- Key insight: Discover how voice‑AI interviews uncover candidate potential and benefit interests
- Expert quote: Recruiters gained deeper candidate insights and reclaimed time, says Tracy St. Dic, Zapier.
- Supporting data: 88% of companies already use AI for early‑stage candidate screening.
- Forward look: Prepare for chatbots to handle benefits FAQs and scale pre‑screening workflows.
Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review
In 2025, workflow management platform Zapier experienced a massive surge in job applications, with thousands of resumes pouring in for its advertised roles. Zapier's recruiting team went to work, but was
"This was a huge pain point for us; my recruiters were spending a significant amount of their time screening applications and jumping on the phone with candidates, the vast majority of whom were not as great as they seemed on their resume," says Tracy St. Dic, Zapier's global head of talent.
Read more: This company's HR department is entirely AI-driven
In her search for a better approach, she found Ezra, a voice-AI recruiting platform that conducts the initial interview — and an actual spoken conversation — with selected candidates. Candidates schedule a video call with Ezra, who participates in the meeting in voice only, and is programmed with the information needed to intelligently respond to candidates' answers with
"We were gaining more insights and getting more in-depth information about [candidates'] experience," says St. Dic, noting that the process has saved recruiters roughly 30% of their time by expediting the screening process. "Based on where we would have ranked them when we reviewed their applications, we would have just rejected them straight out. But because we were able to screen more candidates and use Ezra to uncover more potential about them, we found these hidden gems of people."
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Around 88% of companies
For example, if a candidate wants to know about the company's financial wellness offerings, the chatbot can provide initial information, and a recruiter can quickly follow up with details. Capitalizing on this capability means benefit leaders will need to work closely with recruitment teams, because the more information a chatbot can provide about a company's offerings, the better.
"You can give Ezra the context that you want it to know about when talking to candidates, and you can put in entire documents about company policies, culture, benefits, anything," says Ophir Samson, CEO at Ezra. "You can also write FAQs — Ezra will prompt you to answer questions that most candidates ask, about the team and the culture and stuff like that. As interviews go on, we pick up questions that candidates ask that we don't know the answer to, and then those would be prompted to the recruiting team to answer so that Ezra knows how to answer them in subsequent interviews."
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St. Dic, who was skeptical of bringing in an agentic screening tool, has been reassured by Ezra's lack of lag time and ability to ask intelligent follow-up questions. The ability to screen five times more candidates has resulted in the advancement of 30% who would previously have been passed over. And while her team has not trained Ezra to answer candidate benefit questions yet, she sees it as an extension of setting her recruiters up for greater success.
"Recruiters would spend 10 minutes in the interview giving the same answers over and over," she says. "It just allows us to shortcut that, so when recruiters and hiring managers get to the candidate, they're able to jump into the more nuanced, important conversations that would be best for a human to have."
