How a 40-person staffing agency cut time-to-shortlist from 11 days to 3

Brilstack replaced their intake spreadsheet with Ploras voice agents and pushed shortlists straight into Greenhouse — here's the before/after.

Brilstack places mid-senior software engineers for B2B SaaS clients. Before Ploras, their intake-to-shortlist cycle averaged 11 working days across 40 recruiters. Today that number sits at 3 — same team, same roles, same quality bar.

What changed

Spreadsheet + phone tag

Every new req started in a shared sheet, then a recruiter manually called 30–50 candidates per role. Most never picked up. The ones who did often weren't a fit. Weeks evaporated before a shortlist appeared.

Voice agents + ATS sync

Ploras voice agents run first-pass screens on 400+ candidates per req, overnight, in parallel. Pass-rate candidates flow into Greenhouse automatically, ranked. Recruiters spend their day on the 20 who matter, not the 400 who don't.

Our recruiters thought we were automating them out of a job. Six months in, they hit quota faster than they ever have. The work got more interesting, not less.

The numbers

Time-to-shortlist: 11 days → 3 days. Fill rate on active searches: +64%. Recruiter-touched candidates per week: 40 → 22 (down, intentionally). Revenue per recruiter: +38%.

Why it worked:: They didn't replace the recruiter. They moved the recruiter one layer up — from cold-calling to closing. That's the shift.