database, so the tool you came to for screening quietly becomes the system you run the desk on: pipeline, client CRM, references, scorecards, video introductions, interview scheduling, a branded client portal, your own job board, and placements and fees. The whole permanent desk, from first CV to placed, without a separate ATS. What it will never become is a temp desk, a timesheet system, or an invoicing tool. We build the permanent desk and say no to the rest.
Where I am, and how I work.
I'm based in Hermanus, South Africa, building Aptly for a global market. Aptly is operated by Black Wolf Analytics (Pty) Ltd in South Africa. Payments are processed through our Wyoming-registered affiliate, Black Wolf Analytics LLC. None of that should matter to you, except as context for why a SaaS product can be built and run lean in 2026.
Aptly is currently a one-person product. That means a few things:
When you email support, you get me. Not a tier-one ticket triager. Not an offshore queue. Me, usually within a few hours.
When you suggest a feature, it goes into a real backlog I look at every week, not a black hole.
When something breaks, you'll know about it because I'll tell you, and it'll get fixed faster than at most companies ten times the size.
The downside of a small product is that I'm not going to invent a custom integration for your specific ATS this quarter. The upside is that the product moves fast and stays focused. I'd rather do two things excellently than fifteen things adequately.
Who's already using Aptly.
Aptly is in early adoption with recruitment agencies in South Africa, including Adcorp Group.