How a recruiter screened 3,000 applicants in Japanese, and saved 300+ for other roles

DynaFlow gets more applicants than its recruiters can ever call back. We put a voice agent on it, so every applicant gets reached, qualified, and, if they don't fit, matched to another job instead of ghosted.

3,000

Applicants called in 3 months

300+

Referred to other roles

5x

Cheaper than a recruiter

James Oldham·8 June 2026·6 min read·Japan recruitment case study
TL;DR

DynaFlow, a Japanese recruitment firm, gets far more applicants than its recruiters can call back, so good candidates get ghosted and quietly go elsewhere. We built an outbound voice agent that calls applicants in Japanese, pulls their CV from the LinkedIn job post in their Bullhorn ATS, and qualifies them. Over three months it made 3,000 calls, 1,800 answered first time, qualified 220 to the next stage, and, the part that mattered most, referred 300+ candidates who were not right for their role to other open jobs in the system. All for roughly a fifth of what a recruiter costs.

In Japanese recruitment, the bottleneck is not finding applicants, it is calling them all back. A single job post can pull in more candidates than a recruiter can realistically phone, so plenty of good people apply, hear nothing, and move on.

DynaFlow lives that problem at scale. Recruiters were spending their days on first-pass screening calls, and still could not reach everyone who applied.

The problem

Why do good candidates slip through?

Because there are simply too many to call by hand. Every applicant who is not phoned back quickly is a candidate who drifts to another agency. And the ones who do not fit the exact role they applied for tend to vanish entirely, even when there is another open job they would be perfect for.

Doing that outreach properly, calling every applicant, fast, in Japanese, would mean hiring more recruiters. That is expensive, and it still does not scale.

What we did

What does the voice agent do on a call?

It calls every candidate who applies to a job post, in Japanese, promptly after they apply. It pulls their CV straight from the LinkedIn job post, stored in DynaFlow's Bullhorn ATS, so it already knows who it is talking to.

From there it runs a branching qualification conversation against the role, moves the strong matches to the next stage, and keeps every answer structured back in the ATS.

How did it surface 300+ extra candidates?

This was the part that mattered most. When a candidate was not right for the role they applied to, the agent did not just thank them and hang up. It checked them against the other open jobs in DynaFlow's system and referred them on.

Across the three months, that turned 300+ would-be rejections into live referrals for other roles, candidates DynaFlow would otherwise have lost entirely.

The results

What was the return?

In three months the agent made 3,000 calls, reached 1,800 candidates on the first attempt, qualified 220 to the next stage, and referred 300+ to other roles, all in Japanese.

Applicants called3,000 (over 3 months)
Answered on first attempt1,800 (~60%)
Qualified to the next stage220
Referred to other roles in the system300+
LanguageJapanese
Cost vs a recruiter~5x cheaper
Live in2 months

On cost, the comparison is stark. A recruiter on an average Japanese salary, around ¥4.5 million a year, doing this outreach by hand costs roughly five times what the voice agent does it for, and a recruiter still cannot call every applicant the moment they apply.

The result

Every applicant called, in Japanese, the moment they applied, 220 qualified to the next stage and 300+ candidates rescued for other roles, all for around a fifth of what a recruiter costs.

Your turn

Could this be your agency?

If you get more applicants than you can call back, lose good candidates to ghosting, or spend your recruiters' days on first-pass screening, this is exactly the kind of problem we solve. We start with a Discovery Week: we find your single biggest win, scope it, and ship a first working piece fast, so you feel the value before any bigger decision.

Contact Us

Frequently asked questions

Won't candidates think it is a scam call?

The agent identifies itself and DynaFlow up front, and it calls promptly after someone applies, so it lands as a fast follow-up to the candidate's own application, not a cold call out of nowhere. In recruitment the bigger risk is the opposite: applicants who never get called at all and quietly go elsewhere.

What about candidates who normally get ghosted?

That is exactly what this fixes. Every applicant gets called, fast. And the ones who are not right for the role they applied to are referred to other open jobs in the system instead of disappearing into a reject pile.

How accurate is the qualification?

The agent qualifies against the role using the candidate's actual CV, pulled from the LinkedIn job post and stored in their Bullhorn ATS. It moves the right people to the next stage and refers the rest; recruiters still make the final call.

Does it really run in Japanese?

Yes. The entire conversation, qualification and referral happens in natural Japanese.

Where does the candidate data come from, and is it secure?

It reads from the systems DynaFlow already runs, the LinkedIn job post and their Bullhorn ATS, rather than moving candidate data somewhere new.

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