Recruitz is a boutique recruiting agency with a big problem: they operate as a two-person shop, but their clients expect them to deliver like a full-service firm. Every time they land a hard role with a high applicant volume, the team has to make a choice between thoroughness and speed — and in recruiting, both matter enormously.
When a technology client asked Recruitz to fill a founding engineer position at an early-stage startup, the brief was demanding. The role attracted over 500 applicants in the first two weeks, each of whom needed initial assessment. With two people running the firm, manually screening even a representative sample of that pool would have taken weeks.
The Old Way Wasn't Working
Before using AIR, the Recruitz team would manually review resumes, shortlist 50-60 candidates for a phone screen, and then spend days working through those calls — often only reaching the best candidates by the second or third week of the process. In a competitive talent market, that lag was costly. Candidates already had other conversations in progress.
Deploying AIR
By integrating Braintrust AIR into their process, Recruitz was able to send conversational assessment invites to the full applicant pool immediately. The AI conducted a live adaptive video interview with each candidate — probing their engineering philosophy, their experience with early-stage ambiguity, and their approach to technical architecture decisions.
Within 48 hours, Recruitz had AI-generated scorecards ranking the top performers across the full pool. Instead of screening 50-60 candidates manually, they identified the top 5-10 who warranted a deep human conversation.
The Results
They placed the founding engineer in four weeks — roughly half the average time for a role of this complexity and seniority. The candidate they placed had scored highly on AIR's adaptive assessment, and the subsequent human conversations confirmed what the AI had flagged: exceptional technical depth and a strong fit for early-stage uncertainty.
"I can't live without it," said the Recruitz founder. "We went from scrambling to cover volume to having a genuinely confident shortlist in 48 hours. The AI does the work of a full screening team."
For boutique recruiting teams or internal TA functions operating lean, AIR effectively multiplies your capacity without multiplying your headcount. Try AIR for yourself or book a demo to see how it fits a high-touch recruiting workflow.