How Robertson & Company Wins the 48-Hour Race for Talent

The Customer

The Customer Robertson & Company Ltd. has placed talent for more than 25 years. Founded by Dave Robertson, the Canadian owned and operated firm built its name working with top banks and insurance carriers across the US and Canada. Tara Benson, Vice President of Enterprise VMS & MSP, leads the contingent labor side of the business, filling administrative, business professional, and IT roles sourced through MSP partners. Her team works 20 to 30 open positions in a typical week, and once a role is released, the deadline to submit a candidate is 24 to 48 hours.

"We've got to move fast. We've got to have teams of recruiters that are highly engaged and also able to respond really quickly."
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Tara Benson, Vice President Enterprise, VMS & MSP, Robertson & Company Ltd.

The Challenge 

In the VMS space, speed is not a nice-to-have, it is the qualifying criteria for winning the placement at all. That created a compounding speed problem for Robertson's team:

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1. The submission window was fixed and short: 24 to 48 hours from requirement to candidate submission, set by the client and the MSP, not negotiable.
2. Manual screening could not fit inside that window at volume: recruiters carrying two to three requirements a day had no time to personally pre-screen every applicant and still hit the deadline.
3. Reactive sourcing was already too slow to compete: waiting for a role to post before searching meant the best candidates were typically gone before Robertson even started looking.

"If you're waiting until the requirement is released, you've probably already missed the top talent, because another agency has probably already picked them up."
‍Tara Benson

The Solution 

Robertson moved first-round interviewing to Alex so the clock could start the moment a candidate applied, not whenever a recruiter had an opening in their day.

1. Screening runs the instant a candidate applies, independent of recruiter availability, compressing the gap between application and a scored, ranked interview.
2. Interview channel is tuned for the fastest response by role: business professional and IT roles use Alex's face to face video interview, while high volume, 24 hour turnaround administrative roles moved to an AI phone screen after Robertson found it drove a faster, higher response rate.
3. Recruiters work from a ranked shortlist instead of a raw applicant list, cutting straight to the candidates worth a call rather than screening in order of who applied first.
4. Trust & Verify runs alongside the fast screen, flagging identity and fraud risk automatically, so speed never comes at the cost of the assurance Robertson's banking and insurance clients require.

"We could double check their address on the resume, or their information on LinkedIn against the resume. There were things we could do, but it's very time consuming. We certainly don't have the capability to watch their eye movement and pick up if they're moving from one screen to the next, or if they're giving false information. The trust verified tool is very valuable, especially for clients like ours, when you're working with clients in the financial space, because that whole risk piece is really important."
Tara Benson

The Results 

The speed shows up at both the individual interview level and across Robertson's full volume of hiring.

• Median time to complete an interview: about 2 hours from invite to finished interview.
• Average completion time: about a day, with nearly every interview finished within the same 48 hour window Robertson's MSP clients require for submission.
• Interview completion rates above 55% on cold outreach across roles including operations analyst, corporate recruiter, business analyst, product analyst, HR coordinator, IT analyst and scrum master, despite the tight turnaround.
• Close to 15,000 completed interviews across roughly 1,000 jobs, a screening pace no manual process could sustain at this deadline.
• Recruiters covering 20 to 30 open positions a week without the pre-screening step slowing down any single role.
• Trust & Verify gives Robertson an identity and fraud risk check it did not have before, now a differentiator when pitching VMS services to risk conscious bank and insurance clients.
• Of the ~120 contracts Robertson works monthly, the team now wins 25% more than before Alex. 
• Nearly 6,000 candidates have rated their interview experience, averaging 4.6 out of 5, proof the speed isn't coming at the candidate's expense.

"These interviews can happen all the time, so it does speed up the whole overall process. I think that's very exciting, and I think having a tool like this is very important to stay competitive and be quick."
‍Tara Benson

Speed got Robertson in the door with Alex. What keeps Tara recommending it is that the fast option turned out to be the complete one.

"You kind of get the best of everything within Alex: the resume, how they interviewed, the trust verify piece, and then you can make a really good decision about who you're going to move forward with. I think it's definitely something I highly recommend, and I have recommended it to other companies looking for tools like that, because I do think it's the top one in the market right now."
‍Tara Benson

What's Next 

Every completed interview adds to a searchable record Robertson already owns, so the next time a similar role opens, the fastest candidate to reach isn't a new applicant screened from scratch, it's someone already interviewed and scored in the system. Tara pushes her team to mine that history actively rather than let it sit unused, turning each cycle of screening into a faster starting point for the next one.

"We've got all of that skill sitting there, right? It's ultimately a wealth of information that's just ready to go. And I'm sure that as far as the recruitment world goes, having a tool like this is very important, especially to stay competitive and be quick."
‍Tara Benson

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