“Whatever We’ve Imagined, Alex Has Been Able to Do”: How Raise Hires With Alex

At a Glance

• 68,000 past candidates brought back into consideration through talent matching
• 1,400 to 2,000 interviews a month, on average
• The workflow runs inside the Raise ATS

Raise methodically evaluates software it uses and holds every tool to a high standard. Before committing to Alex, the company tested two AI recruiting platforms for a year and looked seriously at a third.

Raise is a workforce solutions company, headquartered in the US, with offices in six countries and clients supported in more than 185. Raise helps enterprises find, engage, and manage talent through direct sourcing, contingent staffing, direct hire, Global Employer of Record (EOR) and Agent of Record (AOR), and supplier management. As a direct sourcing pioneer, Raise recruits under the client’s own brand, so contingent workers get the same experience as the client’s permanent hires. Its hiring covers skilled trades and light industrial roles through engineering, professional, IT talent, and beyond.

The bottleneck was the conversation

"The hardest part is definitely dealing with applicant screening," says Michael Roberts, Solution Architect at Raise. "You can do that with forms. But you can't get the banter back and forth. You can't answer questions through forms." Alex fills that gap by conducting the screening conversation over the phone, so applicants can talk through their answers and ask questions in real time.

Raise already had strong automation in place. When an applicant came in, it would trigger prescreening, answers would get filtered, and bulk actions would move people through the hiring funnel.

Also, with thousands of people applying to Raise every month, recruiters were naturally gravitating to those active applicants, which leaves a deep database of past candidates untouched. "Recruiters feel like if I spend my time looking in the database, I'm only going to get certain people to reply back," Roberts says.

The goal was to engage each applicant in a real conversation, not just send a message or collect a form. "One thing that's really important to us at Raise is that we try to touch as many applicants as we possibly can," Roberts says. "We use Alex to help us know where to focus and also to provide broad coverage."

Why Alex, after a year of testing

“Alex won out because of its ability to keep up with the pace of change, adding new functionality. Alex started AI-native. Because of that, you can just run.”
Michael Roberts, Solution Architect at Raise

Specific capabilities mattered too. Alex brought video interviewing. Raise could build and write its own questions and grading criteria to fit the way it hires. And enterprise-level workflows made Alex usable across more of the process than pre-screening alone. "That's probably what really was the final piece," he says, "because we needed to be able to use Alex in more areas of the process."

What the workflow looks like now

Every Raise job is matched in Alex. On active jobs, when an applicant arrives — from LinkedIn, Indeed, the career site, any source — Alex reaches out within minutes, and the candidate can interview immediately.

"It doesn't matter if we have 10 applicants or 1,000 applicants, we can conduct all of those at once," Roberts says. "Otherwise, candidates may wait a little while for a recruiter to reach them on the list, or you can use a traditional form solution."

Alex works inside the Raise ATS, so recruiters stay in the tool. "The way that Alex works, it meets the candidate where they're at," Roberts says. "It's just easier to get information across using natural language, through texting and especially speaking. You simply cannot type as fast as you can speak."

It also changed when screening happens. Nearly a quarter of interviews with Alex — 24% — take place outside the 9-to-6 EST business day, as dictated by candidates.

Alex runs alongside matching as a second entry point at the top of the funnel. When Alex surfaces a candidate from the Raise database, it triggers outreach directly. In the measured period, 68,000 candidates came back into consideration through this talent match.

That number is the one Roberts keeps returning to, because it answers a challenge the industry has worked on for decades. "Reactivating the candidates you already have in your database, especially those you've already had a relationship with, is one of the most valuable things a recruiting team can do," he says. "When you combine it with Alex and the voice and video and texting, that brings it to life. It makes it something that's viable from an economic standpoint."

The proof

At 1,400 to 2,000 interviews a month, the volume isn’t the most telling result. It's the placements Raise made, including in roles where it had seen less success.

"Alex has helped us make placements in roles we hadn't placed before," Roberts says. Every recruiting team focuses where its experience runs deepest, and some roles naturally sit further from that core. "Alex was able to understand what good looks like for those roles, find a strong candidate, and help us make that placement."

To Roberts, this is what Alex offers as a teammate: consistent, high-quality matching and screening at scale. That helps recruiters decide who should move forward and frees up their time for the human touch that matters most.

Recruiters feel the positive change in their day-to-day work. "We've seen boosts to our productivity and to our goals without disrupting our recruiters," Roberts says. "To them, it feels pretty natural, like another person is lending a hand." He expects those gains to grow as recruiters and Alex work even more closely.

And for the Raise Innovation Team, the effect was less about minutes saved than about what became imaginable. "What Alex has done is provide enough of that solution all in one package that it's inspiring. It allows you to actually let yourself think, ‘Hey, we really can do this,’" Roberts says. "The biggest change, in my opinion, is allowing people to actually see that the future they imagine is real."

What Roberts tells peers

Asked what he'd say to someone mid-evaluation, Roberts is direct.

"Alex is going to move fast and meet your needs. They're flexible and they're a really good team to work with," he says. "If you want a partner that keeps pace with AI, Alex is a strong choice."

He credits the team as much as the product. "Whatever we've imagined or asked for, Alex has been able to do," Roberts says. "Alex has made us feel like we're asking a partner."

Next, Raise plans to bring Alex earlier into the process — into job intake, so matching, questions, and grading start from better context. "Better inputs mean better matches," Roberts says. "If we have a chance to get Alex in front of the person who actually has the hiring need, we're going to take that opportunity."