Voice Screening: a Case Study

A case study and voice screening next on the Rectake podcast. Welcome to Rectake. The podcast for recruiting and technology intersect. Each month you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world, along with recruiters who will tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now here's your host, the man-scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell. Welcome to the only podcast, helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology and inspire conversations. Mastering recruitment technology is the key to hiring great talent and that's why this show exists. Our episode is sponsored by our friends over at Dalia and parts is your conversion site delivering the conversion you need. While Dalia's plug and play tech turns any employer's cursor site into a high performance mechanic aversion engine with no reply from required and it's live in days, right? So visit Dalia.co to learn more and by our friends at JobCase, the online community will work with all kinds like hourly employees, tradespeople and healthcare technicians, access jobs, make connections and support each other in any aspect of their work life. Visit jobcase.com/higher and tap into their 120-moons strong job-seeker network. Just come back from IMFenom and Phil last week and one of the sessions I attended was a case study from a couple of varsity brands that implemented the Fenom AI Voice Screening tool for high volume hiring. I heard the term voice screening a lot last week and I think it's slowly becoming a must-have feature in any kind of hiring software and it's going to be part of recruiting in the next few years here. It's going to be a mainstay. That only does it allow you to screen faster on the same day in case, in a lot of cases. But candidates like it also for the most part, it's a better experience for them. In airline customer, they referenced, for example, saw 93% of interview scheduled without human intervention. Overall, their AI screening increased interviews scheduled by 107% in 2025. It's pretty impressive. So today you're going to hear that session. I think you're going to find it worthwhile. Enjoy the audio. Hey everybody. Hi. Welcome to day one of I'm Peanut. I hope that you enjoyed everything that you saw on me and stay with me. We're going to kick off the first breakout session. So let's do it. And what a wonderful brand to do that, right? To kind of pump us out after lunch. And for many of you who have seen this brand, maybe if you're a parent, you spend a lot of money to put in your kids through all the sports. But such a lovely story that we're going to hear today about a voice screening agent. And of course, my name is Joanna and I'm part of the product marketing team. And I am here because peanuts purpose is to help a billion people find the right work. But of course, I am joined with Parks and Brands and three beautiful women. So I would like for them to go ahead and introduce themselves. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Bianca Donner-Kill and I'm the director of talent acquisition for Parks and Brands. And just super excited to share with you our journey, implementing voice agents and also introducing our incredible team that was part of the beta test team and our earlier doctors. Hi everyone. Super excited to be here with you. My name is Kristen Sanchez. I'm one of the senior talent acquisition special in the sub-RC brands. Hey everyone, I'm Paige Collison and I am a talent acquisition manager here at RC Brands. Thanks team. But before we get started, I'd love to share with you a little bit about our mission and why we do what we do. So there is a moment when every athlete, every cheerleader and dancer has that moment. They remember the first time that they put on their plates and hit the field, put that new jersey over their head. When the dancer goes out and to stage on the spotlights like I am now, I'm like a deer in the headlights. But they say this is who I am. This is it. And for decades, there's been somebody that's helped them with that journey and that somebody's been varsity brands. So there's sport and spirit, rehab helped young people build confidence, re-help them with character and compassionate leadership on the field and in life. So our purpose really is to be the one trusted one stop shot for all things, competitions and uniforms. Okay, so I want all of you here to engage with us just for a second. So if you could please raise your hand. How many of you have worn a sports uniform or have then two of varsity brand spirit camp before? Okay, so you're yourselves. Now, keep your hands up. What about kids? Do you have any kids that have attended varsity brands, camps or purchase, I think, awesome. So we are all so familiar with the brand, right? We all are huge fans. So let's really just kick it off by talking a little bit deeper about what varsity brands means and where you come. Yeah, absolutely. That's what I love about our brand is at a certain point is attached to anybody's life or mission. So here's what you might not know. varsity brands is the parent company for varsity spirit and BSN sports. So rehab over 10,000 employees and growing. We hire about 4,000 employees, which have of them are seasonal employees. So we're always hiring when BSN sports is ramping up varsity spirits, roughly no, it's just a syllable process. And last year we faced some challenges that maybe most of you are familiar with. And included more application, fewer requisitions. And then on top of that, we ended up losing two full-time recruiters and a recruiting manager as part of a reduction in force that absolutely drowned the rest of our team going through this manual process of screening hundreds and hundreds of applicants. And that's when we met Melissa. And no, she isn't another recruiter that we hired on the team. She's actually our AI voice screening agent. So let me walk you through a little bit of what our day to day looked like before Melissa joined the team. So as we all convention, we have BSN sports and varsity spirit, both totally different models of business where BSN is really focused on that manufacturing the sales side of things. varsity spirit has those events and service side of things. And then varsity brands, as mentioned, the parent company that corporate support executive leadership for the enterprise. This means we have different candidates, different questions, different criteria, pretty much different everything for those superans, including the seasonal surgeons that never quite alone. So when one was ramping up, the other was ramping down. And we still have that same small team kind of doubling these vastly different needs. Regardless of the business or roles we were supporting, the recruiters were in some cases spending entire weeks just trying to get people on the phone, not interviewing, not sourcing, just scheduling that initial screen. So that included back and forth emailing, texting, sending calendar links, whatever the case might be. It would be five to seven days before that candidate even booked something with our team. And then it was kind of a crash you whether that person even showed up or decided to answer the phone that day. And on top of that, we have candidates who maybe are available during normal business hours. So we really had to find ways to connect with them because we're not about to have our team working nights and weekends because we do appreciate it, we're client balance. The third thing that is a little bit different about our industry is that we do have some roles that require that niche industry experience. For example, varsity spirit on our apparel sales side really need that fashion and cheer or spirit background to be able to connect with those customers and provide the best service possible. And on the BSN side, we have club direct teams that focus on selling club sports specifically where we need those connections in the club. And whatever candidate as you know is putting that niche like high school experience on their resume, they're probably taught not to. And so we had a hard time being able to decipher who had this niche experience that would really translate into these roles. For a little more context in 2024, we received about 50,000 applications and then in 2025, a year later, that grew to almost 75,000. So we're working with a high volume here. So we had a choice. We could keep continuing to over screen candidates to uncover that niche experience that might not be on the resume. We could keep sending more time on the administrative side of recruiting rather than the strategic partnership side. Or we could find a solution that transforms and re-banks the screen process entirely. So to do that at first, we needed to eliminate the bottlenecks because like Paige mentioned, with that report, it was not sustainable for our team. We were spending valuable time just trying to get someone on the phone. And then second, we needed to scale without necessarily having that head count. While our applicant volume continued to rise, our recruiter workforce reduced. So we needed to leverage resources in order to not burn out the team and make them work seven days a week after hours. So we needed to scale without having that head count. And then third, I think this one is really important. We needed to improve the candidate experience and we wanted to elevate that from good to great. We were spending a lot of time just trying to get candidates on the screen and are small, but my recruiting team can only do so much. A lot of missed opportunities with candidates who we may not even engage with. In fact, last year we just positioned 22,000 applicants without even making a single touch point. Imagine all of those missed opportunities. So we needed a solution. We needed something to prioritize speed, consistency, and quality. And that's what brought us to Melissa. So Melissa is our voice screening agent. She automates that additional screening touch point. It really alleviates a lot of the time, intensive, and manual work that our recruiting team was handling. Overall, she creates a faster candidate engagement experience. She reaches out quickly. She's always in a positive mood. She's able to answer questions in real time. I mean, I know people are always in a positive mood. But Melissa really carries that sense. She doesn't get burnt out. So it is a smooth process from start to finish, especially for those higher volume positions where speed and consistency really makes a difference. So also too, talking with candidates. A lot of really positive feedback. They say it's wool. It's conversational. It's convenient. And I don't know about you, but I feel that those words aren't common when describing a recruiting interview process. So really cool to see that it's coming from the girl on the candidate side. And even listening to some of the responses, they really thought Melissa was a real person. Yes, man. Oh, OK. Just very conversational. Yeah, I'm going to try. Overall, she gives our candidates more flexibility. And since she is capturing that baseline qualification information up front, I'm able to be more intentional about where I spend my time. It's less on that basic qualification piece, and it's more on the role alignment piece. I can dive deeper into expectations, job fit. I can answer your questions to really assess that this is the job that they want. So overall, she sets the stage for a better conversation, a better candidate experience. Awesome. Well, Hannah and VB, who is our talent off specialist, I wish she was here today to share with you that whole entire journey map, because she is really the beginning of getting this off the ground. But she would say that the journey was not an easy pathway. So we had multiple demos with Marcus and our CVM, just to even understand what could Melissa, the voice agent, do for us. And then we had to work with procurement. We had to show ROI to our finance team within, already scrutinized budget. Triage questions from IT, legal compliance, as well as a newly formed AI governance committee. I'm just curious, raise your hands, how many of you guys out there have an AI governance committee right now? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So they had a lot of questions, right? I'm sure they did. But we had to show them that it was a safe, and it was something that definitely is going to show some ROI. So that means that we did all that, and then out of all that, I will share, a demo was given to our CHRO Martha May early on. And so we didn't even have to sell it to her, which is sometimes half the amount. She was like, just go, just do it, get the approvals. So after we got the Go button Ray light, now we had to look at where are we going to test it? What's that going to look like? And we thought to ourselves, wait a minute, we don't want to scare our recruiters. They are already went through this reduction in force, and here we're going to introduce this AI agent. I mean, they were going to think, oh my gosh, the robots are taking over my job. And that's the last thing we wanted. We wanted to let them know, we care about them, support them. This is just a help supplement, though. So we took them along for that journey. So make sure that they were aware that this is not taking over their jobs. And then went into really deciding a deliberate test scenario. So we decided two areas of our business that were high volume. The first one being production rules. So the warehouse workers, machine operators, in our case embroidery operators, I'm sure I'm wearing today. And then also with the Parallels sales rep, which is with Kristen Manages. So we wanted to make sure that we were deliberate with the test being. And after launching, we were able to get some data points. And with those data points, it was just incredible the night and day difference. So Lily, thank you for sharing that story. Let me go back to my chair. So let's talk about some of the impact that you saw with the voice screening agent. This is super fun for this team, because they are constantly iterating. And so I think if we had the opportunity, I think to update this slide like in this moment, I think we'd be tweaking it. Oh, I know. We would be. So let's talk about-- would you like to share just a few of these sets of seeing on the slide? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, yes, we had to iterate and iterate and iterate. So please, if you're considering voice agents, you don't just formulate your questions, let it go, and just never revisit it. We had to keep going and looking at our questions. Literally every week to see when the impact was. But overall, we had some fails. So the production beta test was not a good test. We didn't set it up the way that we needed to, but we had some lessons learned, which we saw a huge gains with apparel sales. So from that, we did see that we increased our interview acceptance rate by 50%. And that's because we were able to reach every single candidate, and they were already engaged with us. So they weren't like, hey, I'm not interested in this job. So if they scheduled that screen, they were ready to accept our interviews. In addition to that, we also decreased our time to offer. Because we were able to identify qualified candidates, Quaker, we were able to get to that offer stage much quicker. And then this was what was really compelling was the offer acceptance rate. Because good candidates are hard to come by, let alone in the market. So they probably have like five or six offers by the time you get to them. By identifying that quality candidate Quaker, they had less offers or less opportunities and were willing to take our offer much faster. In addition, we saw that implementing list. So would save our recruiting teeth nearly 17,000 hours. Let me say that again. It would save our recruiting team 17,000 hours. And that's nearly 300 days per recruiter. Those are our massive numbers. But it's not just what that time saved. It's what that time translates into. For me, now I can spend more time sourcing those harder to fill positions or preparing for those peak hiring seasons. I can add more as a strategic partner with my hiring managers rather than an administrative assistant. And also until Melissa helps support my position. She didn't take my job. She gave me the tools to do my job more efficiently, more successfully. She's a great partner. So I'm going to go up and kind of show you the voice agent here in action. What there's a couple things I'm going to show you, which is sharing what the voice agent is going to sound like. But first, I did want to call out one of the reasons why they chose these roles. They're very smart about it. Is they chose high value roles? It was roles that if they sit open, it costs the company money. So they said, let's start there. Let's attack that problem. And I'm calling that out because the first thing I'm going to show you here is what a candidate is going to experience in the voice agent. Because one thing they found-- I love that Kristen talked on-- was it allowed them to become more human. So let's talk about it from a human point of view. The recruiter is still doing the same thing. They are still reviewing the candidate. They're still checking off those boxes and those key moments. But what it allows them to do is screen more candidates at Skype. It's not the recruiter math where you need 10 in the pipeline, 5 to this, 2 to that, 1 with an offer. Right? Now you can-- I don't know, 10 times that. Maybe, you know what I mean? And so that was what worked for them. And learning along the way to make sure that candidate experience was great, not good, but great. And one of the things that makes the candidate experience so great is on brand materials. We have all fallen in love, I think, with these slides. Just seeing the varsity brands and that music, what it comes on, it gets you pumped up. So guess what? Candidates, they expect that too. They expect that out of the HR teams. That's a lot of pressure for you to deliver that experience. So let's take a look at what that email will look like. So when Melissa reaches out to a candidate that's applied for a job, the first thing that that candidate is getting is the consent, right? We're not just saying, hey, we're in a three-and-a-tony to let that bet. No, of course not. So what happens is this beautiful brand and email gets sent over to the candidate. And it's going to say, hey, I know you're interested in this role. I'd like to schedule a call with you. And guess what? This is not happening five to seven days later. When the recruiter can finally pick it up, this is happening in that moment where that candidate is excited. They just hit that apply button. And they're like, am I going to hear anything? I guess what they do. And they're like, oh my god, I heard something. I'm so excited. So they can actually complete this when they want, right? Thank you. actually wait and schedule a call, you see the session here or they can actually start it. So in this case I'm going to go ahead and take you through. So what you're seeing now on my screen is actually our scene around. And what's really beautiful about this if you are a phenocostomer, you've already seen this many times, if you are not a phenocostomer, that's okay. What you're seeing is that the entire talent journey is all captured right here in this view of the job. And so I'm focusing on the screen, so that's what that's going to be, but many of the other sessions are going to focus on other parts. So if we go into our screening tab, we're going to see all of our screenings, so we know that this person is moving on. I'm going to go ahead and trigger a call to a natural photo. I'm going to complete some of that voice agent live on this stage for you, but then I'm actually going to turn around and say, okay, what is the recruiter's going to do after? And I'm going to show you how that moment of the human is now augmenting. They're still doing those same things, but now their skills are evolving, and they're able to look at more candidates because of the way this is captured. All right, so let's have a little pressure, right? All right, so I've gone ahead and I've select our lean, and I'm going to go ahead and trigger the call out. What's going to happen is that the call is going to go to my cell phone here, and then we'll read it, I will answer it, and I'll put the mic to the phone, so you can actually hear it. Well, I don't think it's going to trigger. Let me show you what that would look like. Guess what? I always have a backup plan. So when this does trigger, what would happen is the cell phone is going to ring, and darling's going to answer just like she would answer you. And what's going to happen is it's going to capture the entire screening call, and it's going to capture every key moment, and then convert it into a transcript. So let's see what that would look like. When they complete it screening those through, it's going to go over to your completing screening tabs, and then at that time we can go ahead and evaluate. So we're going to go ahead and do that together now. So once we click evaluate, what's happening is taking those key moments from the call. So like I said, this is what I would have demonstrated for you, but part of the pre-screening is just some simple knockout. So I'm going to hit play of what that could sound like. So here as a recruiter, you're still getting those moments, but instead of you just taking call, you're like jotting it down as fast as you can. This is following capture, so there's really no pressure. So let's hear how the agent would interact. Before we get started, just a quick note. If I happen to interrupt you or go quiet, please keep going, and I'll catch up. All right, let's dive in. Are you able to reflect the whole schedule, including weekends and holidays? Yes, that's no problem. Okay, so what you're hearing here is flexibility, right? So when you come in and you're reviewing your screening, you're able to capture these moments. You can go down and see like what did they say and why and how you want to move on to the next stage. You can even see there's multiple ways to set up a screening agent. I think we learned that. Interested multiple times, she was like, "Oh, shoot, I probably should have asked that. Can it interrupt the agent and say like, wait, why do you want to know that? Why do you want to know if I want to work weekends?" And it will actually give a response. But the really beautiful part here that I really love to share that I hear from a lot of customers is how it's really helping you date through and find those candidates. So in some of the questions, elections, summaries, which you're saying here, but one thing I love about phenom, and phenom's AI is not phenom's AI. It's your AI. And what do I mean by that? I mean that R and I learn from you, your recruiter behavior. It does not learn from phenom. What you're doing and how you're interacting matters. And so you can even review the rating to make sure that that aligns with what you, the human recruiter thinks. Sometimes we're humans, right? And we think, "Oh, no, this is not a four out of five answer." Right? Just because they can't work one Saturday and May, I should have disqualified them. They can work most of them. So you can disagree with the AI and give it a thumbs down or thumbs up. Or if you're like, "This is no, this is my ideal candidate. I want to mark this as five. It's learning." So what it's doing is presenting you with more like candidates as you go through. So you can go ahead and rate and move on. If you're like, "You know what? I want to see why you put this in that sort of." We can actually review the transcript word for word. So it's no longer your recall. What did I say? Someone was knocking on my door, shoot ahead and run and shut it. You can actually review that moment, right? Think about your organization, just all your screenings, live somewhere that you can review. Probably not. But now it can, which means that your team can be more connected and solve for more challenges. So in this transcript here, you can see every single answer and how they answered it. So if you do have any concerns, you can pretty much put them at ease here. Once you're done with this greeting, you can move them onto the next stage, or you can disqualify them depending on what you'd like to do. Setting up your score cards is, pretty questions are very easy. You can just navigate that directly from your talent serum and edit them on the fly and it pushes directly to the agent. So you're not waiting for a long time. You're like, "Oh shoot, I wish the agent answered this." You can easily edit it on the fly. So if that I'm going to turn over, I recognize we're getting very close to time. So we will go back and make sure we have time for Q&A. Awesome, thanks Joanna. And so where are we going from here, right? We're going to expand Melissa to our cheerleading side. And what we mean by that is, like the Augusta said earlier, we have a ton of seasonal hires. Right now about 3,500 of them a year, that we have people manually calling each and every single one of them to talk to them about these triads that we have. So imagine if we could automate that and not just the notification or the call about the triads, but Melissa can then also Q&A for them and give them any information they might need regarding the role. In addition, we see a huge opportunity in our retail operation space and supporting the recruitment there. We recently got an acquisition and surprised to us. We are now recruiting retail people. So it's been a journey, but I think it would be invaluable for them to be able to screen these retail associates and save time for the retail store managers. And then we're going to be building out custom analytics dashboards. So that'll include creating screening completion dashboards by roll type and comparing those voice screening agent performance compared to our manual process. Phase two, we're looking at actually moving to that automated scheduling. So right now we have Melissa screening for us. The next step is actually having her schedule interview for us. Looking to release streamline that process and move these qualified candidates through our pipeline quicker. And really, as Chris mentioned earlier, giving our recruiters time back to do what really matters. That strategic partnership, building relationships, and actually building that talent pipeline. Before we wrap up, I mean, we want to give you something to take away. So, you know, we want to give you some tactical advice on if you are considering voice agents. These are just some things that we experience, redidming mistakes, but we also, we want to set you guys up for success. First, we would recommend starting with question design. Get really clear on what qualified means in your organization. And then take that one step deeper. Create questions that you typically can't find just based off looking on a resume. For us, that meant creating a mix of structured questions. We used yes, no knockout questions for those non-negotiable, like location, hours, certification. I can't tell you how many of those, oh, I can't work those hours or I can't work on that location. How many of those conversations, Melissa eliminated four needs since she was already doing the front of that work? We also used multiple choice questions to dive deeper into niche experience, something that's really important in our industry. Also, too, test these questions with your recruiters. We didn't get them right on the first time. We're human. So continue to refine your questions and get recruiter involvement when they are involved. They advocate for the system rather than resist it because they realize it's there to support them rather than replace them. And after you have your questions, continue to review, rate, and refine because Melissa keeps getting better at your job than what she knows. And then second, we would highly recommend highlighting before you scale. As we all come in, we ran our production pilot first. Found tons of issues with it. Wasn't quite as successful as we hoped, but we really took and learned from that for when we implemented with sales and what Kristen did. So, don't try to launch it across your entire organization. Really pick that high volume, maybe pain point that you have and work on that first. Run it, measure it, get your recruiters feedback, and then start expanding to those other departments. And then change management. I mean, the most important thing. I can't stress enough to you, your recruiters need to feel supported. So take them along with that journey and have this constant check noise. It goes beyond, hey, are these questions working out for you? But check in with them. Like, how is the process working for you? Is it adding value? All of those things are going to help your recruiters to adopt the technology quicker and feel more secure with it. And honestly, once they saw the time savings, they were all on board. It goes back to all the things that we just shared with you, designing the questions, piloting it, and then really letting your recruiters die and keep into it. Another episode of Rectek is in the books. Be sure to rate a review on iTunes or Spotify. Connect with Grisel Minton or visit RectekMedia.com, or you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. Rectek Media's mission is to inform the modern recruiter, so be sure to check out our other sites, recruitingheadlines.com, hrnewsfeed.com, and then hrtechfeed.com to stay on top of the recruiting world. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon on the next episode of Rectek, the Recruiting Technology Posh Pass. Let's be honest, hr gets all the blame and none of the budget. But what if I told you content is the leverage you've been looking for? I'm Rhona Pierce, host of the WorkFluencer Podcast, right talk to recruiters and hr leaders who get it. Content isn't just marketing, it's how we build movements and drive real change. My guests are turning expertise into speaking gigs, consulting deals, and actual influence inside their organizations. They're not just filling roles, they're changing how we talk about work. WorkFluencer is part of the Purple Acorn Network. 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