How to Set up AI Phone Screening for Staffing

With AI phone calls, you can go from a list of hundreds of applicants to a shortlist of top candidates—without reviewing a single application or resume.

Let’s walk through how to get started with AI phone screening, and how to scale your implementation without disrupting your current interview process or hiring workflows.

Decide where you’ll use AI phone screening

Before rolling out a new technology in your recruitment process, it’s worth taking a moment to think through how you plan to use it—and what specific challenges you want it to solve.

That’s the only way you’ll be able to measure the impact of automating candidate screening and know whether your investment in a new screening tool is actually paying off.

Start by identifying which stages of your interview process would benefit most from AI phone screening.

In most cases, that’s going to be the prescreening stage, especially when you’re dealing with a high volume of applicants. But every organization’s hiring process is different, so you can still replace your human phone interviews with AI-driven ones even if you’re not in volume hiring.

Next, get clear on the outcomes you want. What exactly are you trying to achieve with AI phone screening? A few common use cases include:

• Collecting structured candidate data—like availability, skills, or experience—and syncing it to their record in your ATS.
• Assessing communication skills or language proficiency during the first interaction. This is especially useful for roles that require fluency in a language you don’t speak as a recruiter.
• Reducing recruiter workload by automating first-round interviews when your team is stretched thin.
• Evaluating candidate fit for specific roles. AI phone screening is ideal for jobs with clear, objective prescreening criteria—like blue-collar roles. And if someone isn’t right for the role they applied for, the tool can flag them as a potential fit for another position in your organization.

Choose the right AI phone screening tool

Whenever you're adding a new tool to your recruitment workflow, picking the right one for your needs is crucial. There are plenty of AI-powered recruiting tools out there, each designed with different use cases in mind.

Here are some key features to look for when evaluating AI phone screening tools specifically:

• Natural language processing (NLP): This is the machine learning tech that helps software understand human speech. It’s essential for accurately interpreting candidate responses in a phone interview.
• Customizable AI: You should be able to tailor the AI agent and conversation flow to the specific role. Relying on generic, out-of-the-box scripts won’t cut it—and nothing turns candidates off faster than a chatbot that can’t go off-script.
• Integrations: Make sure the tool plays nicely with your existing systems—like your ATS, CRM, and calendar. If it doesn’t integrate well, you risk creating more manual work and introducing bad data into your system.
• Scalability: The software should be able to handle a high volume of calls at once and shortlist candidates without sacrificing quality. If it can’t scale, you’re not really solving the problem you bought it for.
• Ease of use: Look for tools that are simple to set up and use—both for your team and your candidates. Candidates should be able to take their phone screening on any device (iPhone, Android, etc.), even without a strong Wi-Fi connection.

Tools like Carv check all these boxes. They’re built to get recruiting teams up and running fast, with minimal technical lift and a shallow learning curve—so you can start seeing value right away.

Set up your AI phone screening process

Once you’ve selected your technology, it’s time to get it up and running. The setup process can vary from one tool to another, so we’ll use Carv as an example to walk through the key steps.

Step 1: Connect your tools

For Carv to handle your pre-screening process, it needs access to a few key systems:

• Your ATS or career site, so it can pull in context about each vacancy
• Your phone number or VOIP tool, if you're using one, so it can call candidates on your behalf
• Your calendar, so it can schedule interviews automatically

Once these are connected, Carv’s AI phone agent is ready to take over screening calls—24/7 and in multiple languages.

While ATS integration isn’t mandatory, it makes the entire process much smoother. With a direct integration, Carv can push and pull candidate data automatically, with no manual effort required. It also eliminates the need to copy and paste vacancy links or manage candidate data manually.

Instead, just head to the job you want to hire for in your ATS and launch the AI chat flow with a single click.

And unlike traditional chatbots that require you to build out complex logic trees, Carv does the heavy lifting. It reads the job description, pulls out the key details, and proposes a conversation flow designed to screen out poor-fit candidates and surface the top talent.

Step 2: Adjust the proposed screening flow

Before launching the AI chat flow, take a moment to review the proposed questions. While Carv’s AI agent is designed to “think” like a human recruiter and suggest the most relevant questions to identify the right candidates, it’s always worth giving it a quick review.

Go through the conversation flow and mark any questions that should be mandatory—for example, if you're hiring drivers, you’ll want the AI chatbot to always ask whether the candidate has a valid license.

You can also add optional interview questions, set guidelines for when the AI should hand the conversation over to a human, and choose the tone you want the agent to use—more casual or more professional.

Once you’re happy with the flow, save it as a template so you can reuse it for similar roles in the future.

Step 3: Test the process internally

The only way to know if your AI phone screening setup works is to run end-to-end tests. Start with a few pilot screenings—either with internal team members or a small group of candidates—to:

• Confirm that the tool integrates smoothly with your recruitment software
• Make sure you understand the functionality and where human overview is needed
• Make sure the screening questions are clear and appropriate for the vacancy
• Make sure your AI callers clearly inform candidates that they’re speaking with an AI
• Test the phone screening process internally to spot any technical or workflow issues before going live

This testing phase isn’t just about troubleshooting—it’s also your chance to optimize the flow by giving the algorithms the best chance to surface top candidates.

Step 4: Train your recruitment team in how to use it

If your hiring team doesn’t know how to use the AI screening tool, even the best tech won’t deliver results. A successful rollout of an AI phone screening tool depends on getting everyone aligned and confident in the new process.

Run a training session—or a few, if needed—covering not just how the AI tool works, but also next steps and what to do with the outputs. This isn’t about blindly accepting the AI’s shortlist. These tools are designed to enhance human decision-making, not replace it.

Your team should learn not just how to use AI, but also how to interpret candidate transcripts, assess AI-generated insights, and use the data to decide who moves forward in the process. That’s where the real value comes in—combining AI efficiency with human judgment.

Launch your AI phone screening process

When you’re ready to release your automated phone screening into the wild, it’s helpful to think about the first few weeks as a soft launch.

At this stage, the focus should be optimizing the process to achieve the best results possible before you launch throughout the entire organization.

Here’s how I would recommend managing the launch process:

Roll it out in phases

Start with one particular role you’re hiring for, or a single organizational department. That way, you can test and refine the system before rolling it out organization-wide.

Gather feedback from recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates in that first phase, so you can use that invaluable data to improve the experience for all users in the next phase.

Monitor and adjust

The beauty of implementing an AI-powered screening process is that it inherently provides you with a load of really invaluable solid data that you can use to optimize your hiring process as you go.

Some key recruitment metrics to track:

• Time saved per screening - How long is each candidate screening call the system records? Every minute of screening calls logged is a minute of recruiter time that’s been saved thanks to automation. And how much faster is time-to-hire now that you’ve started automating screening?
• Candidate drop-off rates - How many applicants begin the screening process but drop off before submitting their answers? Are drop-off rates higher for some questions than others? This will tell you if you need to rethink some of your interview questions to make them more accessible or less labouring for candidates.
• Quality of candidates moving to the next stage - How many candidates that pass the screening stage do you invite to interview? How many of those you interview are hired? Keeping tabs on quality of hire metrics will tell you a lot about your process and whether it needs some work.

And of course, you should be adjusting your questions and workflows based on what you learn from the data.

Scale up

Once the process is optimized to achieve its best possible performance, you can deploy AI phone screening for additional roles and stages in the hiring funnel.

The beauty of using technology to automate stages of the interview process is that scaling up your recruitment takes almost no extra manual effort.

Benefits of bringing AI phone screening into your workflow

So to recap, what are the overarching benefits of automating this stage of the interview process?

• Faster hiring: AI-powered screening cuts down the time spent on initial candidate assessments. Candidates can get real-time feedback and schedule interviews instantly, speeding up the entire process.
• Scalability: Easily handles large volumes of applicants without increasing the burden on your recruiting team.
• Consistency: Delivers a fair, standardized evaluation for every candidate, reducing bias and improving quality.
• Better candidate experience: Enables flexible scheduling and faster turnaround times, so candidates aren’t left waiting between steps.

With all that on the table—why not give it a try?

Get started today

AI phone screening helps you streamline and speed up hiring—without compromising on quality or consistency.

There’s little risk in adopting this technology if you start small, refine as you go, and scale once you see the impact on your hiring metrics.

Want to see it in action?

Request a free demo of Carv and discover how AI can take the most time-consuming parts of your recruitment process off your plate.