Why we are building a phone system inside Recruitly

Recruitly already integrates with every major phone system. Aircall, Dialpad, Ringover, Masqum, and a handful of others. The integrations work. Calls get logged against the candidate record, recordings show up in the timeline, you can click a number in the CRM and the call fires through your phone system of choice.

We are building our own phone system anyway. Native to the CRM. Numbers you can buy and port inside Recruitly, inbound and outbound calling, SMS, team assignments, AI on every call. The kind of thing recruitment agencies have been paying separate vendors for since the day phone systems moved to the cloud. We are nearly there. It ships in the coming weeks.

This is the question I get every time it comes up internally. We have all the integrations. Why bother building it ourselves.

What we kept hitting with the integrations

Integrations do exactly what integrations do. They move data from one system into another. A call ends in Aircall, an event fires, Recruitly picks it up, a call log appears in the timeline. That is it. The data is correct. The data is also flat.

What you do not get is anything that requires being on the call while it is happening. The call itself runs inside the phone system vendor's infrastructure. By the time we know about it, it is already over. We can show you that the call happened, how long it lasted, and a link to the recording if there is one. That is the ceiling.

For most things, that ceiling is fine. For AI on calls, it is not.

Owning the call is what makes AI useful

This is the part that pushed us over the line. Recruitment is a phone job. Recruiters spend hours every day on calls with candidates, hiring managers, and internal teams. Each call generates information that should update the CRM automatically. The candidate confirmed they can interview Thursday. The client moved the role from contract to perm. The salary range came down. The hiring manager wants to see the shortlist by Friday.

If the call is happening inside Aircall, none of that information ever makes it into the CRM unless a recruiter types it in after the call. They do not. Or they do, sometimes, partially, days later. That is where most CRM data goes to die.

Once we own the audio stream end to end, the AI is actually on the call. Live transcription happens in real time. The summary is written before you hang up. The next action is suggested. The pipeline stage updates because the AI heard what was agreed, not because a recruiter remembered to type it. None of that is possible through an integration. The audio has to be in our infrastructure.

This is the same reason we built the Data Agent rather than wiring up a generic data-quality tool. AI that matters has to sit on top of your own data, in your own system. Otherwise it is just a feature wrapper.

A real example of what will change

Take a normal afternoon. A senior recruiter has a 20-minute call with a candidate for a London-based engineering role. They go through the candidate's notice period, salary expectations, the two roles they are interviewing for elsewhere, why they would consider this one, and a rough sense of when they could start.

Under the integration model, the candidate record gets a call log entry. Duration 20 minutes. A link to the recording sits in the timeline. If the recruiter is disciplined, they go back into the CRM in the next hour and add a note: "spoke to candidate, interested, notice 4 weeks, available from mid-July." Most of the detail does not make it in. Whatever is in the recruiter's head stays in the recruiter's head, and if that recruiter leaves the agency in six months, it leaves with them.

With the built-in phone system, the same call ends and the candidate record already has the salary expectation field updated, the notice period set to four weeks, the availability date set, two new notes added about the competing roles, and the next action set to "send role spec and confirm Thursday slot". The recruiter reads the summary, edits the bits that need editing, and moves on. The next time anyone in the agency looks at that candidate, the full picture is there.

Calls, SMS and email in the same thread

A recruiter has a candidate they are working a role for. They call them on Monday. They text them on Wednesday to chase the CV. They email them on Thursday with interview details. They call them again on Friday after the interview.

Today, that is three different tools. The calls live in Aircall. The texts live in some other SMS platform. The email lives in Gmail or Outlook. Each of those has its own search, its own timeline, its own login. The candidate record in the CRM might have all of it, partially, if every integration is working that day. Usually it does not.

Once the phone system lives inside the CRM, the candidate record shows the entire conversation in order. Monday call. Wednesday SMS. Thursday email. Friday call. One timeline. Searchable. Exportable. Auditable. The next recruiter who picks up the file in six months sees exactly what was said and when.

Numbers belong to the agency, not the vendor

Most phone systems treat your business number as part of the subscription. You cancel the subscription, you might lose the number. Porting it out takes weeks of paperwork. Some providers make it deliberately painful because they know the number is sticky. Recruiters who have been calling a particular line for three years do not want to start over with a new one.

That should not be how it works. The number you have been using for three years, that your clients call, that is printed on every CV you have sent out, is the agency's asset. Not the vendor's. The new phone system handles purchase, porting and ownership of numbers properly. If you ever leave us, the numbers leave with you, the same way they came in.

The pricing is a different model, not a discount

This is the argument people make first and the one I find least interesting. Yes, the built-in phone system will work out cheaper than paying Aircall or Dialpad per seat. Most of those products run somewhere between $25 and $50 per user per month on an annual contract. For an agency with ten recruiters, that is $3,000 to $6,000 a year in seat fees before anyone has made a single call.

The interesting thing is not that we are cheaper. It is that we charge differently. There are no seat fees. You pay for minutes and messages at carrier-level rates. A ten-recruiter team running normal call volumes through a US setup will land somewhere around $1,000 a year, total. A quiet month costs less. A busy quarter costs more. The bill reflects what actually happened on the phones.

The reason this matters in recruitment specifically is that call volume is lumpy. January is quiet. September is busy. Contingency season hits and your team is on the phone all day. Then it is Ramadan or summer holidays and nothing is moving. Paying the same flat seat fee through all of that means you are paying for capacity you are not using most of the year.

What we are not trying to do

The integrations are not going away. If your agency already pays for Aircall and likes it, the integration keeps working. We are not in the business of forcing anyone off a tool that is doing the job. Some agencies have invested years in their Aircall setup. Some have call-centre features they rely on. That is fine.

What we will offer is an alternative for agencies that want their phone system to actually be part of the CRM, not connected to it by a wire. The two can coexist. You can run integrated Aircall on your sales desk and built-in Recruitly calling on your perm desk if that suits you. We are not picking sides.

What I do think is that for any agency starting from scratch, or any agency reviewing their stack and looking at the seat fees adding up, the calculation changes when the CRM has its own phone system inside it. One fewer vendor. One fewer login. One fewer monthly subscription. And the AI works the way it should.

What this will look like for the agencies running it

From the recruiter's seat, almost nothing changes. You click a number in the candidate record and the call dials out from your browser or your mobile. The call ends and the summary is there, written automatically, with the action items and the agreed next step. The pipeline has moved if the conversation moved it. The SMS thread sits next to the call log in the same timeline.

From the manager's seat, you see call activity per consultant, conversion from call to placement, who is making the most calls and who isn't, what is working and what isn't. The leaderboards already pull this kind of data from integrated phone systems. With the built-in system, the data is complete and arrives in real time.

From the agency owner's seat, the phone bill becomes a usage line on the existing Recruitly invoice instead of a separate subscription with a separate vendor. The numbers are yours. The recordings, transcripts and call data are yours. The AI summary, transcript and pipeline updates run on every call your team makes through the system. That is it. Phone and SMS. No magic, no scope creep, no claims we cannot back up.

We are in the final stretch on this. If you want a look before it ships, book a demo and we will walk you through where we are. If you would rather just be on the list for early access when it goes live, start a trial and ask for it.