At a glance Problem: A Facebook job lead is cheap to generate and expensive to reach. Recruiters hit voicemail on roughly 70% of their calls, and the lead goes cold while the office is closed.
‍Solution: Ringtime called every incoming lead within minutes, screened them by phone in Dutch and French, and booked the ones who qualified straight into a recruiter's agenda.
‍Result: Voicemail dropped from about 70% of attempts to 20%. Across 5,327 calls, one cleaning campaign turned 670 leads into 241 booked intakes and 63 people who started work.

The lead arrives at 21:40. The office opens at 08:30.

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram is now a standard way to fill frontline vacancies. You run an ad for cleaners or warehouse staff, people tap a form, and leads land in your system all evening and all weekend.

Then the hard part starts. That person filled in a form on their couch, in about eleven seconds, somewhere between two other things. By Monday morning they have half-forgotten doing it. A recruiter calls, gets voicemail, leaves a message, and calls again two days later. Meanwhile the same person filled in two other forms for two other agencies.

Synergie Belgium runs into this at scale. They are a staffing and interim agency with around 510 people, part of the international Synergie group, placing everything from students and flexi workers to forklift drivers, production operators and technicians. Their teams were generating plenty of leads. Reaching those leads was the constraint.

Seven out of ten calls ended in a voicemail

Before Ringtime, Synergie's recruiters landed on voicemail with roughly 70% of the candidates they called. Seven out of ten dials produced nothing except a message that mostly went unreturned, and every one of them cost a recruiter two to three minutes.

It showed up differently across the business. The team handling flexi workers and student jobs deals in volume, across retail, hospitality and horeca, with a pool that has to stay fresh because engagement drops the longer someone sits in it unused. The retail team covers the whole of Flanders remotely, recruiting from sales associate to store manager, and their standard practice was to call every candidate twice. Fewer than half ever called back.

Both were spending their best hours on the part of the job that needs no judgement at all: finding out whether the person on the other end is still interested and still qualifies.

Call the lead before it goes cold

Ringtime sat on the front of the funnel, ahead of the ATS. A lead comes in from an ad form, routes through to Ringtime, and lands in the campaign that matches the ad it came from. Each campaign has its own screening flow, because the questions for a student flexi job and the questions for a forklift driver have nothing in common.

The agent calls within minutes of the form being submitted, in Dutch or French. It asks the qualifiers the recruiter would have asked: legal status to work, language, availability, distance to the site, the licences and certificates the role requires. Candidates who pass get an intake appointment booked directly into the right recruiter's agenda, including separate agendas per client site.

Geography as a hard filter. Frontline placements die on commute. For the packaging-plant campaigns, anything beyond roughly 20 km from the site was filtered out, because people from one city reliably dropped out of a job at a site an hour away.

Eight or nine questions. Longer flows lose people. The screening was kept short enough that a candidate finishes the call.

5,327 calls, and what came back

Over the pilot, Ringtime placed 5,327 calls for Synergie.

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Three things stand out.

Voicemail went from 70% of attempts to 20%. The agent calls an average of 2.3 times per candidate. Across the pilot that is roughly 4,500 voicemails nobody had to leave, at an average of two and a half minutes each.

Time saved is measurable and large. The airport ground-handling campaign brought in around 600 leads. Working those by hand would have taken an estimated 125 hours of recruiter time. Synergie spent about 19 hours, on follow-up with candidates who were already booked. That is roughly an 85% reduction, and the hours came back to the recruiters, not to a spreadsheet.

Candidates stayed engaged about twice as often as usual. Response rates ran from 81% down to 70% across the campaigns, easing over the Easter holidays, against the 30% to 40% Synergie sees on its regular inflow.

There is also one result with no number attached. The technician campaign was the first time Synergie got traction on that profile through social advertising. They had tried before and never made it work.

The roles this fits, and the ones it doesn't

There is a ceiling here, and it is the same one most agencies will hit.

It worked on roles you can qualify objectively. Cleaners, students, flexi workers, forklift drivers, warehouse operators, baggage handlers. Clear requirements, high volume, a yes-or-no answer to every question that matters. On the cleaning campaign, 72% of everyone reached booked an intake, and 63 of them started work.

It struggled where a recruiter's read matters. The fashion-retail campaign booked 12% of the people it reached. For that kind of role, the people who fill in a social ad form are a different population, and screening cannot fix that upstream.

Sales and senior technical profiles are a harder problem. Those conversations turn on language nuance and a recruiter's instinct about a person. Screening helps least where the judgement matters most.

What changed in the recruiter's morning

Before, it started with a list of phone numbers, most of which went to voicemail.

Now it starts with a calendar. The people in it have confirmed they are available, allowed to work, able to reach the site, and holding the licence the role needs. The recruiter opens the conversation instead of chasing it.

If your leads are going to voicemail

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram works. The speed of the follow-up behind it decides what the budget returns. A lead called within four minutes is a different lead from one called on Monday.

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