Summary

In this episode, I spoke with Diederik Syoen, co-founder of Ringtime. Founded in 2025 in Gent, Ringtime uses AI to speed up frontline hiring, screening blue collar candidates at scale via phone and WhatsApp. The AI handles live conversations in 22+ languages, also outside office hours.

The inefficiencies of blue collar recruitment are at a scale that is unthinkable to someone with no context in this sector. Here’s some data to make this concrete:

During the early stages of Ringtime, Diederik spoke with a recruiter who had qualified 140,000 candidates in a year. Of those candidates, only 3% was placed.
Behind those 140,000 candidates qualified, there’s hours and hours of more wasted work. Recruiters have cold targets that go up to 100, 120 calls a day. And 80% of the time they just land on voicemail.

Imagine the scale of time wasted. Imagine the frustration of doing a job that requires so much effort, with such little impact. This is why large recruitment agencies in this industry need to hire thousands of recruiters per year. The average tenure in the role is 1-1.5 years. The data is telling us that humans aren't loving this job at the moment.

Ringtime is fixing all of this.

One of their customers went from a 35% conversion rate to 80% conversion rate. That's more than 2x of all the candidates coming in and it's only after a few weeks of using this tool.

A recruiter they spoke to said their job is finally starting to be fun again.

They just raised a seed round led by Volta Ventures, also backed by Syndicate One. Keep watching this startup, they are going places!

Listen to the episode to hear:

Why Ringtime killed deals outside staffing to focus on the blue collar recruitment vertical
What it’s like to build in a vertical that is new to the founding team
How Ringtime is making recruiters’ jobs better, focusing their time on high impact work and removing the boring part, rather than replacing them
The future of blue collar recruiting
How customers doubled conversion rates in just a few weeks
The founder rule they use for hiring early employees
And more...