A short note from the founding team
1,363 phone screening calls in a week
by a one person TA.
How a capital-markets fintech, hiring across three time zones and multiple brands, did it - with no new headcount and no new spend.
Three weeks after his first campaign: all 35 open roles signed to Kit. Every applicant heard across three time zones. The CFO’s spend page didn’t move. The talent lead called it industry leading.
Real customer · global capital-markets fintech · anonymized at his request
~5 min read
The setup
He’s the only person on talent at a global capital-markets fintech. About a thousand staff. Three time zones. Multiple brands across the group. He runs hiring across the group.
Thirty-five open roles. Forty interviews to coordinate by hand this week. Thousands of applicants spread across the lot. An acquisition closing that would make the numbers worse before they got better. One of him.
He hadn’t looked at one Senior PM listing in two weeks. Four hundred applicants had piled up on it. He told us, when we first spoke, that he felt like a glorified admin. He said it half as a joke and half as a flare in the dark.
“I feel as if I'm a glorified admin. All I'm doing is setting up interviews.”
The deadlock
Three weeks before he found Kit, he made his case to his CPO.
He needed more people on his team. The answer was no - headcount was frozen until the acquisition closed.
He needed budget for tools that could pick up what he couldn’t. The answer was no - the CFO had already turned down one tool that quarter, and was watching every line item that survived.
What his CPO told him instead:
“You're the only TA. AI does the rest.”
No new headcount. No new spend. And the list wasn’t shrinking.
The unlock
He had a ten-minute conversation with Kit. No sales pitch - Kit ran a short call with him as the candidate, the way it would with anyone applying to one of his roles. He saw what came out the other end. By that point he was sold.
Then he spoke to the founding team. And what came out of that wasn’t a quote or a contract.
His business was spending $70k a year on job board distribution - LinkedIn, an Indian board, posting reach across the group. That spend was doing exactly what it was bought to do: delivering applicants. Four hundred of them to the Senior PM role alone. The failure wasn’t the spend. The failure was that with one TA and no way to answer the inbound, none of those applicants were being reached. The $70k was generating a pile nobody could get to.
Kit is the processing layer that makes the job board spend work. We helped him identify where the rest of his stack had gone soft - sourcing tools he’d outgrown, integrations that weren’t earning their place. He redirected that spend to Kit. The job boards stayed. His CFO signed it off inside a week because the line he watches every quarter didn’t move.
No new line item. Same boards. Same traffic. The applicants they were already paying for, finally being answered.
The first week
He picked three roles to start: an HRBP, a DevOps engineer, a Senior Product Owner in one of the eastern hubs. He briefed Kit the way he’d have briefed a junior recruiter - the standards, the must-haves, the dealbreakers. His hiring managers signed off the rubrics. Then he let Kit go on shift.
One campaign week. This is what came back.
1,363
phone screening calls Kit started
360
candidates fully voice-screened
1,658
structured hiring records written live, on calls
The candidates in the eastern hubs calling at four in the morning. The candidates in the west calling at midnight. Kit took every call. Underneath each one, the structured record built - salary captured, location captured, the rubric his hiring manager had signed off scored against every question.
On the HRBP role: 43 candidates screened in seven hours. The hiring manager had a scored shortlist - full transcripts, rubric scores against the brief they’d signed off - in hand the same afternoon. Two candidates through to interview before lunch. The listing pulled from LinkedIn before the day was out.
His one-liner to us when he saw it:
“It saved me a job and a half. I've got 400 applicants for that role. I've now taken it off LinkedIn.”
Three hundred and sixty candidates screened. Fifty-three of them said something about the call before they hung up. Kit never asks.
“This is the best AI interview I've ever had. You're not interrupting - you were listening carefully and letting me complete everything I wanted to say. A close to human experience.”
“It was a fun call and your method of interviewing is really friendly. You made me very comfortable - so I have a good rating for you.”
“How seamless this process was - I could take this call at my own time, not someone ringing my phone mid-meeting. The follow-up questions were intelligently asked.”
“I have never seen an AI companion understanding my answers so crisply, without a hitch. It was a great interview conversation.”
“It does not feel like personally sitting with an interviewer. I'm going to let my friend know and recommend this.”
Who won what
A week later, he signed every one of his open vacancies to Kit. Not just the three he’d tested - all thirty-five.
His hiring managers stopped interviewing unsuitable people. Every shortlist came with full transcripts and rubric scores against the brief they’d signed off - so they walked into interviews already half-briefed on every candidate. On the HRBP role, the hiring manager went from a pile of four hundred unseen CVs to two interview-ready candidates in a single afternoon. On the Senior PM role: 27 screened from 703, six ready to start within 30 days. The candidates who reached the room were the ones they actually wanted to meet.
His CPOgot the story she’d been asking for. Every applicant heard - including the ones calling from eastern hubs at four in the morning and western offices at midnight. Not a single candidate fell into the pile unanswered. Three hundred and sixty screened; fifty-three said something unprompted about the call before hanging up. The function moved from reactive to strategic in three weeks. She had a paragraph for the board, and a number to anchor it.
His CFOlooked at the same line items he’d been looking at all year - the same $70k of job board distribution, the same stack cost - doing more work than they’d ever done. The applicants he’d been paying to attract were finally being processed. Net cost: unchanged. Net output: dramatically higher.
The talent lead stopped being a glorified admin. Three weeks in, what he said about the change:
“Industry leading. It's something that no one's seen before… I would snap this up.”
From glorified admin to industry leading, in three weeks. No new headcount, no new line on his stack.
If this is starting to feel familiar, you probably already know what your noisiest role is.
Bring it to a call →The economics
Kit came in budget-neutral. We replaced spend that wasn’t earning its place rather than adding a new line item. His CFO signed it off inside a week because the page he watches every quarter didn’t grow.
Per-conversation cost falls as volume rises. The applicant pile that breaks a human team is exactly the point where Kit becomes most cost-effective - the more inbound you have, the cheaper each conversation gets.
Verify the story before you commit
He’s not on this page by name. That’s at his request - the politics around running a function alone at his scale are real, as they would be at any company hiring his volume.
He’s offered to speak - privately, off the record - to any prospective buyer who wants to verify the story before committing. Real customer. Real campaign. Real numbers. If you’d like to talk to him before you talk to us, tell us when you book.
Bring it to a call.
Thirty minutes. The founding team. We’ll run Kit on it, live.
Before you click - pick the noisiest role you’ve got open. That’s what we’ll run Kit on.
You leave with what he had after his first week:
- A top-performer profile for the role
- The rubric Kit would build with you
- The first ten candidates Kit surfaces - with full transcripts and scores
No slide deck. No PDF. A working session.
Not quite ready? Reply to my email and I’ll send you a deeper write-up. No calendar pressure - just context.
Forward it. Your head of talent, your CFO, the hiring manager whose role is stuck - they’ll want it more than you did.
P.S.- The next bottleneck he named - after screening - was scheduling. Forty interviews coordinated by hand, the spreadsheet open all day. We’re building toward capturing candidate availability inside the Kit conversation itself, surfacing bookable slots in your team’s calendar. Q3. If that’s where your time is going, tell us when you book.
- Dan
founding team at Speak to Kit