The one-paragraph answer
If you're a US healthcare, insurance, construction or manufacturing employer that needs licence-verified sourcing at volume, HireQuotient. That's who their site is built for now — demo-gated, enterprise-priced, and outside what either tool was built to compare on when this page was first written.
If you're an Indian founder doing the screening yourself, Lucida. Every score Lucida produces cites direct quotes from the résumé or interview. Every applicant — including the rejected ones — gets a private feedback URL within 24 hours. Every shortlisted candidate gets a 90-day outcome capture that feeds back into your rubric. Published, self-serve pricing, no demo call. None of that changed on our side; what changed is who HireQuotient is now built for.
Feature comparison
| Lucida | HireQuotient | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (entry) | ₹2,499 / month, published | "Contact sales" |
| AI scoring | Cited evidence per dimension | Score in a black box |
| JD clarification pre-pass | Asks 3 questions before drafting | Scores against raw JD |
| Candidate feedback report | Every applicant, automatic, shareable URL | Not by default |
| Outcome → rubric calibration | 90-day survey · /admin/insights | Static rubric, no learning loop |
| Audit trail (DPDPA / AEDT / EU AI Act) | Per-row, every score, Save-as-PDF | Limited |
| Founder onboarding time | ~10 minutes, self-serve | Sales call → demo → contract |
| India-native | INR · GST · DPDPA · Tier-2/3 channels | India-founded, but its public site is now US frontline-industry focused |
| Best fit | Founder hiring 3-6 roles/yr, doing screening | US healthcare, insurance, construction or manufacturing employer — licence-verified sourcing at volume |
Where HireQuotient wins (we'll say it plainly)
- Licence-verified sourcing. For a regulated role — a nurse, an insurance agent, an electrician — HireQuotient checks the credential against the issuing registry (NPI, NIPR, state boards), not just the résumé claim. Lucida doesn't do this; it isn't built for regulated-credential hiring.
- Enterprise procurement path. A contract, an SLA, a customer-success manager, demo-led onboarding — if that's what your buying process requires, they have it. We don't; we're a ₹2,499/month self-serve tool.
- US frontline-industry depth. Healthcare, insurance, construction and manufacturing hiring at volume is a genuinely different problem than a 30-person Bengaluru SaaS team hiring its fourth engineer. If that's your shape, their current product is built for it and ours isn't.
Where Lucida wins
- Every score cites the résumé. Open any candidate detail page and you see the exact quotes from their answers that the score is built on. HireQuotient's scores are a number with no citation — you trust the AI or you don't. We surface the reasoning.
- JD clarification before scoring. Lucida reads your JD and asks you the three questions a senior recruiter would ask the hiring manager — before drafting anything. Most "AI scoring" tools score against whatever JD you uploaded, ambiguities and all.
- Candidate feedback as a default. Every applicant — even the ones you reject — gets a private URL with their score breakdown + cited gaps + a thoughtful "what to do next." We've never seen another hiring tool ship this by default.
- The compounding loop. Every shortlisted candidate triggers a 90-day "did you hire them? how's it going?" email. Your replies populate `/admin/insights` — which dimensions of your rubric actually predicted your hires. After 6 hires you're not relying on intuition any more; you're reading data on your own hiring.
- Published pricing. ₹2,499/month. ₹24,999/year. ₹49,999 LTD. No sales call.
If you can only run one
For a 5-30 person Indian team hiring 3-6 roles a year with the founder still doing the screening — Lucida, by a wide margin now. The candidate-feedback report alone is a hiring-brand moment HireQuotient's current product doesn't ship, and its pricing and sales motion aren't built for a self-serve SMB buyer any more.
For a US healthcare, insurance, construction or manufacturing employer that needs licence-verified sourcing at volume — HireQuotient, not Lucida. We don't do regulated-credential verification and we aren't built for a US enterprise procurement process. The teams we cannot serve well are listed openly at /who-we-are-not-for.