From 47 days to 15. AI screening at scale.

Construction hiring was broken — and their customers knew it.

For a workforce management platform serving hundreds of construction SMEs across the UK, recruitment was the elephant in the room. Their customers — groundworkers, scaffolding firms, civil engineering contractors — were spending weeks filling roles that needed to be filled in days.

The platform had built strong tools for scheduling, compliance tracking and payroll. But when a site manager needed a qualified bricklayer on Monday, there was nothing in the product to help them find one. Their customers were exporting spreadsheets, posting on job boards manually, and managing applications in their inboxes.

It wasn't just an inconvenience. Slow hiring was costing their customers real money — delayed projects, overtime costs, and frustrated clients. And it was creating a growing gap between what this platform offered and what modern HR platforms had started delivering.

• Build and ship product features end-to-end across React frontend and Node.js backend services
• Design and implement integrations with HRIS, ATS and payroll platforms via unified APIs
• Collaborate with the ML team to integrate AI screening models into production hiring pipelines
• Own reliability, performance and observability for your areas of the platform
• Contribute to architecture decisions and technical roadmap in a team that takes engineering seriously
• Review code thoughtfully and mentor mid-level engineers when the opportunity arises

Building an ATS from scratch was considered and quickly ruled out. The estimated timeline was 18–24 months and the cost prohibitive for a platform of their size. They needed a faster path.

A fully branded ATS, live in six weeks.

After evaluating several options, the platform chose to embed Candidly's whitelabel ATS — primarily because of two things: the speed of implementation, and the depth of the AI screening capability.

Candidly's specialist design and integration team worked alongside their product team to deliver a fully branded recruitment module — their logo, their colours, their domain — that felt native to the existing platform. From a customer perspective, there was no visible join.

The AI screening module was configured specifically for construction — understanding sector-specific qualifications like CSCS cards, SMSTS certifications and NEBOSH requirements, and automatically filtering candidates who didn't meet the role's compliance threshold before a human ever saw the application.

Scheduling automation handled interview coordination. Blind CV review was turned on by default. And D&I dashboards gave customers visibility into the diversity of their pipeline at every stage — something several of their enterprise clients had started requiring contractually.

Numbers that moved — fast.

Within the first six months of go-live, the results across their customer base were consistent enough to be unambiguous. Time-to-hire dropped from 47 days to 15 — a 68% reduction across 50,000 applications and 14 distinct customer accounts used as the initial cohort.

The platform's own metrics shifted too. Customers who had access to Candidly showed an 18% lower churn rate than those who didn't. The recruitment module had become a meaningful retention driver — customers who relied on it every week were far less likely to consider switching providers.

The ARR impact was significant. By adding a recruitment module — priced as a tier upgrade — the platform unlocked a new revenue line that hadn't existed before. Customers who upgraded to include Candidly also had a higher average contract value and longer average tenure.

What made it work.

Three things stood out as critical to the success of this implementation — and they're consistent with what we see across all successful whitelabel deployments.