40% more recruiting output, same team delivering
Randstad deploys Popp across two Fortune 500 life-sciences and pharma programmes, automating applicant screening and outreach at scale. The result is tens of thousands of candidate conversations successfully handled without adding a single recruiter to the delivery team.
Org Type
RPO
Sector
Life sciences
Region
Global
Start Date
2025
“Before Popp, we could only reach out to a fraction of people. We're now reaching out to 100% of people – and that's been a huge transformation for us as an organisation.”
Alastair Schirmer
Global Head of Digital Innovation, Randstad Enterprise
The challenge
Submission speed, throttled by manual admin
Randstad's recruiter teams on two major life-sciences and pharma programmes were screening thousands of applicants manually – a process that consumed three days per submission cycle and left recruiters buried in admin. Both end-clients needed faster throughput and tighter candidate quality without Randstad scaling its delivery teams. The maths didn't work: volume was outpacing capacity, with peaks exceeding 12,000 candidate conversations in a single month.
Adding recruiters wouldn't fix the structural bottleneck. Most of the team's time went to repetitive screening conversations – confirming availability, right-to-work, rate expectations – rather than the judgment calls that actually required human expertise. The programmes needed to remove entire workflow stages from the recruiter's plate, not add more people to absorb them
The approach
Embed the engine, keep the recruiter in control
Popp was integrated via API directly into Randstad's recruitment workflow; whitelabeled and branded for each end-client's candidate experience via WhatsApp. The first programme launched in August 2025 with applicant screening on UK-based roles: automated qualification conversations, vetted submissions to hiring managers, and real-time recruiter oversight of every conversation.
Within three months, a second enterprise programme was brought online, replicating the playbook in just weeks. Both accounts expanded from applicant screening into new candidate outreach and engagement outreach – three distinct use cases running across more than 1,250 campaigns. Randstad's recruiters retained full control: Popp handles high-volume screening while humans handle exceptions, closing, and any complex negotiations.
Randstad's Alastair Schirmer on stage with Popp CEO Sam Dhesi, discussing the partnership
The result
Same headcount, 40% more output
Across both programmes, Popp has processed over 43,000 candidate conversations and completed screening on more than 40,000 applicants. Time-to-submit dropped from three days to two; a 33% reduction. The longer-running programme holds an 88% candidate response rate with just a 0.3% opt-out rate, while the other scaled from 49 conversations in its first month to over 12,000 by month seven, with no team growth.
The structural shift for Randstad is the leverage it now has on enterprise delivery. The same-sized team handles 40–50% more recruiting output than before Popp. As a result, Randstad can now absorb volume spikes, and win enterprise bids, that would previously have required emergency headcount