# Felt brand narrative and messaging — round 22

Updated November 1, 2026. Proposed Felt copy for review, grounded in Alexandria, the supplied messaging document and direct user decisions. No final master tagline, color system or identity lockup is implied. Claim scope and source status are recorded in [SOURCE-ALIGNMENT.md](SOURCE-ALIGNMENT.md).

## Current positioning

**Felt is the agentic platform for recruiting teams.**

Direct user decision, October 31, 2026: remove the previous AI recruiter master framing. The existing AI Interviewer product name remains. Agents do work across the candidate journey. This decision supersedes the earlier positioning recommendation recorded in the source materials.

## Brand story

**Accepted framing:** “Felt is the agentic platform for recruiting teams.” This direct correction supersedes the previous one-AI-recruiter framing. The narrative below is review copy using the accepted platform positioning. Earlier AI-recruiter master framing is historical, not current direction.

Great recruiting teams bring people and businesses together. Felt is the agentic platform for recruiting teams. It takes on the work around those relationships: reviewing applications, holding interviews, pursuing missing information, and booking the next conversation with context attached. Start with a task. Connect the process. Build a new way for your team to work. Our team works alongside yours to decide what Felt owns, where people take over, and how the process should evolve. Recruiting teams gain more room to advise hiring managers, build candidate relationships, and make the judgments their businesses depend on. That's what more human hiring makes possible.

## Candidate-journey product message

**Felt, at every step.**

Felt is with the candidate through screening, interviewing, scheduling and the next stages of their journey. The line describes continuity of the candidate experience and context across those stages. Direct user clarification, October 31, 2026.

## Ownership story: task, process and operations

### Own a task

An application reviewed against your requirements. An interview completed. A missing document followed up. Give Felt a defined piece of recruiting work and a clear goal.

### Own a process

Connect interviews, scheduling and follow-through. Felt carries the context into the next step, so the hiring manager starts with the conversation that already happened.

### Transform recruiting operations

Work with our team to define what Felt owns, redesign handoffs, and shape how your people work alongside it. Build around the hiring outcomes your business needs.

These are three levels of ownership to develop with a customer. Scope depends on the agreed process, enabled capabilities and implementation. The operations pillar describes a partnership with the Felt team, not a promise that software independently redesigns an organization.

## Creative world thesis

**Round-22 review status:** the natural-felt hero is the accepted master for this iteration. It replaces the prior curled-texture scene with a new contained pattern-table composition informed by real wool references. Final adoption of the world remains open.

**One shared pattern table. A resourceful crew. A connected journey taking shape.**

Each character builds one part of the shared work. A plain steel needle and fine thread lift a sewn path, a silver zipper joins its edges, and a cloth-hinged felt door opens the next step. Each finished piece makes the next action possible. The pattern table gives that work a common purpose and a recognizable setting. Warmth comes from the crew, close composition, material and care in construction.

Dense matted wool, visible cut thickness, compressed seams and imperfect cotton stitches make the world tangible. Decorative gold studs, rivets, clips and knobs are removed. There are no ornamental buttons in the scenes; a single functional wooden four-hole button joins the Integrations product symbol. The scheduling marker is a coral embroidered square tab.

The defining analogy is **recruiting work taking shape through coordinated acts of care and ingenuity**. The crew builds the journey and its surroundings; people move through with agency. Candidates are never raw material, objects to sort, or figures reshaped to fit a pattern. Characters remain an independent brand ensemble. The platform includes distinct products and abilities. The resourceful crew expresses agents working across the candidate journey; the brand ensemble and product icon family remain separate.

## Tagline roles and status

| Exact wording | Role to test | Current status |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **The difference is felt.** | Competitive differentiation and comparison | Endorsed for that role. |
| **Felt, at every step.** | Product message: with the candidate through screening, interviews, scheduling and what comes next | Reaffirmed. Preserve the comma. |
| **Great recruiting teams are felt.** | Broader brand line that elevates the recruiting team | Existing candidate, not a final master tagline. |
| **Great recruiting is felt.** | Direct brand-level recruiting statement | Liked candidate to remember and explore; not final adoption. |
| **Felt, not filtered.** | Campaign or brand philosophy about fuller human understanding | Liked candidate; not final adoption. |
| **Hiring, felt by everyone.** | Shared experience across hiring teams and candidates | Liked candidate; not final adoption. |
| **People are felt, not processed.** | Brand philosophy about human treatment | Liked candidate; not final adoption. |

The emotional language describes how recruiting is experienced and how people are treated. Candidate review and hiring decisions remain grounded in relevant evidence and human judgment. The lines about filtering or processing should not imply abandoning job requirements, standards or appropriate screening. The messaging document's proposed “Make hiring more human. For everyone.” is a strategic premise for this review, not a newly selected Felt tagline.

## Identity rules for this review

- **Lead pair to develop:** the extracted open-door symbol and the exact user-supplied **felt** wordmark. Preserve the original silhouette, proportions and dense felt; the thicker, less-felty redraw is rejected. The final lockup remains open.
- **Build the f as a dimensional overlap.** The raised crossbar sits over the stem in the same color. No stitch or seam detail on the f, and no alternate-color crossbar. Follow Aaron's supplied reference.
- **Keep the material visible.** Brand marks and icons should have felt texture, thickness and dimensional construction wherever the output supports it. Do not present flat icon or flat logo alternatives.
- **Preserve sewn product construction.** Aaron preferred the earlier stitched objects. The round-22 gallery has 11 natural-felt objects with sewn seams, folded layers and distinct construction; it does not replace them with smooth molded icons. Product symbols remain independent of the character cast.
- **Keep the pattern table central.** Aaron likes each little figure building a part of the shared work.
- **Give the world a contained, specific setting.** Both blank round 11 backgrounds were rejected; the original room was distracting. Surrounding details should establish place and participate in the scene.
- **Colors remain undecided.** Any palette shown is an option for review, not a recorded brand decision.


## Current artwork and interaction rules — November 1, 2026

The master is `world-art/hero-natural.png`, with nine actual palette variants alongside it. Ten `product-art-tactile/{id}-atlas.png` files supply the same 11 product subjects. The original wordmark and door-logo source bytes are unchanged; existing identity palette variants remain in use. The sticky palette chooser swaps real hero, identity and product artwork, with no hue or saturation display filters. Four natural-felt crew scenes retain their ensemble colors.

Measured alpha bounds and SVG exclusions isolate product objects from their atlas without modifying raster pixels. Calendar placement points and hero framing are remapped to the new compositions. The scheduling choice moves a coral embroidered square tab; it does not book a real appointment. The hero is still imagery, not finished mechanical animation.

The images are **generated concepts inspired by real felt photographs**, not documentation of physically built props. The palette variants have some fiber-texture variation. Preserve that distinction in any leadership deck or handoff. [ROUND22-NOTES.md](ROUND22-NOTES.md) and [world-art/README.md](world-art/README.md) list active assets; earlier material attempts are historical.

## Carried-forward copy and interaction decisions

Aaron retired “people people” as an active line. He rejected the thread overlay, numbered stations and slider, and wants purposeful, delightful interactions. The page uses object selection, close inspection, candidate-journey choices and restrained scene framing; successful technical QA does not by itself establish creative acceptance.

The earlier negative or abstract copy was replaced with the proposals “Build the teams that change what’s possible.” and “Your ambition, put to work.” Recruiting creates possibilities for people and businesses; agents turn defined hiring goals into action and carry context through the journey. These remain review copy, not final brand adoption.

Earlier instructions to retain the exact round-13 scene composition were superseded for the round-22 natural-material rebuild. The crew remains compact and dot-eyed, while composition and interaction points now follow the accepted natural hero. No gold hardware, taller humanlike figures or elaborate character faces are reintroduced.

Aaron instructed: never sync to the brain again unless explicitly asked. This round updates local project artifacts only; no shared-brain or memory update is included.