Case Study · Recruiting Firm · Life Sciences

A Recruiting Firm Screened a Full Req in a Day. The Client Never Touched the Platform.

A Toronto recruiting firm took on a Patient Education Associate search for Enhanced Medical Nutrition. Rather than running phone screens one candidate at a time, they configured Virvell once and launched the entire field in a single action at 9:56 on a Friday morning. Twelve completed screens were back before noon. Roughly three quarters of the completions came from candidates who called back on their own schedule. Fifteen candidates went to interview and both openings were filled, in less than half the recruiter time the same role took in March.

The Client

Employer	Enhanced Medical Nutrition Inc. (EMN)
Industry	Food as medicine, perioperative medical nutrition
Founded	2016
Locations	Toronto
Headcount	32 full-time including co-ops, 25 full-time permanent
Funding	USD $5M Series A, January 2025, led by dsm-firmenich Ventures and the corporate venture arm of Ajinomoto
Recruiting partner	A Toronto fractional finance and HR firm
Role	Patient Education Associate
Jurisdiction	Ontario, Canada
Modules used	AI Pre-Screen Interviews
Platform operated by	The recruiting firm
Engagement window	June 26 to July 7, 2026

The Challenge

The Screening Layer Is Where a Recruiting Firm Loses Its Margin

For a recruiting firm, the pre-screen is the least leveraged hour in the process. It is necessary, it is repetitive, and it does not scale. Every candidate needs the same questions asked the same way, and every one of those calls has to be scheduled around someone else's workday.

The role made that constraint sharper. A Patient Education Associate at EMN explains a surgical nutrition program to patients preparing for an operation. The core requirement is the ability to communicate clinical information clearly to someone who is anxious and not a clinician. That is a skill a resume cannot show and a form cannot test. It only becomes visible when the candidate speaks.

So the screening step was not a formality to get through. It was where the actual signal lived, which meant skipping candidates to save time carried a real cost.

The firm knew what that hour cost, because they had run this role before. In March, screening the Patient Education Associate field the traditional way took 5.5 hours: four on phone screens, one on updating candidate statuses in BambooHR. That is the least leveraged time in a recruiting firm's week, and it is unavoidable when every screen has to be scheduled around someone else's workday. Running the same role through Virvell in June and July took 2 hours and 15 minutes, spent reviewing pre-screen reports and updating BambooHR. The four hours of phone screens went to zero.

The Solution

What the Firm Did

Configured the Role Once

Seven role-specific pre-screen questions were built for the Patient Education Associate position, asked alongside the platform's standard set. Every candidate received an identical question set. Not one candidate received a different version.

Ran the Screens from Their Own Account

This is the part that distinguishes this engagement. The firm operated the platform directly. Virvell provisioned the account and then stepped out. Every screen in this case study was initiated from the firm's own sessions, over a three week window, including a return visit two weeks after the last screen completed.

Launched the Entire Field in One Action

At 9:48 on the morning of Friday June 26, the firm added the candidate list. Eight minutes later, the whole field was launched at once. Every candidate received an outbound call and a callback code they could use at any hour. The first four completed screens came back between 10:05 and 10:07, candidates who simply picked up. From that point on, every completion for the rest of the day came from a candidate calling back. Twelve screens were finished before noon and sixteen by the end of the day, with nobody placing a single follow-up call. Three more arrived over the following days, the last from a candidate added on July 6.

Let Candidates Choose the Moment

Fourteen of the nineteen completed screens came from candidates who did not take the initial call and instead called back on their own schedule using their code. Five completed on the live outbound call.

Received Structured Reports Automatically

Each completed pre-screen generated a structured report containing the candidate's responses and a summary of how completely the role's stated requirements were addressed. Nineteen of nineteen produced a report, median sixty-four seconds after the call ended.

The Results

19 Screens. 16 on Day One. Both Openings Filled.

Metric	Result
Candidates launched	31
Candidates with valid contact details	23
Pre-screens completed	19 of 23 (82.6%)
Completions from candidate callbacks	14 of 19 (73.7%)
Completions on the live outbound call	5 of 19
Median time, candidate added to completed screen	50 minutes
Median time, call end to written report	64 seconds
Reports generated	19 of 19
Completed on the day of launch	16 of 19
Completed within two hours of launch	12 of 19
Last of the remaining three completed	July 7
Total candidate speaking time captured	163 minutes
EMN hours spent screening	0
Openings filled	2 of 2
Recruiter time on the role, March (traditional)	5.5 hours
Recruiter time on the role, June–July (Virvell)	2 hours 15 minutes

A note on the denominator:

Thirty-one candidates were launched. Ten had incorrect phone numbers entered at the point of upload and never connected. Those rows were corrected or removed, and two of the ten were re-added with the right number and completed their screens without issue. The nineteen completions are measured against the twenty-three candidates the platform could actually reach.

What the Reports Captured

Across the nineteen completed screens, sixteen candidates answered every question in full. Two answered ten of twelve, one answered eleven of twelve.

Each report set out what the candidate said against what the role asked for, so the reviewer could see the answers side by side rather than working from call notes.

To be explicit about what this is and is not: Virvell does not score candidates, does not rank them, and does not recommend or reject anyone. Every hiring decision in this engagement was made by the recruiting firm and EMN.

Callback Behaviour

When the Candidate Chooses the Moment

Every candidate in this engagement received one outbound call at launch. Five people picked up and completed the screen on that call. Fourteen did not pick up, and later called back on their own time using the code they were left.

5 · Completed on the live call

Answered when the phone rang.

14 · Completed on a callback

Missed the call, finished it later on their own schedule.

Where the 19 completed screens came from:

The screening capacity a recruiting firm normally loses to voicemail was recovered without a single follow-up call being placed.

This repeats a pattern Virvell has seen before. In an earlier engagement with a medical device manufacturer, candidates who called back completed their pre-screen at 98.1 percent against 37.1 percent for outbound calls, a 2.6 times difference across the same applicant pool and the same questions. The scheduling tax, not candidate interest, was the barrier.

The number here is smaller and comes from a single req, so the honest claim is a consistent pattern rather than a proven rate. But the direction is the same, and the operational implication for a recruiting firm is direct. The screens complete themselves when the candidate is allowed to pick the hour.

	Traditional phone screen	This engagement
Recruiter hours on phone screens	4	0
Voicemails requiring a follow-up call	Every one	None
Availability	Business hours	Any hour
Consistency	Varies by call and by day	Identical question set for everyone
Time to a written summary	Hours, or never written	Median 64 seconds
Comparison across candidates	Notes and memory	Side by side reports

The Outcome

Both Openings Filled from a Single Screening Run

Fifteen of the nineteen screened candidates went forward to interview. Both openings were filled, on July 23 and August 1. EMN hires two Patient Education Associates each cycle for an 8-month co-op term, so this was the full requisition closed from a single screening run.

The reports were read in the platform and exported into BambooHR, where they sat alongside the rest of the candidate record for the interview stage.

Asked whether the structured reports changed the decisions the firm would otherwise have made, the answer was no. They saved the time of getting there. That distinction is worth stating plainly: the platform did not surface a candidate the firm would have missed, and it did not talk anyone out of a shortlist they had already formed. What it did was remove four hours of phone screens and produce a written record of every answer, so the people making the decision arrived at the same judgment with the work already done.

A note on the advance rate. Fifteen of nineteen is high, and it should be read in context: this field had already been resume-screened before anyone was launched into the platform. The pre-screen was not filtering a raw applicant pool. It was confirming, in the candidate's own words, what the resumes suggested, and capturing it in a form the hiring team could compare side by side.

31 launched → 23 reachable → 19 screened → 15 interviewed → 2 of 2 openings filled

Engagement window: June 26 to July 7, 2026. EMN hours spent screening: zero.

Compliance

Disclosure, Consent, and a Full Audit Trail

The engagement operated under Ontario's Working for Workers Act requirements for AI disclosure in job postings. Candidates were informed that AI assisted in screening and that a human made all hiring decisions. Every pre-screen was recorded with a full transcript, producing a complete audit trail of what was asked and what was answered.

Virvell's published AI Acceptable Use Policy prohibits candidate scoring, ranking, and automated rejection. No candidate in this engagement was scored, ranked, or rejected by the platform.

Key Takeaways

19 pre-screens completed on a single requisition, 16 of them on the day of launch

The recruiting firm operated the platform itself. Virvell provisioned the account and stepped out

Recruiter time on the role fell from 5.5 hours in March to 2 hours 15 minutes, on the same role with the same firm

Four hours of phone screens went to zero. No follow-up call was ever placed

14 of 19 completions came from candidates calling back on their own schedule, echoing the 2.6× inbound lift seen in an earlier engagement

Every completed screen produced a structured report, median 64 seconds after the call ended

Both openings were filled. The client spent zero hours screening

The reports saved time rather than changing decisions, and this case study says so

Bill 149 AI disclosure built into the workflow, with a full transcript audit trail

No scoring, no ranking, no automated rejection

About the recruiting firm

A Toronto firm providing fractional finance and HR services to Canadian technology companies, covering bookkeeping, accounting, fractional CFO, payroll, HR, and recruitment. Their people practice runs the full hiring cycle for clients, from recruitment strategy and job postings through interview training, offers, and onboarding.

About EMN

Enhanced Medical Nutrition Inc. is a food as medicine company founded in 2016, developing evidence-based medical nutrition products for surgery and critical illness. Its flagship program, ENROUTE®, is designed to help patients prepare for and recover from surgical procedures. EMN raised a USD $5M Series A in January 2025 led by dsm-firmenich Ventures and the corporate venture arm of Ajinomoto, with participation from PeakBridge, Elder Ventures, and angel investors. The company operates from Toronto.

About Virvell

Virvell is a screening platform combining AI voice pre-screens, AI reference checks, and background verification, with an evidence layer that cross-checks claims across sources. The platform does not score, rank, or reject candidates. Tablise Technologies Inc., Toronto.