Robertson & Company competes in a 48-hour market with a faster first round

At a Glance

• About 2 hours median time from interview invitation to completion
• Above 55% interview completion on cold outreach
• Close to 15,000 completed interviews across roughly 1,000 jobs
• 4.6/5 average candidate rating from nearly 6,000 responses

The clock starts when the role arrives

For Robertson & Company, helping a client hire a strong candidate depends on reaching, assessing, and submitting that person before the deadline. Its VMS staffing business works to submission windows of 24 to 48 hours, set by clients and managed service providers.

Tara Benson, Vice President of Enterprise VMS & MSP, leads the contingent labor team serving banks and insurance companies across the United States and Canada. Her team typically covers 20 to 30 open positions a week, spanning administrative, business professional, and IT roles. Each new requirement adds another deadline to an already crowded calendar.

Manual first-round calls made that pressure harder to manage. Recruiters carrying two or three requirements a day could not personally screen every applicant and still move quickly enough. Waiting until a requirement opened to start finding talent left even less room to compete.

Match the interview to the urgency

Robertson introduced Alex to start first-round screening as candidates applied, without waiting for a gap in a recruiter’s schedule. Completed interviews arrive scored and ranked, so recruiters can begin with the strongest potential matches rather than work through an undifferentiated applicant list.

The team adapted the interview channel to the role. Business professional and IT candidates use video interviews. For high-volume administrative roles with 24-hour turnarounds, Robertson moved to phone screening after finding candidates responded faster and at a higher rate.

For financial-services clients, the team also needs information it can scrutinize. Alongside the interview, Alex’s Trust & Verify surfaces potential identity and interview-integrity concerns for review. Recruiters can consider those signals with the resume and interview record when deciding whom to advance.

Tara Benson describes the value of that combined view: “With Alex, we can review the resume, the interview, and Trust & Verify together to make a well-informed decision about who moves forward.”

A first round that fits the submission window

The median time from invitation to completed interview is about two hours. Cold-outreach completion exceeds 55% across roles that include operations analysts, corporate recruiters, HR coordinators, IT analysts, and scrum masters.

That responsiveness has supported close to 15,000 completed interviews across roughly 1,000 jobs. Nearly 6,000 candidate ratings average 4.6 out of five, giving the team a separate view of how candidates experience the process.

For Tara, that responsiveness is a competitive capability: “Alex lets interviews happen around the clock, helping us move quickly and stay competitive.”

A stronger position when the next requirement arrives

With first-round interview evidence available earlier, recruiters can use more of the submission window for candidate conversations and client recommendations.

That work also builds a searchable record of talent the team has already interviewed. Recruiters can return to those candidates when similar requirements arrive, giving them a head start on the next search and, again, more of the submission window for candidate conversations and client recommendations.

For Robertson, Alex supports two demands of its VMS business at once: moving quickly enough to compete and bringing interview evidence and risk signals into the decision about whom to put forward.