UPPER is an AI-native recruiting company on a simple, serious mission: connect more people to good work, faster — and give the talent leaders who do that work a system worthy of it.
Every role filled is a livelihood — a person with momentum, dignity, and a place to do their best work; a company with the team it needs to build something real. That's not a tagline. It's the through-line of everything we make.
And yet the work of connecting talent to opportunity is still mostly grind. Talent leaders spend their nights keyword-guessing across a dozen tabs, copy-pasting between tools, and chasing candidates who went quiet. The best people stay buried. Good roles stay open. Everyone loses time that should have gone to the human part of the job.
"Recruiting done right means dignity for candidates and outcomes for clients. Automation should remove the grind — never the judgment."
So we built UPPER: an autonomous recruiting OS that scans every channel, scores every signal, and hands a talent leader a ranked shortlist — while they sleep. The system never misses a signal and never sleeps, so people can do the parts only people can do: judgment, relationships, and building teams.
We believe AI should amplify talent leaders, not replace them. The machine does the searching. The human decides who gets the call. That balance — capability with accountability — is the company we're building.
UPPER was founded by Rachel Messing, who assembled the founding team to build the autonomous recruiting OS from the engine up.
Rachel founded UPPER on a conviction she'd carried through years in talent: the work of putting people into good jobs is some of the most meaningful work there is — and the tools built to support it had never been worthy of it. She set out to change that.
Rather than build another point tool, she assembled a founding team of operators and engineers to build an entire operating system for recruiting — autonomous where it should be, human where it matters. Today she leads UPPER as CEO and carries its mission voice: recruiting done right is dignity for candidates and outcomes for clients.
Under her leadership, UPPER has grown into a team of 200+ across 18 countries, delivering on 1,500+ projects — and defining a new category in the process.
Connect with RachelEvery placement is a livelihood and a team made whole. We say it with restraint and pride — never savior-complex, never cheese.
Automation removes the grind so talent leaders do the human part: judgment, relationships, and building teams.
We cite real sources and never fabricate a stat. Credibility is the brand, and we earn it claim by claim.
A system that never sleeps and never misses a signal — that's the category we're defining, not another bolt-on app.
Speed plus respect, with no ghosting. Opt-out honored, PII protected. People are people, not records.
AI agents do the work; named humans own the outcomes. Capability with accountability, by design.
A hybrid team of real humans and autonomous AI agents, built transparently and on purpose.