Talkpush accelerates recruitment with Twilio IVR

For employers that want to offer real-time engagement to their candidates, Talkpush’s Twilio-powered interview platform makes it possible to hear what every candidate has to say

Talkpush accelerates talent acquisition for high volume hiring companies globally through the automation of candidate sourcing and screening. They’ve created an entirely new recruitment model with a digital and audio application process which captures and assesses the voices of thousands of job seekers every week. Talkpush uses the Twilio engine for SMS, voice calls, and web-based IVR–the backbone of their interviewing technology, enabling Talkpush to conduct thousands of interviews in a condensed format.

Opening up the talent pool to a world of opportunity

Talkpush’s objective is to make easier for employers to hear what every candidate has to say. “For high volume hiring companies, the sheer number of the applicant pool is overwhelming,” said Max Armbruster, CEO of Talkpush. “, which is why they often resort to resume screening, which eliminates a lot of qualified candidates before even giving them a chance to talk. “

Talkpush opens the talent pool to a much wider group of people than ever before, speeding up the recruitment process by recording job-specific questions that a prospect can then answer at their convenience via chat or call. Their recorded answers are collated into profiles for the employer to listen to any time. Recruiters can review hundreds of candidates for the role, increasing their capacity fivefold or more.

Since implementing Twilio into their platform, Talkpush has increased the interview volume by four times, reduced the time to hire by over 50%, and cut the average cost per hire by up to 70% for some employers.

Twilio IVR: the backbone of the Talkpush platform

Talkpush’s platform and process enables recruiters to conduct up to 400 interviews per day with Twilio IVR. When a candidate applies for a job online, they are prompted to complete an IVR interview. The candidate will get a call and be asked a series of automated questions. Talkpush records their answers, and the IVR moves on to the next question. The final recording of questions and answers is then provided to employers so they can more fully evaluate candidates. “For every transcript that is submitted we can automate and fine tune hiring decisions. We’re able to tell via Twilio’s metrics and business intelligence which candidate has what it takes to make it to the next level,” notes Armbruster.

Talkpush also uses Twilio SMS to generate faster engagement with candidates on the front end and social media. “We send thousands of SMS via Twilio every day. Most of those are initiated as soon as a candidate applies to a job,” said Armbruster, “We also integrate with new messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, in order to drive even faster engagement with candidates.”

In the volume hiring space, email open rates are painfully low, “but when we send a candidate a Twilio-powered SMS with a link to a receive screening phone call, we see a much higher open rate,” notes Armbruster. “We’ve also reduced the response to time to candidates from 36 hours to just three minutes.”

Making the move to Twilio IVR

For the first two years of business, Talkpush hosted their own IVR, running everything on Asterisk and their own hardware, but they soon found they needed to move to more scalable, flexible and reliable platform. Despite the obvious business need, they were hesitant to make a change, anticipating a long and complex integration that might slow their growth.

“IVR is core to our product, but we had been delaying implementation because thought it would take a few months to do,”said Armbruster. “There was no question that we were very invested in the technology, and we knew that Twilio could do it on the cloud, but weren’t sure how fast they could roll it out and if they had internal resources.”

Talkpush completed the complete Twilio implementation in less than half the time they expected. “Twilio’s platform is so easy to use. Within 2-3 weeks we had working prototype and in less than a month we had shifted majority of our volume into Twilio IVR,” said Armbruster.

With Twilio, Talkpush now has more visibility into call quality. They can see the history of every call that drops, as well as analyze the quality of each operator, and troubleshoot with Twilio when needed. “Call quality is better than what we had with local vendors, and we now have more visibility into dropped calls or quality issues so we can respond faster. Twilio’s engineers are used to working with developers, and are quick to look into local issues when we need them.”

Twilio makes the global connections Talkpush needed

Most of Talkpush’s clients are based in Asia, with China and Southeast Asia the biggest markets. The company launched in Asia specifically to get scale, and needed an engine that could support their growth. “With half of the world’s population within 5 hour flight of Hong Kong, we are strategically located to support the demographic epicenter of the world,” said Armbruster. “Servicing enterprise clients, we can’t afford to have any dropped calls. One of the reasons we went with Twilio is because they have global presence and better call quality. The fact that Twilio had recently invested in APAC and partnerships to improve the rates and call quality in emerging markets was a must have for us.”

The quality of telecom operators can be poor in many emerging markets, but Twilio has helped to take away some of pain points for Talkpush. Twilio provides VoIP and an optimized system for routing phone calls through the best carriers in a given region, delivering better phone call quality than using local carriers directly.

As the company continues to grow into new markets, including Europe and Africa, “we can open a new market within hours,” said Armbruster. “For example, we uncovered an opportunity in Romania but never having done business there, we didn’t know what to expect. Twilio got a Romanian phone number for us and we were up and running within a few minutes.”

What’s next for Talkpush

Armbruster envisions a future where human recruiters and artificial intelligence collaborate more and more to open up the talent pool to job seekers who may not have gotten the opportunity otherwise. “Technology is really great for evaluating candidates based on communication, language, and empathy. While the labor market is under pressure due to automation, the service industry will continue to require people with strong communications skills. Our process is built around that future labor market.”