Sofia starts her day with a new list full of people she needs to contact.

She calls. She leaves notes. She raises her hand. Nobody looks. Nobody responds. She looks at her hands. They are almost transparent.

Sofia is a ghost. Not because she isn't there. She's just on the wrong frequency.

This is what blue-collar recruitment feels like today. Not because the candidates aren't out there. But because the outreach lands in places they never look.

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163,000 open vacancies. And still no contact.

Europe faces a structural shortage of frontline workers. In retail, logistics and hospitality alone, tens of thousands of vacancies remain unfilled in Belgium. While AI is reducing demand for certain profiles, the shortage of blue-collar workers is only growing.

Recruiters call hundreds of candidates a day. Leave voicemails. Ask the same questions over and over. Workers and operators rarely use email, LinkedIn or a CV. They speak a wide range of languages. And yet the tools recruiters use to reach them have never evolved.

They are still built for a world of permanent contracts, office hours and polished applications. The blue-collar labour market moves constantly. Today a warehouse worker is in logistics, tomorrow in food processing, next month driving trucks. If a candidate applies on Monday and hears nothing by Tuesday, they are working somewhere else by Wednesday.

We were still figuring out which use cases had the most potential. One day we walked from our office to the parking lot in the centre of Ghent. Five hundred metres. Four recruitment offices. Behind every window: consultants at desks, phones to their ears.

We didn't need to explain anything to each other. This was the market.

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This is not another HR tool

Ringtime automates candidate recruitment from start to finish. Not through a single channel or a single language, but by determining what works for who.

• The candidate's preferred channel
• The right language, from 22 options
• The best moment to reach them

The result is an agent that converses, screens and matches through conversational screening, without a recruiter having to intervene at every step. The candidate doesn't notice the difference. The recruiter does.

We are not building a tool that does one thing better. We are building the infrastructure that brings supply and demand together faster than the market itself, across sectors, languages and geographies.
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Beyond recruitment

Recruitment is where we focus hardest, but it is not the only domain where the problem exists. Wherever contact volume is high and time pressure is real, the same pattern plays out.

For ERA, Ringtime manages the full visit scheduling of properties. Outside office hours, on weekends, without an agent having to intervene. Properties sell faster and the human bottleneck disappears. The first properties have already been sold with Ringtime handling the entire visit process.

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€1.8 million to fix the problem

The round is led by Volta Ventures. Syndicate One, JK Invest, New School VC and Allusion also joined.

With this capital we are expanding our product team, accelerating our growth and building towards expansion into the Netherlands, the UK and Germany. The interest from customers and prospects shows the market is ready. We are deliberately building an AI-first company, where efficiency and scale are central.

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Thank you to our first customers

We could not have done this without the companies that trusted us early. They chose Ringtime when there were no success stories yet, no proven track record. They saw the potential and gave us the chance to deliver. That trust means more than we can say.

Recruitment: House of HR, Trixxo Jobs, Forum Jobs, Synergie Jobs

Real estate, technology and energy: ERA, iFirma, Teamleader, EnergyKing

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The Ringtime team
Charlotte, Diederik, Johan, Joy, Maarten, Michiel, Simon, Vincent & Wouter