Say you post a role on Monday, and by Wednesday you have four hundred applicants. Your recruiter starts at the top. Each call means three rings, no answer, a “call me later”, and sometimes a person who applied to thirty jobs and can't remember yours. By Friday, two good candidates have accepted other offers.
Most of a first-round call is the same few questions. Are you still looking? Notice period? Current location? Salary expectation? An agent can ask those and write down the answers, and the recruiter can begin from a list of people they have actually heard about.
What to ask
Keep it short. A candidate is doing you a favour by answering, and this may be the first impression your company makes.
- Are you still interested in this role, at this location?
- What is your notice period?
- What is your current location, and would you relocate?
- What salary are you expecting?
- Two or three facts that are must-haves for the role: a licence, a shift, a certain experience.
What not to ask
Leave out anything you wouldn't want a recruiter asking: marriage plans, religion, caste, health, family. Write that in the script as a rule, and check it with a few agent tests. Don't let it assess “communication skills” or decide who moves ahead. The screening questions are for your criteria, and the decision to hire stays with your team.
Be careful with Call Scoring too. It can mark a call High, Medium or Low on rules you write, and that helps order your recruiter's list. Use factual rules such as “available within 30 days”, and have a person look at the Lows from time to time. Check whether your High band really does turn into people who join.
How the call goes
The agent says who it is calling for and about which role. It answers basic questions from a job sheet in its knowledge base: the location, the shift, what the role is. If the answer isn't there, it says it will find out. A candidate who sincerely asks whether it is a real person gets told it is a virtual assistant, and it never claims to be human. Be ready for that question, because candidates ask it.
Then it saves the answers on the contact. Your recruiter reads them and decides who moves ahead. The agent can then offer interview times, book a slot and tell your team, and a workflow can send the address and ring before the day.
Running the list
- A campaign works through an applicant list, inside your hours. Candidates at work often pick up at lunch or in the evening, and calls can go up to 9 pm IST.
- A workflow can call new applicants soon after they apply, while the role is still fresh.
- Re-churn picks up the ones who never answered, with Last called set so nobody gets rung twice in a day.
- Best time to call takes time to learn, so it won't help much on a fresh list. It helps more on a pool you keep calling.
Bulk hiring in local languages
For warehouse, delivery or factory hiring, your applicants may be more comfortable in their local language. Set up the agent in the language of that town where we support it, and check the voice with a test call first. Tell local applicants about the drive, and those who confirm get the address by workflow and a reminder call the day before. Have someone local listen to a few calls. A wrong word is a small thing in a script, and a large thing on a call to a nervous applicant.
After the offer
The silence between offer and joining is a known risk. Keep the joining date on the contact, and let date-based workflows check in during the notice period and before joining day. Keep these calls simple: are you still on track, do you need anything. A doubt goes straight to your recruiter, who is the only one who can do something about it.
What to be honest about
- Some candidates may dislike a screening call from an agent, especially senior ones. Keep this for high-volume roles, and let your recruiter call for the senior hire.
- An agent can only ask what you wrote. It won't notice that a candidate's story doesn't add up the way a sharp recruiter would.
- You need a lawful reason to call the people on your list. Applicants who applied to this role have given you one kind of reason. A bought database or a five-year-old resume file is another matter, and it's your call and your responsibility.
- Anyone who says stop goes on your Do-Not-Call list, which blocks every outbound path.
Getting started
Take one role with a real volume of applicants. Write the questions with the recruiter who will read the answers, since they know what they need. Make a test call. Run it on fifty applicants, and have the recruiter ring ten of the same people to compare what they learn. If the agent's notes match, widen it.
See the recruitment page for other jobs, such as past applicants when a new role opens. Rates are on the pricing page, and lead sources covers how to bring applicant sheets in without double calls.