Recruitment: first-touch candidate screening

A recruitment agency with several recruiters ran searches for dozens of active roles at once for different employers. Popular positions drew hundreds of applications a day from many sources: job boards, social media ads and referrals. The small team physically could not process each one quickly, so applications piled up in a common queue with no unified tracking. By the time a recruiter reached a strong candidate, that person had often already interviewed at another company and stopped responding.

We pulled several weeks of the recruiters correspondence and looked at where the time went. It turned out that a large part of the day was spent on the same first questions: work experience, preferred schedule, salary expectations and readiness to start soon. These answers are easy to check against formal criteria, yet they were the ones eating hours. As a result the strongest candidates, who receive several offers at once, most often accepted someone else offer before their turn in the queue arrived.

The goal was not to filter people out to save effort, but to stop losing strong ones to a slow reaction. The assistant should ask the initial questions itself in a calm, respectful tone, match the answers to the requirements of the specific role and immediately offer an interview time to a suitable candidate. A formal decline should sound polite and human, while any borderline profile must reach a recruiter rather than being rejected automatically. In essence, we needed to take the first-touch routine off the team and leave it the live assessment.

We built an assistant on Telegram as a single point of first contact with candidates. In the dialog it introduces itself, explains the role and clarifies experience, schedule and expectations in turn, recognizing free-form wording rather than only buttons, and checks the answers against the role requirements from the base. For a suitable candidate the assistant immediately shows free slots and puts a meeting into the recruiter calendar, and passes the card with the answers into the CRM. The tone is set by examples of the agency real correspondence, so the exchange feels human rather than like a form.

The project took about four weeks. First, together with the recruiters, we described the criteria for each group of roles: what is mandatory, what is desirable and what disqualifies right away. Then we set up the questions themselves, the answer-checking logic, polite decline wording and the handoff of borderline cases to a human. We first launched on several roles, listened to real dialogs, tuned the tone and wording and only then connected the assistant to the whole flow of applications.

After the run-in the assistant handles the first touch on almost all applications. A candidate gets the first reply in minutes at any time of day rather than after hours of waiting, so strong profiles no longer cool off in the queue, and suitable ones immediately pick a convenient interview slot. Recruiters stopped sorting the same first messages and spend their time on what truly needs a human: live interviews and the final assessment. The share of candidates who reach an interview, meanwhile, grew noticeably.