How AI Frees Up Hiring Managers in Volume Hiring

At scale, this breaks fast. Hundreds of applications, coordination chaos, missed ATS updates, delayed decisions — it’s no surprise the candidate experience suffers, good candidates drop off, and hiring managers burn out.

The common fix? Offload to recruiters or an agency. But even then, the hiring manager is still stuck managing interviews, giving feedback, and moving candidates from one column to another in the applicant tracking system. The bottlenecks stay — just in different places.

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to rethink what hiring managers should actually be doing throughout the hiring process — and what can be handled by AI.

Let’s break down where the overload comes from, what process steps to automate, and how teams using Carv are already doing this today.

Where AI can support the interview process in volume hiring

Not every step in the volume recruitment process needs a hiring manager. In fact, most don’t.

The key is to identify which tasks are:

• Repetitive and rules-based (perfect for AI-based automation), and
• Decision-driven and people-focused (where humans still need to lead).

Take pre-screening: If your shortlisting criteria are clear-cut, AI can handle this entirely. For example, if you’re DHL hiring drivers, you can shortlist candidates based on knockout questions like “Do you have a valid license?” or “Can you work night shifts?”.  

AI can run these structured interviews — via voice or chat — with no human input needed, progressing only the right candidates to the next interview stage.

Then comes scheduling. This shouldn’t require a human touch at all. If location managers are still coordinating phone interviews manually, you're wasting valuable time. An AI assistant can instantly sync with hiring calendars and send out interview invites — no back-and-forth needed.

Interview prep is another time sink. Hiring managers often need help structuring interviews or coming up with good interview questions. AI can generate tailored, role-specific question sets in seconds, giving managers a head start before they even speak to a candidate.

And after the job interview? More admin. Updating the applicant tracking system, adding notes, summarizing candidate performance, sending follow-ups. These are all repeatable tasks that AI can easily take over — and do consistently.

So if you zoom out, most of what slows hiring managers down is work that:

• Doesn’t require direct or real-time candidate interaction
• Doesn’t influence the final hiring decision
• Is necessary, but not strategic

That’s exactly where AI fits in.

Carv’s AI assistants are built for this kind of delegation — freeing up hiring managers without sacrificing candidate quality or process control.

By automating the pre- and post-interview admin, managers can focus where they’re actually needed: in-person interviews, high-stakes conversations with the best candidates, and making the final hiring call.

So how do you decide what to automate — and what to keep human?

That’s next. Let’s break down a simple way to assess your current interview process and pinpoint the best handoff points.

What to delegate and what to keep human

If you're not sure where the handoff points are in your hiring process, do a quick audit:

1. Map the steps in your entire recruitment process, from application to offer.
2. Mark where hiring managers are required. For example, they might be needed for video interviews, but not for screening calls.
3. Estimate time spent per step: screening, scheduling, interviewing, feedback, admin.
4. Spot the patterns: Where are decisions delayed? Where are candidates going quiet? Are hiring managers struggling with unanswered applications, rescheduling, or missed ATS updates?

In 9 out of 10 cases, the hiring manager isn’t the bottleneck because they’re slow — it’s because they’re swamped with things that could easily be automated.

Let’s look at two of the most overloaded stages, and how AI-based automation can change the game.

Integrating an AI pre-screening assistant

In volume hiring, the “volume” can be a problem — particularly if you have one hiring manager in charge of the whole recruitment process.

As blue-collar jobs have a low barrier to entry, these kinds of vacancies tend to attract a lot of job seekers. And by ‘a lot,’ I mean hundreds. Candidates will apply to every blue-collar opportunity they see on job boards, even when they don’t fit the requirement or have any real interest in the role, just because they need a job fast.

So of course, this leaves recruiters and hiring managers with a situation where they need to wade through hundreds of applications to find qualified candidates that are a good match.

What tends to happen in these situations is that hiring teams only make it through the first 40-50% of applications before they give up. They create their shortlist and hire just from that section of applicants, even though it’s entirely possible the other 50% might have better matches.

Of course, the goal is to hire people, not just to screen people. But to be able to hire top candidates for your roles, you need to go through screening and scheduling and interviewing first — and AI can do that for you.

The good news for volume hiring businesses is that an AI pre-screening assistant can do virtually all the heavy lifting associated with pre-screening candidates.

Simply by having an AI-powered conversation with job seekers, the AI can filter out candidates who don’t match the requirements.

And for those candidates who do fit the bill, the AI will schedule interviews, and provide recruitment teams with context on each individual candidate beforehand, so they’re just as prepared as though they did the screening themselves.

How AI can help with pre-screening

We’ll use Carv as example, to make this more practical.

Carv’s conversational AI module works by taking an open role and, based on the job description and pre-decided knockout questions, generates a conversation flow that will pre-screen and evaluate applicants without any human input.

When a candidate applies to a job and leaves their contact details, the AI assistant will kick in. Depending on whether you’re using a text or voice AI assistant, the bot will automatically contact the candidate via email, phone call, WhatsApp, or whichever text messaging platform you prefer.

From there, the AI assistant will have a human-like conversation, moving through the conversation flow and your specific questions until the bot can qualify them.

Good-fit candidate matches will be automatically invited to choose a time slot for the next interview stage, and any candidates who aren’t right for this particular role will be filtered into buckets in the ATS for future reference.

This whole process is incredibly seamless because the conversational AI assistant is synced with both the ATS and the hiring team’s calendars. This means no back-and-forth conversations need to happen to find an in-person or video interview slot that suits everyone.

Large organizations like DHL Express and Carrefour have already cut their time-to-hire by 30-50% using Carv’s pre-screening AI assistant, and are processing and hiring 3x more candidates.

Adding an AI admin assistant

When hiring at scale, the level of admin that comes with every candidate interview can be unmanageable even for a full-time recruiter. So just imagine what it can do to a hiring manager’s workload, when they already have a whole other job to do at the same time.

With so many admin tasks to handle, often what happens is that the recruitment process collapses because the hiring manager can’t keep up. Again, candidates are ghosted, and by the time the hiring manager has gotten round to the selection process, all the better candidates are already weeks into another role.

AI technology can be used by hiring managers and recruitment teams to delegate a whole load of different admin tasks; pre, post and during the interview. For example:

• Pre-interview: Coming up with standardized interview questions, creating candidate profiles, scheduling interviews
• During the interview: Note-taking, suggesting follow-up questions in real-time
• After the interview: Updating the ATS with full context on each interviewee, candidate scoring to assist with decision-making and avoiding unconscious biases, sending candidate follow-ups.

Just think how many hours of time can be saved by letting AI automation handle all these interview admin tasks. In reality, none of these stages of the interview process actually require human input, and allowing AI to handle them means you can focus on improving the candidate experience and selection process.

How AI can help with interview admin

The AI admin assistant works by joining your interview, transcribing the meeting in real-time while taking notes along the way. It will then take all the data it’s gathered and turn the interview notes into candidate summaries, profiles, or write-ups that can be used to inform decision-making.

Delegating these tasks to the AI can save hiring managers and recruiters a huge amount of time and energy that can be preserved for providing candidates with a positive, engaged interview experience and making important decisions about who to send job offers to.

Just like the AI pre-screening assistant, the admin AI integrates seamlessly with your applicant tracking system for data syncs, and with all relevant calendars so it can schedule interviews and join meetings.

Updating the ATS with information about the candidate and how the interview went is one of these important administrative tasks that is notoriously forgotten about.

This ensures all data about candidates is always up-to-date in the ATS, and no important information falls through the cracks, so your ATS becomes the rich bank of top talent it should be that you can recruit from in the future, not just for your current open roles.

Carv customers who have been using the AI interview admin assistant have already reported cutting admin time by as much as 20-40%.

Start delegating to AI today

Delegating stages of your interview process to AI doesn’t have to be complicated or complex.

An AI assistant like Carv can be up and running within days, and will make an impact on your time-to-hire from day one because it supports hiring managers where they need it most.

By strategically shifting your pre-screening and admin burdens to AI, you ensure you’re offering consistent and fair candidate evaluation while providing space for hiring managers to have meaningful connections with candidates throughout the talent acquisition process.

To see how Carv’s AI pre-screening assistant and admin assistant work in action, book a demo with a member of the team today.