Setting up a new role search on High Five takes minutes, not days. Once your role is configured, AI-assisted sourcing begins immediately, scanning LinkedIn, GitHub, and niche communities around the clock. By the end of your first week, you can expect to have a shortlist of pre-screened, interview-ready candidates moving through your pipeline, without a single screening call on your calendar.
TL;DR
- High Five is a subscription-based hiring platform built for founders and operators hiring in Southeast Asia
- Role setup is fast: define your requirements and the platform builds the search strategy automatically
- Automated candidate sourcing runs 24/7 across multiple channels simultaneously
- Candidates are pre-vetted by both AI and human reviewers before you see them
- You can realistically receive your first shortlist within the same week you set up your search
About the Author: High Five is an AI-powered hiring platform purpose-built for companies scaling teams across Southeast Asia. With a talent network spanning Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, and clients including Hupo, PayMongo, and Nafas, High Five brings direct, hands-on experience to every dimension of regional talent acquisition [letshigh5.com].
What Is High Five and Why Is It Built Differently?
High Five is not a job board and it is not a traditional intermediary. It is hiring infrastructure: an always-on system that runs sourcing, screening, and shortlisting in the background while you focus on running your business. The core model replaces traditional fee structures, which can include contingency fees, retainer fees, and success-based percentages of first-year salary, with a flat monthly subscription, removing the financial unpredictability that makes conventional hiring frustrating for growing companies.
The structural difference matters. Traditional hiring intermediaries send you candidates when a consultant has time. High Five’s AI agents are running every hour of every day, covering channels and communities that a manual process simply cannot work at the same scale. The result is faster pipeline velocity with more consistent quality.
This matters especially in 2026, where skills-based hiring and faster hiring cycles have become table stakes for competitive employers [astoncarter.com]. Companies that treat recruiting as a background process rather than a reactive scramble are winning on talent.
How Do You Set Up a New Role Search on High Five?
Setting up a role search on High Five is designed to take minutes, not a lengthy intake meeting. Here is how the process works:
Step 1: Request access and onboard
Start by visiting High Five’s platform and requesting a demo or submitting your details. Once your account is confirmed, the team guides you through onboarding so you are ready to launch your first search [letshigh5.com].
Step 2: Define your role
You describe the role: title, key responsibilities, must-have skills, experience level, and any location or language preferences within Southeast Asia. The platform takes this input and automatically builds a comprehensive search strategy, including which candidate pools, communities, and signals to target.
Step 3: Let the AI agents go to work
Once your role is live, AI agents begin scanning LinkedIn, GitHub, and niche professional communities simultaneously. This is not keyword matching against a static database. The agents actively source candidates across live networks, surfacing profiles that match your requirements whether or not those candidates are actively job-hunting [high5hire.com].
Step 4: AI screening and scoring
Every candidate the agents surface is analyzed and ranked against your role criteria automatically. The system evaluates fit across experience, skills, and signals of intent, filtering out mismatches before any human reviews the profile.
Step 5: Human expert review
Before a candidate reaches your shortlist, a High Five talent specialist reviews the AI-selected profiles. This hybrid model is deliberate: AI handles pattern recognition at scale, and humans apply judgment where context matters. You only see candidates who have passed both filters.
Step 6: Receive your shortlist
Pre-screened, interview-ready candidates are delivered to you on a weekly basis. You skip the screening-call stage entirely and move straight to interviews with people who already meet your bar.
How Does Automated Candidate Sourcing Actually Work?
Automated candidate sourcing, in the context of High Five, means AI agents are continuously running search queries and evaluating profiles across multiple platforms without any manual intervention between each cycle.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
| Manual Sourcing | Automated Sourcing via High Five |
|---|---|
| Recruiter searches LinkedIn once or twice a week | AI agents scan continuously, 24/7 |
| Limited to platforms the recruiter uses | Covers LinkedIn, GitHub, niche communities simultaneously |
| Dependent on active job-seekers | Surfaces passive candidates as well |
| Volume constrained by hours | Volume scales without additional cost |
| Single human judgment call | AI ranking plus human expert review |
The 24/7 nature of automated sourcing has a compounding effect. Profiles updated on a Tuesday night or new community members joining on a Friday afternoon are captured in near real-time rather than missed until the next manual search cycle.
How to Shortlist Candidates Without Spending Hours on Screening Calls?
Knowing how to shortlist candidates efficiently is one of the most practical challenges hiring managers face. The default approach, reviewing dozens of applications and running phone screens to filter down, consumes significant time for uncertain returns.
High Five’s model inverts this. The shortlisting work happens inside the platform, before candidates ever reach you:
- AI scoring ranks candidates against your role criteria, removing weak matches early
- Human reviewer input adds a layer of contextual judgment, catching things an algorithm might miss
- Only shortlisted, pre-vetted candidates appear in your weekly delivery
The practical outcome is that you spend your interview time talking to people who already meet your requirements, rather than discovering mismatches midway through a call. For founders without a dedicated HR team, this distinction is the difference between hiring being a distraction and hiring being a manageable weekly task.
Building on that point, the platform also learns from the feedback you give on each shortlist. If you consistently prefer candidates with a certain background or flag a particular mismatch, the system adjusts its scoring criteria over time, improving match quality on subsequent searches.
Frequently Asked Questions
How quickly can I expect to see candidates after setting up a role? Sourcing begins immediately after role setup, and most clients see their first shortlist within the same week the role goes live, though timing can vary based on role complexity and availability.
Do I need to change my existing interview process to use High Five? No. The platform integrates into your existing workflows. You run your own interviews; High Five simply delivers the pre-screened candidates to your pipeline.
Can I pause or cancel my subscription? Yes. The subscription can be paused or cancelled at any time with no lock-in or penalty.
What roles does High Five cover? Coverage spans tech and product roles (software engineers, data, product, design) as well as accounting, finance, marketing, operations, and legal functions.
Which countries in Southeast Asia does High Five source from? The platform actively sources talent across Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore.
Is there a limit on how many candidates I receive? Each subscription includes one active search slot. Candidates are delivered on a weekly basis for that active role.
What makes High Five different from posting on a job board? Job boards rely on candidates finding and applying to your listing. High Five’s agents actively source both active and passive candidates, including people who are not browsing job postings at all.
About High Five
High Five is an AI-powered hiring platform that helps companies hire top talent across Southeast Asia on a flat monthly subscription, with no placement fees or contingency costs. Its hybrid model combines autonomous AI sourcing and screening with human expert review to deliver interview-ready candidates. Built for founders, operators, and HR teams at growing companies, High Five covers technical and business roles across Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Clients including Hupo, PayMongo, Nafas, and SkinSeoul use High Five as always-on hiring infrastructure rather than a reactive, transactional service.
Ready to run your first role search? Visit highfive.global to request a demo and see how quickly you can go from role definition to interview-ready candidates.
