Recruiters and search firms
Interview intelligence software that keeps every interview on your own machine
Ghosty Notes records intake calls, screens and debriefs from your Mac’s own audio, transcribes them on the device, and saves each one as a markdown file you own.
Ghosty Notes runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon, because transcription runs on the chip itself. Intel Macs are not supported.
no notetaker in this list
what the other side sees while you record
A recruiting week is mostly talking. An intake call with a hiring manager, eight screens, a panel debrief, the conversation about the counter-offer. The written record from those calls is the actual product: the submission summary the client reads, the reason you passed on a candidate in March, the seniority band the hiring manager described before he changed his mind. Most of it lives in short-term memory and a half-finished field in the applicant tracking system.
Ghosty Notes records the call from your Mac’s system audio. Nothing joins the meeting, so the candidate does not see a fourth participant carrying a vendor’s name. Speech becomes text using a model running on the machine itself, and the transcript and summary are written as plain markdown files into a folder you choose. Your audio never leaves the device on any plan.
Because the notes are files rather than rows in someone else’s database, an AI tool you already use can read them. Ghosty Notes ships an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can search your interview history locally: every intake call for a client, every candidate who mentioned a specific stack, on one search.
The Illinois deletion duty, and why the copies are the hard part
The Illinois Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act, 820 ILCS 42, sets out what an employer using AI to analyse video interviews has to do. Give the applicant notice. Explain how the AI works and what characteristics it uses to evaluate them. Obtain consent before the interview. And, if the applicant asks, destroy the video within 30 days. That destruction clause is the interesting one, because it does not stop at the copy you know about. It reaches all backup copies, and it requires the employer to instruct anyone who received a copy to destroy theirs too.
Be clear about whether that statute reaches your process at all, because we are not going to pretend it reaches ours. The Illinois Act is aimed at AI that analyses a video interview. New York City’s Local Law 144 is aimed at automated employment decision tools that screen or score candidates. Ghosty Notes does neither. It does not score anyone, rank anyone, or produce any output a hiring decision could be delegated to. A note-taker that only writes down what was said is very likely outside both rules. We are not regulated by either, using Ghosty Notes satisfies neither, and any vendor telling you their product makes you compliant is selling you a feeling.
What those rules do is set a deletion and consent culture, and the culture is what reaches your desk. Candidates ask where the recording goes. Clients ask it in vendor questionnaires. In-house counsel asks before signing your MSA. And the genuinely hard question is the deletion one. A cascading destruction duty is trivial to honour when the interview is a single file in a single folder on a single laptop: you delete it, and the fact is settled. It is far harder when a cloud vendor has replicated that recording across storage regions, nightly backups, a search index and a transcription subprocessor, and your only lever is a support ticket.
This is being litigated rather than theorised. In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, case 5:25-cv-06911, was filed in the Northern District of California on 15 August 2025. We will not characterise the merits or predict an outcome. The point for a search firm is narrower: recording a private conversation through a third-party platform is now something plaintiffs bring cases about, and the cleanest position is the one where no third party holds the recording.
- 820 ILCS 42, Illinois Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act
- Requires notice, an explanation, applicant consent, and on request destruction of the video within 30 days including all backup copies, with that instruction passed to anyone who received a copy.
- NYC Local Law 144
- Applies to automated employment decision tools that screen or score candidates. A note-taker producing no score is very likely outside it.
- In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, 5:25-cv-06911 (N.D. Cal.)
- Filed 15 August 2025. Cited as a live case on the record, with no view taken on its merits.
How it fits a recruiting desk
Record the intake, not just the job spec
The intake call is where the role is really defined, and the written spec is a lossy summary of it. Recording keeps the hiring manager’s own words about the must-haves, the candidates he already rejected elsewhere, and the salary number he said out loud before it was formalised. Six weeks later, when the brief has drifted, you still have the original.
Run screens without typing through them
Screens stack up. Recording each one means you can look at the candidate instead of your keyboard, and the summary is waiting when the call ends. Every interview lands as a dated markdown file in the folder you picked.
Write the submission from the transcript
Open the transcript next to the client’s format and pull the evidence directly: the project the candidate described, their exact phrasing on notice period, the answer to the question your client always asks. Then paste the finished summary into your applicant tracking system yourself, because Ghosty Notes does not write to it.
Search your history before the next call
Point Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor at the MCP server and ask across everything you have recorded: which candidates have shipped a payments integration, what this client said about remote work across three intakes. The search runs against files on your Mac.
What recruiters ask before they try it
- We shortlisted Metaview and BrightHire. How do you compare on ATS integration and scorecards?
- We lose that comparison, and we would rather say it now than after you have installed the app. Metaview, at around $100 per user per month at list as of September 2026, and BrightHire are built around writing structured interview notes back into Greenhouse, Lever or Workday and scoring candidates against a defined rubric. Ghosty Notes does neither: no write-back, no scorecard, no rubric, no ranking. If your process depends on notes appearing in the ATS without a human pasting them, buy one of those. We are for recruiters who want a complete, private record of the conversation and will move the summary across themselves.
- Do we still have to tell candidates we are recording?
- Yes, and nothing about this product changes that. Consent is your obligation and it depends on where you and the candidate are sitting, not on where the file is stored. Some US states require the consent of all parties. Ghosty Notes does not ask on your behalf and plays no disclosure. What changes is only the answer to the follow-up question: where the recording goes, which is onto your machine and no further.
- Half our recruiters are on Windows laptops.
- Then half your recruiters cannot use this. Ghosty Notes runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon, because the transcription model runs on the Apple Silicon chip itself. There is no Windows build, no Intel Mac build and no web version, and there is no roadmap date we would be willing to state here.
- Can our head of talent see everyone’s interviews in one place?
- No. There is no shared library, no admin console and no seat management, because there is no team plan. Each licence is one person’s app writing to that person’s own folder. A firm can buy several individual licences, but nobody gets a view across a colleague’s meetings. If a central, searchable team library is the requirement, this is the wrong architecture for you.
- A client asked us not to use AI notetakers at all.
- Then do not use one on their roles. A local tool answers the question "which vendor is receiving this recording" with "none", and for a lot of clients that ends the conversation. It does not answer "we do not consent to being recorded", and no feature could. Ask, and take the answer.
- What happens to the interviews we already recorded elsewhere?
- Ghosty Notes does not import them and does not delete them from your previous vendor. Migrating means exporting what you want to keep, then using that vendor’s own deletion process for the rest. We govern only the recordings made with us.
Against the tools recruiting teams actually shortlist
| Ghosty Notes | Alternatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Where processing happens | On your Mac. Audio never leaves the device | Otter, Metaview and BrightHire upload audio to their servers |
| What the candidate sees | Nothing joins. Recording is from system audio | A named bot joins as a participant |
| ATS write-back and scorecards | Neither. You paste the summary in yourself | The core selling point of Metaview and BrightHire |
| Honouring a deletion request | Delete the file. There is no vendor copy to chase | A support request covering backups and subprocessors |
| Where the record lives | Markdown files in the folder you chose | In the vendor’s account, via their web app |
| Works without an internet connection | Yes, in local mode | No |
| Price | Free, or Pro at $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year | Metaview lists at around $100 per user per month as of September 2026 |
Questions from recruiting teams
- Does anything leave my Mac if I turn on Pro’s hosted AI models?
- The transcript text, and only if you switch it on. Recording and transcription always run on your Mac and the audio never leaves the device, on any plan. Summaries and chat are local by default. Pro’s hosted models and the fast cross-meeting chat send transcript text to that service for processing, never the audio file. In local mode nothing is sent at all.
- What hardware do I need?
- A Mac with Apple Silicon. The transcription model runs on the chip in your machine, so an Intel Mac cannot run it. There is no Windows build.
- Does Ghosty Notes score or rank candidates?
- No. It produces a transcript and a summary of what was said. It does not rate a candidate, compare candidates, predict performance or output anything a hiring decision could be handed to. That boundary is deliberate, and it is why rules aimed at scoring tools very likely do not reach it.
- If a candidate asks us to destroy their interview, what do we actually do?
- You delete the files: the recording, the transcript and the summary in your folder, plus any copy made elsewhere, such as a backup drive or a document you pasted it into. We hold no copy for you to request and keep no index of it. Whether the statute reaches your process is for your counsel.
- Can it tell the interviewer from the candidate?
- Speaker identification is a Pro feature and runs on your Mac like everything else. On the free plan the transcript is not labelled by speaker, which reads from context on a two-person screen and does not on a five-person panel debrief.
- Does it join Zoom, Teams or Google Meet?
- It does not join anything, which is the point. It records the audio your Mac is already playing plus your microphone, so it works with any platform, including a phone call on speaker and an interview held in a room.
- Can I use the free plan for real client work?
- Yes. The free plan does on-device transcription with no cap on meetings, includes the MCP server, and detects meetings from your local Apple Calendar. Pro adds Google and Outlook calendar sync, hosted AI models, fast cross-meeting chat, Obsidian sync and speaker identification.
- How do interview notes reach the rest of my team?
- The same way any file does. Put the folder in a shared drive, paste the summary into the ATS, or send it. There is no built-in sharing, because no server holds your notes to share them from.
Keep the whole interview, not the half you remembered
Free on a Mac with Apple Silicon, no cap on meetings. Pro is $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year.
Record your next intake call