Technology
Building the Future of AI-Driven Recruitment with ElevenAgents
Transforming high-volume screening into seamless, human-like AI interviews that help global brands identify the right talent at scale.
February 13, 2026
Juliette Santelmo

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.
The Challenge: Humanizing 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.
Empathy & 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: Optimized 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 AI 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.
Key Results
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.
See what Maki Agents can do for you

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