AI screening calls for high-volume hiring

Why use an agent for the first screening call?

High-volume roles bring hundreds of applications a week, and most of them need the same five-minute call before anyone can decide on an interview. Recruiters spend whole days dialling, half the candidates don’t pick up, and the ones who do are often driving, at work or already in another company’s process. By the time someone calls back, a good candidate may have taken another offer.

An agent can call the whole list as applications come in and ask every candidate the same questions in the same order: area, joining date, experience, the role’s must-haves such as a two-wheeler or a licence, and pay expectation. That consistency helps your recruiters, because every answer lands in the same column and can be sorted. It’s also fairer to candidates, who all get asked the same things and nothing more.

Delivery partners, warehouse associates, telecallers and retail staff are the roles where this fits. A senior hire, where the first conversation is already a sales pitch for your company, should stay with a person.

How do you set it up?

1. Build it as a node-based agent. In Agent Studio, choose Create agent, then Node-based, and either describe the screening or give it transcripts of two or three of your recruiters’ best screening calls. You get a draft flow with one step per question, which you can edit.
2. Check each step. Tell it what value to extract and how to normalise it: experience in months, salary as a range in rupees, licence status as a short phrase.
3. Pass the role’s facts as variables: {{role}}, {{city}}, {{pay_details}}, {{next_step}}. If the candidate asks about pay, the agent quotes {{pay_details}} and nothing else.
4. Add schedule_callback for candidates who are busy, and have the first step ask whether it’s a good time before anything else.
5. Test it in the browser as a strong candidate, one who’s driving, and one who only wants to know the salary.
6. Upload the applicant list as a campaign, with the candidate id and the source as extra info. If the same people apply through several portals, the console’s option to skip numbers reached in an earlier campaign stops you calling them twice. It applies to every earlier campaign in your workspace, so check that’s what you want.
7. Download CSV from the campaign gives one row per candidate with the extracted answers, ready for your applicant tracker. Or read data.call.flow from call.processed in your webhook handler.

What should recruiters still do?

Decide. The agent shouldn’t tell anyone they’re rejected, promise a job, or negotiate pay. Interviews, offers, document checks and background verification stay with your team. Questions about religion, caste, marital status or family plans have no place in the script, and if a candidate raises something sensitive, the agent should note that a recruiter will follow up and move on. It can’t transfer a call to a recruiter, so a candidate who wants to talk to someone gets a promised callback.

What should you check before calling applicants?

Someone who applied to your posting expects a call about it. A list bought or scraped from elsewhere is a different matter, and you should check TRAI’s current rules and your consent records before calling it. TRAI’s Third Amendment to the TCCCPR, notified on 18 September 2026, also asks every sender to declare software-placed calls, including those using artificial voice, to its originating telecom provider in advance with the numbers it will use, and treats undeclared ones as unsolicited. It comes into force in stages after publication.

Candidate answers are personal data. Recordings and transcripts are kept for 90 days, so copy what you need into your own system and limit who can open them.

What does a screening call cost?

You pay for connected minutes only, and a candidate who doesn’t pick up costs nothing. On T1 a connected minute costs ₹1 with a ₹1,00,000 monthly commitment, plus ₹0.30 for Mirai phone calling and ₹0.20 for call insights if you switch them on. On T5 it’s ₹5 a minute, pay as you go, with both included. Prices exclude GST. The cost block assumes about three and a half minutes connected, an estimate for five questions and a pay discussion; a busy candidate who asks for a callback costs seconds. Weigh that against a recruiter’s hour on the phone. Pricing has all three plans, and the cost calculator takes your applicant volume.