Agencies are paid for speed and judgement, and both die in the same place: the first-round phone screen. Every call is a booked slot, a no-show risk and an hour your recruiter is not spending on the next req. Staffing agency software is worth having only if it removes that bottleneck rather than adding a system to keep updated. springhire does one job: every applicant answers the same short set of questions on their own time, and you get one report per person with scores, answers and transcripts on a single page.
The bottleneck that costs you placements
Speed-to-submit decides most placements, and the work that decides speed-to-submit sits in your recruiters' calendars. A desk running eight live roles is not short of candidates. It is short of hours to talk to them, and the hours go to whoever applied earliest rather than whoever is best.
- You screen high volume across many roles and many clients at once, and phone screens do not scale with that load.
- Chasing a callback slot burns the hours that decide who submits first.
- Clients increasingly want to see and hear someone before they agree to interview, so a formatted CV no longer earns that yes on its own.
What staffing agency software has to do differently
An agency desk is not an in-house hiring team with one req and a quarter to fill it. The screening layer has to survive a dozen open roles, a spike on Monday, and a client who changes the brief on Wednesday. That points at a few hard requirements.
- Setup measured in minutes per role, because you open and close roles constantly and nothing gets configured twice.
- No cost for the applicants who go nowhere, because most of an agency funnel goes nowhere by design.
- Output a client can look at without a login or a walkthrough call.
- Evidence, not opinion: the same questions asked of everyone, so your shortlist survives the question of why these five.
The six tools, and which ones an agency actually uses
springhire has six screening tools and every result lands on one report per candidate: qualifying (knock-out) questions, skills tests, one-way video interview, resume scoring, psychometric test and culture fit test. Agencies rarely use all six on one role. The usual shape is three.
| Tool | What it settles for an agency desk |
|---|---|
| Qualifying questions | Notice period, right to work, shift or location, rate expectation. Free, and the only automatic rejection. |
| One-way video interview | How the person comes across, which is the thing the client is really buying and the thing a CV hides. |
| Skills tests | The claim on the CV, checked. 266 tests across software, programming, IT and security, marketing, finance, sales, data and more. Browse the test library. |
| Resume scoring | Each resume read against criteria you write, returned as met, partly met or missing with the lines that support it. See resume scoring. |
How the first round runs
- 1
Write the knock-outs from the client brief
The facts that decide eligibility before anything else: notice period, work authorisation, shift availability, location, rate. These run before any assessment, cost nothing, and are the only place an automatic rejection happens.
- 2
Four to six recorded questions
Keep the whole thing under fifteen minutes, which is where completion holds up. The AI can draft a structured question set for the role from the brief and you edit it, so a new req takes minutes rather than a planning session.
- 3
Send one link
The candidate clicks it and records in the browser on a phone or a laptop. No account, no app. Their microphone is checked before the first question, and they see each question before answering it. Anyone who has not recorded gets an automatic reminder after 48 hours.
- 4
Read the transcripts
Every answer is transcribed and scored against your rubric, so the ranked list puts the strongest first. Transcripts read far faster than video. Watch video only for the people you are genuinely choosing between.
- 5
Submit
Send the client a link to the report with an expiry you choose. Notes and contact details are hidden on a shared link, so the client sees the evidence without seeing your desk. See a sample report.
What the client gets, and why it shortens their side too
The usual submission is a CV and a paragraph of your opinion. The client cannot check either, so they run their own first round and the placement slips a week. A report changes what you are handing over: the same questions asked of every candidate, the answers, the transcripts, the test scores, on one page per person with a ranked list across the group.
What it does not do
Worth saying plainly, because staffing agency software is usually sold as if it decides. Scores never automatically reject anyone. The only automatic rejection in the whole system is a failed knock-out question, and those are facts you wrote down yourself, not judgements. Everything else is a first pass that puts the strongest work in front of a person sooner.
It is also not an ATS and does not try to be. It is the screening round that sits between the applications you already have and the shortlist you submit. Keep your ATS, keep your CRM, and take the phone screens out of the week.
