AI-powered interviews for frontline hiring
Firstwork automates frontline hiring for hospitality, medical staffing, and large-scale logistics: document verification, compliance processing, and onboarding. A few months ago, the team started using AI voice agents to run screening interviews at scale.
That made voice the backbone of the product. In frontline hiring, a dropped call is a lost applicant and an unfilled shift.
“In our world, a dropped call isn’t just a bug, it’s a lost hire. And in frontline staffing, that costs a lot.”
The problem: five months of providers that broke
When a product runs AI interviews across continents, you can’t discover the limits in production. So Firstwork spent five to six months trying to find them on purpose, evaluating platform after platform before one held up.
The pattern was consistent. Demos looked clean. Controlled tests passed. Then real-world conditions exposed the gaps.
Capacity broke first. Firstwork needed thousands of concurrent calls sustained through peak hiring windows across time zones, not burst tests. Most platforms degraded well before those volumes.
Then language. Frontline hiring in the US means Spanish. In India, it means Hindi. Firstwork needed multilingual performance under production load, not a capability that looked solid in documentation and fell apart on real calls at high volume.
“We tested a lot of platforms. The infrastructure was not so robust.”
Why Plivo
A stress test, not a sales pitch
Firstwork started with Plivo the way they’d tested everyone else: by trying to break it. One hundred calls per minute, low enough to judge audio quality, high enough to see how the platform behaved under pressure.
Then they pushed. Within three months, they were running 10,000 to 20,000 calls per minute with zero breaks and no degradation in call quality. The same platform, the same architecture, at volumes that had already eliminated every other provider.
“We stress tested a lot of service providers in the ecosystem and stumbled upon Plivo, which provided reliability and protection at scale.”
Multilingual that works under load
For Firstwork, multilingual wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the core use case, and the requirement that had filtered out every other provider.
AI interviews running in Spanish for US logistics hiring and Hindi for Indian operations, simultaneously, on the same platform. No separate pipeline per language. No degradation as volumes climbed.
A platform you build on
Mohit’s team wasn’t shopping for a vendor. They were building a product, including AI interview logic, compliance workflows, and real-time processing, and needed infrastructure that could keep up with what they put on top of it.
“For founders building voice-first AI products, working with Plivo feels like having an engineering team embedded in your ecosystem. The API documentation, the engineering support for new functionalities, that’s what Plivo stands out for.”
The results
With Plivo underneath, Firstwork stopped evaluating providers and started building. Hospitality, medical staffing, and logistics, each with its own compliance requirements, language needs, and volume patterns, all on the same platform.
99.95% uptime. Zero call drops.
“The best thing about Plivo’s platform is I never have to think about it.”