I Have Made a Lot of Those Calls

Before I started Achilles, I spent years building labor pipelines across dozens of cities and states for industrial, skilled trades, and hospitality employers. I have done more hourly phone screens than I can count, screening candidates for welding positions in the Midwest, assembly work at manufacturing facilities, and frontline positions in hospitality including stadium vendors, security staff, and event attendants at large venues across the country.

One thing I learned quickly was that a significant number of candidates applying for hourly roles did not have a resume attached to their application. Most companies would skip right past those applicants. I made it a habit to call them anyway. And what I found consistently was that some of the best candidates I talked to were in that pile. People with real hands-on experience, strong work histories, and exactly the skills the role required, who simply had not thought to put together a formal resume. If I had filtered by resume alone, I would have missed them entirely.

What I can also tell you from that experience is that a significant portion of those calls had nothing to do with finding the right person for the job. The candidate had not fully read the job description. The schedule was not going to work and they had not realized it until we got on the phone. The pay rate was lower than what they had in mind. Or they had applied to so many positions through LinkedIn Easy Apply or Indeed Quick Apply that they needed a moment to remember which job this was and which company they were talking to.

None of that is the candidate’s fault. The modern job market has made applying frictionless, and when applying is frictionless, people apply broadly. It is a rational response to a competitive market. But it means that the person on the other end of the phone, whether that is a recruiter, an HR coordinator, or a plant supervisor juggling a full production schedule, is absorbing a significant amount of screening time that produces no useful information about whether someone can actually do the job.

I saw this pattern repeat itself across every industry I worked in. And when I started talking to hiring managers and operations leaders about it, I heard the same story everywhere. The calls were taking too long. Too many of them went nowhere. And the people making them had more important things to do with their time.

What This Actually Costs Your Operation

Most operations leaders think about recruiting as an HR problem. What they often miss is how much of the early-stage recruiting burden has quietly shifted onto their department heads, floor supervisors, and property leaders. It happens gradually and then completely.

A role opens. Applications come in. Someone has to screen them. In hospitality, that is often the Director of Food and Beverage or the Executive Housekeeper making phone calls between service periods. In manufacturing, it is the plant supervisor carving out time between production runs. In restaurants, it is the general manager or kitchen lead fitting screens into the margins of an already full day.

The math is not complicated. Reviewing applications takes time. Sending outreach emails and chasing candidates who do not respond takes more. Scheduling a phone screen requires back and forth coordination that industry research shows consumes 30 minutes to two hours per candidate. The phone screen itself runs another 20 to 45 minutes. And then the on-site interview, which for most frontline roles runs 30 to 60 minutes and for culinary positions closer to 60 to 90 minutes, requires a manager to step completely away from their operation for a block of time that the floor cannot absorb without noticing.

A regional manufacturer we work with estimated their plant supervisors were spending roughly 10 hours per week per facility on phone screens alone before they automated the process. A multi-property hotel group found that their department heads were losing 6 to 8 hours of every work week to recruiting tasks: monitoring applications, emailing candidates, scheduling calls, and coordinating on-site visits. And that number would triple or more during periods of high volume hiring when multiple roles were open simultaneously across the portfolio. That group returned 547 hours to their property leadership in just 39 days after implementing Achilles. Those are not small numbers. They are the equivalent of a part-time job that nobody signed up for.

The On-Site Problem Nobody Talks About

Here is the part that bothers me most, because I watched it happen over and over when I was doing this work. A candidate makes it through to an on-site interview. The hiring manager clears their schedule, steps off the floor, sits down across from the candidate, and within the first five minutes of conversation discovers that the person cannot work the required shift, or the pay rate is not what they expected, or there is a fundamental mismatch that a proper pre-screen would have caught before anyone drove to the facility.

From everything I have seen across industrial, skilled trades, and hospitality hiring, this happens in more than 30% of on-site interviews. The candidate is not being dishonest. They applied quickly, the details were not front of mind, and nobody asked the right questions before the visit. But the hiring manager has still lost 30 to 60 minutes, plus the time walking away from their department and returning to whatever they left behind. And the floor felt it.

Service does not pause because someone is in an interview room. Production does not slow down because a supervisor is unavailable. The cost of that time shows up in small ways that are hard to measure and easy to underestimate until you add them up across a full hiring cycle.

What Hiring Managers Should Actually Own

I want to be clear about something. The answer is not to remove hiring managers from the process. Their judgment is irreplaceable at two specific moments. The first is defining the role: what the job actually requires, what a strong candidate looks like, and what questions matter most for that position. The second is the final interview: the conversation where they assess fit directly, evaluate real skills, and make the call.

Everything between those two moments, the intake, the initial screen, the scheduling, the follow-up, the coordination, should be handled before it ever reaches them. A hiring manager’s first interaction with a candidate should be a pre-qualified, pre-screened person sitting across from them with a structured summary already in hand. Not a cold conversation with someone they know nothing about.

What that looks like in practice is a manager who opens a portal, sees a shortlist of candidates who have already been screened against their exact criteria, reads a summary of each conversation, and clicks to schedule the on-site. Their floor never noticed they were doing anything other than running their operation. Because effectively, they were not.

A Dedicated Recruiter for Every Role and Every Manager

The most useful way I know to describe what Achilles does for a hiring manager is this: imagine having a dedicated recruiter assigned to every open role you have, one who knows exactly what you are looking for, conducts every screening call the way you would want it conducted, never lets an unqualified candidate through, and has a structured summary waiting for you before you even know someone applied.

That recruiter is available at 11pm when a line cook applies after their shift. They speak Spanish when the candidate does. They know to confirm shift availability before anything else for the housekeeper role and to probe welding certifications and equipment experience before moving a candidate forward on the floor. They schedule the on-site, send reminders, and update the ATS automatically. You stay in the loop on everything that matters. You are protected from everything that was never a good use of your time.

This is not about replacing the human judgment that makes a great hiring manager great. It is about making sure that judgment gets applied at the moment it counts, with everything already in place, rather than being scattered across dozens of administrative tasks that any well-designed system should handle automatically.

The Question Worth Asking

How many hours did your department heads spend on recruiting last week? Of those hours, how many required their specific expertise and judgment, and how many were intake, outreach, scheduling, and screening conversations that could have been handled before they were ever involved?

Most operations leaders I talk to, when they sit with that question honestly, find the answer is more than they expected. And the good news, from someone who spent years on the other side of those phone calls, is that it is one of the most solvable problems in frontline operations.

The work does not go away. It just gets done before it reaches the people running your floors, your kitchens, and your properties. That is what your best managers should be able to count on. And it is exactly what we built Achilles to deliver.