Fireflies, tl;dv, Otter: meeting notetakers up against recruitment interviews

The situation is almost always the same when you talk to a recruitment team. Someone else already chose the notetaker. The sales team rolled it out six months ago for client meetings, the license exists, it runs, and the question comes up naturally: if the tool already takes notes in meetings, why pay for one more piece of software for job interviews.

It is a good question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a sales pitch. General-purpose notetakers like Fireflies, tl;dv, or Otter do a solid job of what they were designed for. The real dividing line is not transcription quality, it is what happens after the interview: what the candidate data becomes, where it lives, and whether you will be able to reuse it in six months.

Hirify, which publishes this guide, is one of the tools cited below. Every factual point about the other tools is sourced and dated as of June 6, 2026, and we stay focused on the same need: capturing and structuring what comes out of an interview, then deciding what becomes of the candidate data.

What these notetakers do well

Before looking at the limits, you have to acknowledge the strengths, because a comparison that lists only gaps helps no one decide.

Fireflies transcribes in more than 100 languages, with a free plan and a very low entry-level paid tier at face value (Pro at $10 per seat per month on annual billing, $18 monthly, according to its pricing page). It has a real recruitment use-case page: scorecard generation from the interview, a question-and-answer assistant over the content of the conversations, syncing notes to the ATS. On the security side, it claims SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, and it has signed a no-training agreement with its AI sub-processor covering your data.

tl;dv is published by a German company and claims data residency in Europe on its security page. The interface is available in French, transcription covers around thirty languages including French, and the tool offers an analysis layer over the meeting corpus, "Ask tl;dv", which lets you query one or several meetings at once. It claims SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance.

Otter benefits from massive name recognition in transcription, a mature real-time mode, and integration that works cleanly with Zoom, Teams, and Meet. It offers a Recruiting Agent that covers before, during, and after the interview: a profile summary beforehand, transcription and keyword detection during, then a strengths-and-weaknesses summary and a draft feedback email afterward. It claims SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.

In the same family, you also come across serious French-speaking players. Leexi, for example, is a Belgian company that claims ISO 27001 certification, hosts in Europe, and entrusts part of its transcription to Gladia, a French player. Its interface is in French and it explicitly addresses recruitment with a dedicated page. That is a useful point to keep in mind: the hosting question does not boil down to "American versus French", there are jurisdictional nuances we come back to further down.

The four structural limits for recruitment

These tools are good at capturing a meeting. When you put them to work on a flow of interviews over time, four points keep coming up, and they are down to how the tool is designed, not to a passing flaw.

A meeting transcript is not a candidate profile

The output of a notetaker is a summary attached to a meeting. There is no structured "candidate" entity you can query later by skill, by availability, or by location. You have a record of the conversation, not a reusable profile. That is what makes the base of past interviews hard to put to work on a new role, the topic we cover in the dormant talent pool.

The flow to the ATS is write-only

When the ATS integration exists, it pushes summaries to the candidate profile without reading anything back. The Greenhouse integration for Fireflies is documented as write-only by that ATS's documentation: Fireflies sends, nothing comes back apart from the API configuration. tl;dv works as a push to the ATS, and Otter syncs its notes through a third-party connector (Zapier), again write-only. None of these flows reads the existing profile to enrich it on both sides.

The AI chat is about the meetings, not the candidate base

This is the easiest nuance to miss. These tools do have an AI chat: "Ask tl;dv" at tl;dv, Otter AI Chat at Otter, AskFred at Fireflies, "Ask Leexi" at Leexi. But this chat queries the meeting corpus or a given recording. It does not operate over a structured candidate base you could query with a question like "find me five SOC profiles available in Paris". The scope of the chat is not the talent pool, it is the history of transcripts.

The data lives under the jurisdiction of the vendor's cloud provider

This is the point DPOs look at first. At Fireflies, storage and processing take place by default in the United States, on AWS and GCP; a storage option in the European Union exists on the Enterprise plan, but processing still stays in the United States even in that case, according to the official documentation. At tl;dv, data is claimed to be in Europe, but on AWS and GCP with a US AI sub-processor. The tool-by-tool detail is covered in our article on interview data hosting.

The moment a team switches tools

As long as interviews stay occasional and the candidate base never serves twice, the sales team's notetaker does the job. The switch comes at one of these three moments.

The first is when interview volume climbs. An IT services firm (ESN) running technical qualification at scale, or an agency opening twenty assignments a month, very quickly piles up dozens of hours of conversations that remain isolated transcripts, never turned back into something useful for the next role.

The second is when the DPO asks for the list of sub-processors. The question is not "are you GDPR compliant", most of these vendors claim that. The question is the jurisdiction of the cloud provider that hosts and processes the candidate data, because a company under US law remains exposed to the CLOUD Act even when its servers sit in a European region.

The third moment is more diffuse, and it always ends up arriving: the realization that the base of past interviews never serves the next role. You assessed a candidate eight months ago, they were a fit, the timing did not line up, and no one finds them again when the role that suits them finally opens.

That is the moment Hirify is built to absorb. Transcribing the interview is the entry point (the Starter plan at 29€ excl. VAT per user per month), but the value lies in the Hub (59€ excl. VAT per user per month monthly, 49€ annual): a structured interview summary built from customizable, unlimited templates, auto-generated from the job description; automatic, bidirectional enrichment of the candidate profile in your ATS after the interview; an AI chat that operates over the candidate base itself; no percentage scoring, everything stays explainable. Hosting is handled by Scalingo, a French company, datacenter in Paris, and no candidate data leaves France.

For general meetings, your client appointments, your internal check-ins, notetakers stay relevant and there is no reason to replace them. The question is not choosing one against the other, it is knowing where the interview flow goes when it becomes an asset you want to reuse.

Which tool stays a good fit for whom

The fairness of a comparison shows here. None of these tools is a bad choice, they answer different needs.

Fireflies suits a team that wants a broad catalog of integrations, a low entry cost, and mature multilingual transcription, accepting default hosting in the United States. tl;dv suits a European team that wants a French interface, data residency in Europe, and a multi-meeting analysis layer, without a strict French data-sovereignty requirement. Otter suits a team heavily tooled on Zoom, Teams, and Meet, comfortable with an English interface, that wants fast real-time and a ready-to-use Recruiting Agent. Leexi suits a French-speaking, security-conscious team that wants a polished interview summary and a European vendor, with transcription partly entrusted to a French player.

Hirify is aimed first at recruitment agencies, tech IT services firms (ESNs), and accounting firms, that is, teams for whom the candidate base has direct commercial value and who have a volume of interviews to reuse. If your need stops at transcribing a meeting, one of the tools above will do.

Watch out for pricing traps

Three points deserve a careful look before comparing prices.

First, the currency. The prices for Fireflies, tl;dv, and Otter are shown in US dollars, not in euros excluding VAT. Comparing raw figures between a plan in dollars and a plan in euros excl. VAT makes no sense without that caveat, and the features of each tool do not cover the same scope.

Next, the options reserved for Enterprise plans. At Fireflies, storage in the European Union and the HIPAA option are only available on the Enterprise plan ($39 per seat per month, annual commitment). A feature that seems to exist may therefore belong to a much pricier tier than the entry rate.

Finally, the retention period on free plans. tl;dv deletes recordings after three months on its free plan, according to its pricing documentation. A free plan stays useful for testing, but it does not stand in for an interview archive.

Frequently asked questions

Is a meeting notetaker enough for recruitment interviews?

To transcribe and summarize an interview, these tools do it well. The limit comes after the interview: a meeting transcript is not a candidate profile you can query by skill or availability, and the flow to the ATS is write-only when it exists at all.

Does Fireflies store data in Europe?

By default, storage and processing take place in the United States, on AWS and GCP, according to Fireflies' official documentation. A storage option in the European Union exists on the Enterprise plan, but processing still stays in the United States in that case.

Does tl;dv keep interview recordings indefinitely?

On the free plan, tl;dv deletes recordings after three months, according to its pricing documentation. Beyond that, retention terms depend on the paid plan you choose.

What is the difference between these notetakers and an HR Hub connected to the ATS?

The notetaker captures and summarizes the interview. An HR Hub structures what comes out of it into a candidate profile, enriches the ATS in both directions, and makes the candidate base searchable in natural language to reuse profiles you have already assessed for a new role.

Key takeaways

• To transcribe and summarize an interview, meeting notetakers do the job well, and for your general meetings they stay relevant.
• Four structural limits for recruitment: no searchable candidate entity, a write-only ATS flow, an AI chat that is about the meetings and not the candidate base, and data that lives under the jurisdiction of the vendor's cloud provider. On that last point: in the United States by default for Fireflies and Otter, in Europe but on US infrastructure for tl;dv.
• The switch comes when interview volume climbs, when the DPO asks for the list of sub-processors, or when the base of past interviews stays unused on the next role.
• Compare at equal currency and scope: prices in dollars, options reserved for Enterprise, limited retention on free plans.