How a Fortune 500 contractor reactivated 46,000 candidates from a backlog the team could never reach
A Fortune 500 government services contractor was getting 5,000 to 10,000 applications a month and could not respond to most of them. We built an outbound voice agent that worked the backlog, qualified the candidates who were open to other roles, and routed the qualified ones to human recruiters. 46,000 candidates reactivated, 95,000 calls placed, 30.2% completion.
- Candidates contacted
- 46,000
- Calls placed
- 95,000
- Qualification completion
- 30.2%
- Routed to recruiters
- ~30%
The math the recruiters lived with
5,000 to 10,000 applications a month. A recruiting team that could realistically respond to maybe 5% of them. Every other candidate sat in the database, with no answer, no update, no signal that anyone had ever read their application.
That's a brutal candidate experience. It's also a database full of people who'd actively raised their hand for the company and were now being ignored.
Why this one worked
Every candidate had applied for a real job at this company. So a call from the company wasn't cold. The conversation felt like the follow-up they'd been expecting, even if it arrived six weeks late.
The agent opened by introducing itself and acknowledging, gently, that they hadn't been selected for the role they'd applied for. Then it asked the question that actually mattered: were they open to being considered for other roles?
If yes, the agent ran a qualification flow. Preferences, location, salary band, availability. Structured output, written back to the recruiting team's pipeline so a human picked up the next step with everything already collected.
What the campaign produced
- 46,000 candidates contacted
- 95,000 calls placed (about 2 dial attempts per candidate, on average)
- 30.2% completed the full qualification flow
- ~30% of contacted candidates ended up routed to a human recruiter for follow-up
Numbers held steady across the campaign. We weren't dialing the easy half of the list first.
The mid-campaign addition
A few weeks in, we noticed a pattern in the dropped calls. Candidates were picking up, sounding interested, then asking the agent to call back in an hour or two. The first version of the agent had no callback path, so those leads just churned.
We added one. The agent now offers to call back at the requested time and actually delivers on it. That single feature lifted completion rates by about 2 percentage points. We were no longer dialing people who'd already said they couldn't talk.
When this build fits
Big employer. Application backlog the team can't realistically work. The recruiters aren't being replaced here. The agent is doing the work the recruiters were never going to get to anyway, and converting a database full of ignored people into a real pipeline.