The challenge

Contact centers need high-quality associates, but finding and hiring the best ones for the job can be a long and complicated process. 

Reviewing applications, verifying credentials, matching skills to job openings, and scheduling interviews has traditionally been a largely manual process that takes a lot of time and resources. 

When candidates grow frustrated by lag times, they end up repeatedly contacting the employer for status updates. And hiring managers can spend time interviewing candidates who aren’t good fits for jobs, making the process inefficient.

Our solution

SmartHire is TTEC’s award-winning, end-to-end candidate selection workflow designed to manage the entire talent acquisition experience from application to hire. It helps ensure we’re hiring the best candidates for the job. 

The ecosystem starts with using AI to evaluate resumes against job postings and assigning a match score to each candidate. After passing initial disqualifying "deal breakers" like location or credentials, candidates view a realistic job preview video, filmed in a TTEC contact center, to get a true picture of what a job entails day to day. 

Candidates also complete a suite of standardized assessments that are designed to find people who will be the best matches for jobs. We constantly collect data on the back end throughout. If certain candidates are not the right fit for one role, the system can reroute them to a different position, such as moving a service job applicant to a sales role opening.

Candidates who pass this initial screening process then self-schedule a time to speak with Sam, our voice AI recruiter. Sam can speak to candidates in different languages and regional accents and can conduct interviews 24/7.

Sam also generates detailed transcripts of every conversation, which are searchable and can be used to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies in the hiring process. With each call Sam completes, we learn more about what makes a strong candidate and what doesn’t. Sam can even flag instances of potential fraud by noticing things such as unnatural gaps in conversations.

Sam identifies promising candidates, who are then connected with a live recruiter. By the time our recruiters speak with a candidate they can feel confident that the candidate has met all pre-screening criteria. 

The results

We launched SmartHire in December 2025 and it drove quick results. In the first two and a half months alone, which included a seasonal hiring slowdown around the holidays, it evaluated 6,513 candidates, contributed to the hiring of 686 candidates, and its pre-screening capability saved 1,964 recruiter hours. 

The median time from when candidates enter the system to when they are evaluated is 42 minutes. 

Beyond internal efficiency gains, SmartHire provides a great experience for candidates. When we surveyed candidates, 71% said they were more excited about the job they were applying for after talking with Sam, 68% described the experience as streamlined and frictionless, and 72% rated it as a four- or five-star experience. 

Candidates said the process feels simple and straightforward, questions are easy to follow, and calls with Sam are efficient. They also appreciated our innovation and modern approach.

TTEC launched SmartHire in the United States and based on early success, we plan to roll it out in APAC, LATAM, and EMEA.