At a glance

• ‍Problem: reaching frontline candidates by phone is slow, so connection rates stay low.‍
• Solution: automated WhatsApp screening instead of calling candidates one by one.‍
• Result: a higher connection rate (52% of a campaign responds), with qualified candidates landing in recruiters' calendars.

The job was never finding candidates

A frontline recruiter's morning goes into the phone. Dialing down a list, hitting voicemail, leaving a message no one returns, dialing the next name. The candidates aren't avoiding the call. They're on a forklift, on a roof, mid-shift, unreachable exactly when the office is open and free again only after it closes.

That was the bottleneck at Trixxo Jobs, part of the Trixxo Group, which puts more than 16,000 people to work across Belgium and the Netherlands from a network of 180+ offices. They had the vacancies and they had the database. What they didn't have was a way to get candidates on the line before another agency did. In frontline staffing the same worker is being approached by three agencies at once and the placement goes to whoever has a real conversation first.

Screening candidates was really about getting them in front of us. We spent a lot of time calling people to figure out whether it was worth inviting them to the office. But you'd often land on voicemail, and with voicemail, you lose time.

Michiel Alen, Expert Office Manager at Trixxo Jobs

What changed: the screening moved to WhatsApp

Trixxo plugged Ringtime in on top of Brightstaffing, their existing ATS. No migration, no new system for recruiters to learn. Ringtime runs in a side panel, like a browser extension, so new buttons simply appear inside the screens recruiters already use all day. A recruiter adds candidates to a Ringtime campaign straight from the ATS, and Ringtime opens the conversation over WhatsApp with the same questions a recruiter would otherwise ask.

The questions are specific to the role. For a roofer, that includes whether the candidate is comfortable working at height. Ringtime confirms availability, checks the deal-breakers, handles the back-and-forth, and writes the result back into the ATS. The recruiter picks up a candidate who's already qualified, with a summary attached.

Now we just use Ringtime to send a WhatsApp that already contains the screening questions we'd otherwise ask by phone. That makes the whole matching process go faster.

Michiel is blunt about why the channel matters. The old methods had quietly stopped working, and he includes himself in that:

We can spend the whole day calling down the database, sending SMS, sending a thousand emails myself, and get no response, because nobody opens their email anymore. WhatsApp is an everyday thing. Even with SMS, I catch myself not reading them. It's that old school.

In Michiel's words

What does it look like now that you're working with Ringtime?

The inflow has gone up. Of the campaigns we set up, 52% respond. That's phenomenal. And we notice the team gets more and more comfortable with it every week.

What does that mean for the people on the floor?

Concretely, it means we have more time to actually talk to candidates. And honestly, more time for a bit of fun on the floor too.

What surprised you most when you saw the first results?

The clarity of the communication. I had my doubts about AI, but it's better than I expected. The AI responds really well to what candidates tell it, and we get a clean transcript of how the WhatsApp conversation went and what the candidate actually wants.

Would you recommend it to others in your sector?

Definitely, to peers and to any company dealing with candidate inflow. It's a very easy way to pull candidates over the line and get them to make contact.

What it changed for the team

The morning stops being about phone calls that don't get answered. The candidates who respond, and at Trixxo that's 52% of a campaign, come in already screened, on a channel they check on a break or in the evening. The recruiter starts the day with people who said yes, not a list of numbers to work through.

That frees up the part of the job that needs a person. A candidate who gets a reply the same evening hasn't been left wondering whether anyone saw their application; they've had a conversation that the recruiter can pick up warm. The team handles more inflow without adding headcount, and they spend the recovered hours on the conversations worth having in person.

This is what candidate screening looks like as a layer on top of the ATS, running in 22+ languages.

See it for yourself

In frontline staffing, the candidate who gets a reply tonight is the one who shows up Monday. Trixxo stopped leaving that to whoever happened to be free to dial. See how Ringtime works, or get screened by the agent yourself to hear the conversation from the candidate's side.

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