The first-round phone screen feels cheap. It isn't. At high volume it is the single most expensive, least consistent step in the funnel, and the one most worth automating.
The phone screen doesn't scale, and it isn't fair
Every phone screen costs a recruiter a call plus the scheduling overhead around it. Multiply that by a funnel of thousands and the math collapses. In a large funnel, many candidates never get a call. The ones who do get a different interview each time: different questions, different mood, different day. You cannot rank candidates fairly on interviews that were never the same interview.
A live AI interview fixes both problems at once
In Hiearlly, candidates join a live video interview with Hira, the AI interviewer. It is a two-way conversation, and Hira asks follow-up questions based on what the candidate says. No recruiter needs to be on the call. That single change has two consequences:
- It scales. Every candidate books their own slot from a link, and no recruiter time is spent on the call or on scheduling.
- It is consistent. Every candidate gets the same kind of structured interview, so the output is comparable across the whole funnel.
Consistency is what makes ranking meaningful. When every candidate has had the same kind of structured interview, a shortlist is a real ordering, not an artifact of who happened to catch a recruiter on a good afternoon.
A video interview also leaves evidence a phone screen does not. Hira writes a scored report with transcript quotes for every candidate, and proctoring runs during the interview, so your team sees timestamped flags beside the result. Flags are information for your team and never an automatic rejection.
“But candidates prefer talking to a person”
For a final conversation, yes, and that is exactly where you want your recruiters spending their time. The AI interview is not the offer conversation. It is the first-pass filter that currently eats your team's hours and reaches only a fraction of applicants. Automating it means the human conversations that remain are with finalists who have already been fairly evaluated.
Where it sits in the pipeline
In Hiearlly, the live AI interview is one stage of the funnel. A skills assessment tests hands-on skill, then the interview runs at two levels: L1 checks that the candidate has the basic qualifications for the role, and L2 goes deeper to find out whether they know what they are talking about and can prove it. Proctoring runs throughout. The recruiter gets a ranked list built from the evidence, not a stack of call notes. Interviews are in English today, with more languages in development.
The live AI interview is one stage of a full funnel from outreach to offer.