Building a voice AI recruiter with ElevenAgents

Maki is a leading recruitment platform that helps HR teams at global brands, including TRG Wagamama, PwC, H&M, Nespresso and other large chains, automate the screening process. By leveraging ElevenAgents, we have transformed the traditional, friction-heavy hiring process into a seamless, human-like conversational experience that identifies the best talent at scale. This is the story of how we built our voice AI recruiter on ElevenAgents, and what it changed for candidates and hiring teams.

The challenge: humanising high-volume hiring

In industries like hospitality and retail, speed is critical. However, traditional screening methods, such as long forms or robotic IVR systems, often lead to high candidate drop-off and a poor employer brand perception.

We set out to solve this by building AI Recruiters, intelligent agents capable of conducting first-round interviews. To succeed, these AI recruiters needed to overcome three major hurdles:

• Latency: Real-time conversation requires near-instant response times to avoid awkward pauses. In human conversation, the gap between one speaker finishing and the next starting is typically around 200 milliseconds, so a voice AI recruiter has very little room to think.
• Empathy and realism: Candidates in high-stakes interviews need to feel respected and heard, requiring a voice that sounds human, not clinical.
• Global scalability: Large clients like Wagamama require multilingual support to hire diverse teams across different regions.

The solution: real-time conversational intelligence

We integrated ElevenAgents to serve as the voice of our AI hiring assistants. Rather than treating voice as a simple text-to-speech output, we treat it as a strategic component of the interview experience.

ElevenLabs provides the technical backbone for our AI Recruiters, offering:

• State-of-the-art voice quality: Expressive realism that reduces candidate anxiety and builds trust.
• Low-latency performance: Optimised for the ping-pong nature of live interviews, ensuring the conversation flows naturally.
• Multilingual capabilities: Allowing us to deploy the same high-quality experience across various languages as we expand globally.

"ElevenLabs provides state-of-the-art voice quality with the flexibility required for real-time, multilingual applications. For us, this combination is critical. Voice AI interviews demand both expressive realism and technical reliability at scale." Juliette Santelmo, Founder Associate

The impact: better signal, better experience

By switching to an ElevenLabs-powered voice interface, we have seen significant improvements across the hiring funnel:

• Higher completion rates: Candidates are more likely to finish an interview when the interaction feels smooth and respectful.
• Improved candidate signal: When voices feel human-like, candidates give more natural, detailed and honest answers, providing HR teams with better data to make hiring decisions.
• Strengthened employer brand: Large restaurant chains are able to offer a cutting-edge, professional and consistent first impression to every single applicant, regardless of volume.

A differentiated approach to AI hiring

What sets us apart is our use of context-aware voice technology. By tightly integrating ElevenLabs with our own conversational logic, our voice AI recruiter does not just read a script; it listens, understands, and responds with the appropriate tone and pace. This makes the interview feel like a dialogue rather than a checklist.

Looking ahead

As we continue to expand our footprint in the global recruitment market, voice remains the central interface. Our partnership with ElevenLabs allows us to push the boundaries of what is possible in HR tech, delivering interviews that are not only efficient but also consistent, fair, and human at scale. Read how we approach security, bias audits and AI Act readiness, and how our partnership with Deepgram powers real-time voice AI for hiring.

Key results for the voice AI recruiter

• Seamless multilingual support: Ability to interview candidates in their native languages with high-fidelity voices.
• Reduced candidate friction: Natural prosody and low latency lead to a more human interview feel.
• Enterprise-grade reliability: Reliable performance for large-scale customers with thousands of concurrent applicants.

About Maki

Maki is a skills-based hiring platform that replaces traditional resumes with data-driven assessments and AI-led interviews. We empower HR teams to hire better talent, faster, while ensuring a bias-free and engaging candidate experience.

About ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is the world leader in audio AI. Its mission is to make content universally accessible in any language and voice. ElevenAgents allows developers to build high-quality, low-latency conversational AI agents for any use case.