Recruitment firm, United Kingdom

A UK Recruitment Firm: From Five to 50+ Active Job Postings With AI Screening

A UK recruitment team moved candidate outreach and screening from manual calls in Bullhorn CRM to AI voice and chat agents. Active postings grew from five to more than 50.

Timeline: Six-week deployment roadmap, including a pilot with five roles before full rollout

5 to 50+ Active job postings (10x growth)
3 days to 4 hours Candidate response time (90% faster)
100% Candidate engagement coverage
$6-8K Monthly savings

The problem

The firm's recruitment team ran candidate outreach and job applications entirely by hand in Bullhorn CRM. Consultants spent hours each day calling candidates, updating records and coordinating placements, often calling more than 20 candidates per posting. Slow responses were damaging the candidate experience, unanswered calls were rarely followed up, and the manual workload meant the team could only manage a few active postings at once.

Staff manually called 20+ candidates per job posting
Slow responses to job seekers damaged the candidate experience
Only a few postings could be active at once
Unanswered calls were rarely followed up, so placements were missed
Hours spent logging call outcomes in Bullhorn CRM
No real-time view of engagement to prioritise follow-ups

What we built

We built an AI screening and outreach system around the firm's existing Bullhorn CRM. Retell AI voice and chat agents screen candidates using a library of screening questions and qualification criteria. n8n workflows keep Bullhorn in sync in both directions, start outreach when new applications arrive, run SMS and email follow-up sequences, retry missed calls with an SMS fallback and route qualified candidates to the right recruiter. The recruitment team receives notifications in Slack or Teams and works from a real-time dashboard.

Tools: Bullhorn CRM, Retell AI, n8n, Twilio SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, REST APIs

How we ran it

Every engagement follows The Claro Build Framework.

Assess: We mapped the manual outreach workflow in Bullhorn CRM, from first call to logged outcome, and identified where response delays, missed follow-ups and manual record updates were limiting how many postings the team could run.
Design: We designed the conversation flows, screening question library and qualification logic, mapped the candidate data fields for automation, and planned the follow-up, routing and exception-handling rules.
Build: We configured the Retell AI voice and chat agents, set up two-way sync and webhook triggers with Bullhorn, built the n8n workflows and reporting, then ran a pilot with five job postings and refined the flows from recruiter feedback before full rollout.
Sustain: The build was handed over under The Adoption Standard: a structured 45-minute handover call with the team, backed by documentation written as the system was built.

The result

The firm scaled from five active job postings to more than 50, a tenfold increase. Candidate response time fell from three days to four hours, every candidate was engaged by the AI agents, and the firm reports monthly savings of $6,000 to $8,000. The system also keeps a time-stamped audit trail of candidate interactions, AI decisions and team actions, and was built to UK GDPR requirements for consent and right to erasure.

Client name withheld for confidentiality.