How Blissway hires 27% faster and still finds the needle in the haystack

Key results

• Cut average time to hire 27%, from 88 days in 2025 to 64 days in 2026
• Uncovered top talent from a sea of 17,800 candidates in 2026
• Gave a 25-person team a scalable front door to hiring: a 20-minute Voice AI interview that widens the funnel without spending human hours

About Blissway

Blissway is a Denver-based technology company building roadside tolling infrastructure for transportation agencies. Its compact roadside devices and cloud analytics replace traditional highway gantries and in-vehicle transponders, deployable in weeks at no upfront cost. The company runs lean, with a team of around 25 people, nearly all engineers.

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The challenge

Nearly 17,800 people applied to Blissway this year. For a 25-person team, the problem was deciding where to spend limited attention across all of them.

Every candidate call has a real cost. A team this small can only run so many live conversations a week, so an hour spent on the wrong candidate is one it can’t spend moving the right one forward.

Thin resumes hide real talent. A resume can’t capture how someone thinks or what drives them. Strong candidates were slipping through resume screens before a human ever took a close look.

Reach and selectivity were at odds. Widening the funnel meant more low-signal calls. Staying selective meant risking the very people worth finding. Blissway wanted both, without adding headcount.

The solution

Greenhouse Voice AI became Blissway’s front door to hiring, instead of a gate that kept people out.

Signal without the hour. Voice AI has a 20-minute conversation with each promising applicant, booked at their convenience. A human reviews the recording afterward and decides whether it’s worth a live call.

A better read than a resume. The conversation gives candidates room to show judgment and drive that a resume flattens. People who look thin on paper get a real chance to stand out. 

Humans make every call. Voice AI surfaces who’s worth talking to, but a person makes every advance decision. The team widens the top of its funnel without handing judgment to a machine.

A Voice AI interview is not a consolation prize, and it is not a rejection dressed up as a step. It means one thing. You are interesting, and we want to know more before we ask a human to commit an hour.

^{– Mikaela Bourret, recruiting operations leader who brought Voice AI into Blissway’s hiring process}

The results

Voice AI gave Blissway a fuller read on more candidates, and it showed up everywhere that mattered: who they talked to, who they hired and how fast their process became overall.

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Hiring got faster. Average time to hire dropped 27% year over year, from 88 days in 2025 to 64 in 2026. That 24 day gap is meaningful for a small team competing for the same top talent.

It surfaced great talent a resume review would have missed. Blissway hires only about 1 in 3,500 applicants, so making the wrong call can be costly. Voice AI helps ensure strong people aren’t cut before anyone really looks.

Seeing past a thin resume. Blissway hired twin brothers this year, both engineers. One had a resume strong enough to skip the Voice AI screen. The other had strong academic credentials but few other details and was a “maybe” on paper. In his Voice AI interview, he talked about what his resume left out, including playing semi-pro volleyball and leading a debate team, and showed the drive and depth his resume didn’t fully capture. Those signals earned him a human conversation, he was hired, and is already shipping infrastructure improvements meriting public shout-outs from teammates.

Interviews make everyone nervous, and talking to an AI sounded even stranger. But it felt like a conversation, and I ended up mentioning things I’d completely forgotten to put on my resume.

^{- Ryan Quinlan, Software Engineer at Blissway}

Better aimed human conversations. Voice AI enables Blissway to “speak” with a wider number of promising applicants, far more than 25 people could interview live. Because it surfaces real signal, the team spends its valuable time on the 1 in 4 who advance.

Not every candidate is comfortable with Voice AI, and they always have the option to opt out. But for those that lean into the experience, it’s an invitation to share more and tell more of their story in a way that just might make the difference between an application rejection and a hire.