At a glance

• ‍Problem: Skilled technicians don't wait. Twenty percent of applicants go cold before a recruiter picks up the phone, and the strongest ones are already talking to a competitor.
• ‍Solution: Ringtime screens every applicant by WhatsApp and phone the moment they apply, captures their exact skill profile and routes them to the right technical recruiter.‍
• Result: One screening qualifies a candidate across a whole skill cluster, the recruiter starts with a warm conversation instead of a cold call, and the data is complete before anyone opens the file.
  
  (The full interview is available on our Youtube channel, below is the summary)
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Technicians don't need you. You need them.

Logi-Technic is a technical outsourcing company inside House of HR. They supply electricians, mechanics, electromechanicians, maintenance engineers and field service technicians to industrial clients across Belgium. The technicians stay on Logi-Technic's payroll. They move between projects as their career evolves, from shift work to day jobs, from one site to another. It's long-term employment, not temp staffing.

That model only works if you keep attracting the right people. And in technical staffing, the power dynamic is inverted.

"We have to convince the technician to choose us, not the other way around," says Lies Dumarey, COO at Logi-Technic. "A good technician has multiple options. Every mid-sized company is looking for them. So if someone is ready to make a move, you have to be ready to act fast."

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Twenty percent gone before anyone calls

Here's the problem. Most technicians don't apply during office hours. They apply on a Friday evening after a bad day at work. They scroll through options, leave their details at a few agencies, and go to bed. On Monday morning, the race starts: every agency the person applied to begins calling. The one that reaches them first has a real advantage.

"We lose twenty percent of applicants without ever reaching them," says Lies. "You can't call them back to ask why they stopped answering. But we think those people were ready at that moment, and we just weren't there."

The recruiter team works weekdays, office hours. Their first task each morning is calling yesterday's applicants. But "yesterday" for a Friday-night application means Monday, 60 hours later.

That gap is the bottleneck. The time between "I'm interested" and "someone actually talks to me."

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The moment it had to change

As COO, Lies keeps an eye on the dashboards and the metrics. She knew the speed problem existed, but the data made it undeniable: the moments people apply are not the moments the team is available.

"We had to flip it around. We needed to be ready to talk when the candidate is, not the other way around."

That's when Logi-Technic started looking for a way to be present the moment someone applies, regardless of the hour. Not by hiring a night shift of recruiters, but by letting an AI agent handle the first two screening phases.

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Screening the person, not the vacancy

Most staffing agencies screen a candidate against the single vacancy they applied to. If that role is filled or the fit is off, the conversation ends and the candidate goes cold, even when they are right for three other openings.

Logi-Technic flipped that. The screening unit is the bucket: a cluster of roles that share the same core qualifications. A candidate who applies to one maintenance role gets screened against the whole electrical cluster. The posting they applied to is only the entry point.

"We don't put people in a box," says Lies. "We want to know what someone can do. Someone might be a qualified electrician, but also have mechanical skills, or be able to weld. We start broad and then go specific, so we never miss a competency just because someone applied to the wrong listing."

That only works if the screening captures the detail underneath the trade. Being a qualified electrician is the entry ticket. Whether someone has wired residential installations, commissioned public charging infrastructure or worked on industrial production lines at the right voltage decides which vacancies in the cluster they actually fit.

The buckets sit in a tree the agent walks during the call. Three branches at the top (Industry, Construction and Infrastructure, Engineering), nine skill clusters underneath. The first questions place the candidate in the right branch. The rest are specific to their cluster.

WhatsApp first, then voice

The agent is called Lou. She works in two stages, on two channels, before any recruiter time is spent.

WhatsApp knock-out. Within minutes of an application, Lou sends a WhatsApp message. Four binary qualifiers: driving licence, language, Belgian residence, technical background. Yes or no. "WhatsApp is for the clear one-or-zero questions," Lies explains. "You have it or you don't."

Voice screening. Candidates who pass move to a phone call. Lou places them in the right branch and asks the cluster-specific questions: training, years in the sector, which domain, preferred work regime, availability. The conversation runs in Dutch, French or English.

The difference between the channels is deliberate. WhatsApp catches deal-breakers fast. Voice captures nuance. "When I ask about your preferred work regime, the answer isn't yes or no," says Lies. "Maybe you prefer day shifts, but you're open to rotating shifts. Good to know. That's not a WhatsApp question."

What Lou never does is decide. Every answer goes back to a recruiter, and the go or no-go stays with a person. Ringtime delivers the evidence: the summary, the structured answers, the transcript. The recruiter makes the call.

Better data than a human conversation

Lies expects a clear improvement in data quality from the AI screening.
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"The technology is actually stronger than a recruiter in this phase. A person listens, interprets, and then has to write it down from memory. Things get lost. With AI, what the candidate says is what ends up in the ATS. One to one, almost perfectly."

Logi-Technic runs Connexys by Bullhorn on Salesforce. Everything Lou captures flows straight into that system. That matters beyond the immediate screening. A candidate who doesn't qualify today might gain two years of relevant experience and reapply. If the original screening data is complete and accurate in Salesforce, the recruiter picks up the thread instead of starting from scratch. "We're going to dramatically improve both the quality and the volume of data in our system," says Lies.

What the recruiters actually think

Bringing AI into the first candidate touchpoint is a change. Lies is honest about the reaction.

"There's always some resistance. People ask: does my role become redundant? Can AI do everything we do?" The answer she gave her team: the opposite is true. The recruiter's job shifts from checking boxes to having real conversations.

"Right now a recruiter has ten minutes per candidate, rushing through the must-haves. Did you check everything? Good, next. With AI handling that first qualification, the recruiter can sit down with a qualified candidate and actually talk. Why did you leave your last company? What do you really want? That's a human conversation, and that's what makes someone choose us."

The result: recruiters spend less time checking boxes and more time understanding people.

What keeps a COO up at night (it's not the tech)

With go-live approaching, Lies' biggest concern is not whether the technology works. "The technology is solid. During testing, it's been more accurate than a person at capturing what was said."

Her worry is candidate readiness. "Will candidates drop off because a robot calls instead of a person? Or will they be fine with it?" She pauses. "Personally, I think the world is more ready for this than we believe. I think we talk to robots more often than we realize."

The second concern is the handoff. Lou works 24/7, but the recruiter who picks up a qualified candidate still works office hours. "If someone is screened on a Saturday night and the recruiter only follows up Monday, we have to make sure we don't lose that speed advantage between phases."

What changes if it works

Short term, the recruiter's morning changes. Instead of a list of numbers to dial, it starts with candidates who already said yes, already qualified, with the full conversation on file. The recruiter picks each one up warm and spends the recovered hours on the people worth a real conversation.

Lies sees a second-order effect: capacity for growth. "We can run more marketing campaigns and handle a wider inflow of candidates, because we have the capacity to qualify them before they reach a recruiter. We're not limited by how many calls our team can make in a day anymore."

That's the shift. The constraint was never the number of vacancies or the size of the recruiter team. It was the gap between when candidates are ready and when someone picks up. Logi-Technic closed that gap.

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