Email triage for recruitment firms and staffing agencies
A recruitment firm’s application inbox is a funnel: hundreds of CVs, candidate follow-ups and client messages a day, of which a handful — urgent order, withdrawal, rare profile — demand immediate action. The agent sorts, extracts and routes continuously.
In your day-to-day
- 01
Automatic extraction of incoming CVs into the ATS — contact details, qualification, availability — no retyping.
- 02
Detection of client orders and candidate withdrawals, forwarded to the right consultant within minutes.
- 03
Automatic reply to applications with a personalised acknowledgement and first qualification questions.
A typical scenario
In high season, an agency’s application inbox takes 150 CVs and messages a day — and the assistant handling them does nothing else, and still runs late.
- 01
Overnight Sunday to Monday, 84 applications land after the weekend’s ad run: by 8 AM all are in the ATS, deduplicated, with the five profiles matching open orders flagged on top.
- 02
The 6:50 AM withdrawal for an 8 AM assignment triggers an immediate alert to the account manager — not a 9:30 discovery.
- 03
Timesheets received by email flow to invoicing, matched against the corresponding assignment contract.
What changes
The application flow gets processed as it arrives whatever the season, and the assistant requalifies profiles instead of doing data entry.
Order of magnitude
Working assumptions
- →150 applications and messages a day in season
- →3 minutes of manual handling each: opening, ATS entry, acknowledgement
On the order of 7 processing hours a day absorbed (150 × 3 min) — a volume no single assistant could hold, and one that no longer forces choosing which CVs to open.
Indicative estimate built on average sector assumptions — it gets recalibrated on your actual volumes during scoping.
What eats your days
- →
Applications arrive by the hundreds — the best profiles are already in process elsewhere by the time a consultant opens the inbox.
- →
Placement invoices and temp timesheet billing get chased after sourcing, always — and outstanding balances swell.
- →
A no-show or a poorly anticipated assignment end is discovered through an angry client call, not by the firm.
How it works
- 1
Measure before sorting
We start by measuring the real flow: who writes, about what, what actually needs action. Sorting rules are built on that data — not on impressions.
- 2
Sort, extract, route
The agent classifies each message, extracts the useful data (references, amounts, deadlines) into your tools, and routes to the right person. Urgent items are flagged within minutes.
- 3
Answer the recurring
Acknowledgements, document requests, standard questions: the agent replies on its own within the approved fence. The rest lands pre-qualified in your team’s queue.
Typical results
95%
of messages classified and routed with no human involved
4 min
between an urgent message arriving and being flagged
0
client requests lost in the pile
Orders of magnitude observed in production; your diagnostic sets your own baseline and targets.
Frequently asked questions
Does the agent create candidate records directly in our ATS?+
Yes, with duplicate detection: if the candidate already exists in the pool, the record is updated rather than duplicated, and the consultant following the profile is notified.
How does it tell an urgent order from an ordinary message?+
Rules are calibrated on your real flow during a measurement phase, then run in assisted mode before going autonomous. The criteria — client, wording, start date — are yours, made systematic.
Is this the problem eating your team’s time?
Tell us how you work today — 30-minute call, then a free written diagnostic of what this agent would change for you, with numbers.
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