At a glance

• ‍Problem: Placing an Eastern European driver in a Dutch vacancy turns on details a CV does not settle, and the phone calls to establish them do not scale.
• ‍Solution: Ringtime calls every candidate, runs six knockout questions including a real check on spoken English, and books the ones who qualify straight into a recruiter's calendar.
• ‍Result: Candidates across several countries get a text, then a call, then a booked interview in a Dutch recruiter's calendar, at a volume no team could dial by hand. The pool they already owned went back into play.

Every placement crosses a border

Eastmen is a recruitment and staffing company in Utrecht that places Eastern European workers with Dutch employers. Truck drivers, welders, machine operators. The vacancy is in the Netherlands and the candidate is in Hungary, Romania or Poland.

That gap is the whole job. A CV tells you someone has driven trucks. It does not tell you whether they hold EU nationality, whether they can be in the Netherlands within a fortnight, whether they are willing to relocate inside the country once they arrive, or how much English they actually speak. Each of those decides whether a placement is possible at all, and each of them takes a phone call in a different time zone to establish.

Only a small fraction of the people who enter that pipeline are ultimately placeable in a given role. Most of the work is finding out which ones.

It is worth being clear about what sits on the other end of that number. Every one of those placements is somebody moving country for work. The screening is the step that tells them whether it can happen, and how quickly. A candidate who waits three weeks to hear anything has usually made other plans, and the ones who lose most from a slow process are the people with the least room to wait around.

English is the question people answer optimistically

Of the six questions, the one that behaves differently is English.

A candidate ticking a box will say their English is fine. On a call it becomes obvious that "fine" covers a wide range, and there is a meaningful difference between someone who understands English and someone who can hold a conversation in it under pressure. Eastmen needs the second. A driver who cannot take instructions on a Dutch site is a placement that unwinds in week one.

So the agent, Hannah, probes it rather than asking it. She distinguishes candidates who speak and understand fluently from those who understand but speak less, and where the English is weak the candidate goes to a recruiter for manual review instead of into a booking. Eastmen also found the pattern underneath: English comprehension varied sharply by where the candidate had been sourced, which tells them something about where to spend next.

The agent works in 22 languages, so screening a Romanian candidate in Romanian would have been the easier build. Eastmen screens in English deliberately. The job requires English, so the screening call is the test rather than a box on a form, and a candidate who can hold the conversation has already demonstrated the thing the employer needs.

A text two hours ahead, then the call

The mechanics are deliberately tight. Eastmen sends a candidate list, Ringtime works it at around 300 calls a day, and every candidate who qualifies gets booked into a shared recruiter calendar with an SMS and email confirmation.

Every candidate gets a text two hours before the agent rings. An unknown international number ringing out of nowhere gets declined, and a message that says a call is coming turns it into an expected one. Eastmen asked for two hours ahead instead of the standard fifty minutes, so a candidate at work has time to see it. Across the pilot that came to 3,210 messages to 1,907 people, roughly 1.7 each.

The pairing is the point. A message that warms up the call, then a call that does the actual screening, then a booking into a recruiter's calendar. Running that by hand at 300 calls a day is arithmetic before it is a staffing question. A recruiter texting ahead of every call, waiting out the window, dialling, and rebooking the misses would manage a fraction of it, which is why the pool sat uncalled in the first place.

Two settings changed early, both at Eastmen's request, and both are the kind of thing you only learn by running it.

Call attempts went from five to three, spread at most two a day. The extra two produced more annoyance than conversations.

Interview slots went from 30 minutes to 15. A first phone interview after a full screening does not need half an hour, because the screening already answered the things the first half hour used to be for. A recruiter now fits about five in an hour instead of two.

They also had to bound the booking window to Dutch office hours after an appointment landed at 20:30.

The database was bigger than anyone assumed

The assumption going in was that Eastmen had run out of people to call, and that growing the pipeline meant buying new candidate lists.

Their own system holds tens of thousands of candidates. Only a small share had ever been called, which is the normal state of a database that size. It is unworkable by phone: a recruiter picking through it by hand can only ever reach the top of a list, so the searches that get run are narrow by necessity. Eastmen's covered truck drivers and machine operators, because those were the live vacancies.

Widening the search beyond those two roles opened the pool again without buying a single lead. The constraint was always reaching the records, rather than having them.

There is a second layer under that. A candidate screened for one vacancy and turned down still leaves behind a current record: their availability, licences and language level, all established and dated. Someone rejected for a driving role this month may fit a warehouse vacancy next month, and the screening that established it has already been paid for. A database only goes stale because nobody has the hours to keep asking. Once asking is no longer the bottleneck, the economics of buying lists look different.

What they got back

Phone is the main channel, with WhatsApp picking up the candidates the calls do not reach.

What the first weeks bought them was reach. Candidates in several countries contacted, tested on the thing the job actually turns on, and booked into a Dutch recruiter's calendar. Alongside that, a pool they already owned and had written off as worked through.

This is automated phone screening applied to a cross-border pool. See how Ringtime works, or get screened by the agent yourself to hear the conversation from the candidate's side.

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