The Recruiting Volume Trap … and How Career Town Escaped It

Most hiring teams think that more applicants lead to greater success. Career Town learned the hard way that they don’t, and that prioritizing sheer volume is the fastest way to kill your quality of hire. 

 When Orville Lynch founded Career Town, a virtual career fair platform now serving over 700,000 users, he built something that worked almost too well at attracting candidates. Employers would host a hiring event, hundreds of applications would pour in, and then the real problem would begin. Which candidates were actually worth talking to?  

 “We were doing career fairs, and that’s a blunt instrument when you’re trying to find candidates,” Lynch reflects. “We needed something more like a scalpel.” 

 That gap between volume and quality, the tension between reach and precision, is one of the most underappreciated problems in talent acquisition today. And it’s getting worse, not better. 

What is the Hidden Cost of Unqualified Applicants? 

Typically, when we talk about recruiting efficiency, the conversation usually focuses on time-to-fill. It’s an important metric, but the overarching metric obscures the hours wasted by recruiters in screening candidates who never should have made it to review and the cost of phone screens with people who weren’t remotely qualified. Also not captured? The compounding frustration that leads strong recruiters to burn out. 

The real cost of unqualified applicant volume is opportunity cost. Every hour a recruiter spends on the wrong candidate is an hour not spent building a relationship with the right one.  

As a result, for organizations running high-volume hiring, this imbalance becomes unsustainable fast. Career Town’s employer clients knew this. A government agency managing hundreds of open roles doesn’t just need applicants. It needs qualified applicants, pre-screened well enough that hiring managers can make real decisions without becoming amateur recruiters themselves. 

Can Precision Sourcing Be Achieved?  

To address this challenge, Career Town partnered with Leoforce to solve its growing challenges with unqualified applicants by layering AI-powered candidate sourcing directly into its virtual hiring platform. The goal wasn’t to eliminate human judgment. It was to ensure that human judgment was applied to the right people in the first place. The results were immediate.  

With Leoforce’s proprietary AI handling upfront matching and filtering, Career Town’s government agency client saw nearly 70% of the surfaced candidates classified as genuinely hirable. Their response said it all, “Whatever you guys are doing, keep doing it!”. 

That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a fundamental shift in how recruiters spend their time. When AI handles the initial filtering that humans used to do manually, the downstream impact is significant. Teams that once spent most of their time on initial screening redirect that energy toward interviewing, building relationships, and closing. Their work becomes more strategic. The results follow. 

 How Do You Define Partnership? 

Here’s what often gets lost in conversations about recruitment technology and AI. The technology is only as good as the partnership behind it. 

Every organization that adopts AI sourcing brings its own workflow, its own client base, its own definition of “qualified”. Off-the-shelf tools that ignore that complexity tend to underdeliver, regardless of how strong the underlying technology is. 

What Lynch credits as the deciding factor in choosing Leoforce wasn’t just the platform.  It was the approach. “A lot of organizations have a very narrow focus. They’ll say, ‘We can’t do that. That’s not what we do,'” he says. “Leoforce didn’t do that. You were like, ‘This could work. Let’s figure it out.’ That attitude is what we needed.” 

That willingness to engage with complexity and to co-innovate rather than simply install is what separates transformative technology partnerships from vendor relationships. It’s harder to evaluate in a demo than a feature list, but over time, it’s often the variable that determines whether a technology investment actually changes anything. 

What Makes Career Town’s Journey a Blueprint?  

Lynch built his platform before virtual hiring was mainstream, expanded through a pandemic that tripled his user base overnight, and has since acquired multiple staffing agencies, generating nearly $16M in annual revenue. He didn’t get there by following conventional wisdom about recruiting. He got there by asking better questions and finding partners willing to help answer them. 

The organizations still measuring recruiting success primarily by application volume are playing the wrong game. The shift from quantity to quality, from reach to precision, from blunt instruments to scalpels, is already underway. The competitive advantage will go to the teams that make this shift before they drown and who choose the right partners to redefine what a good recruiting outcome actually looks like. 

Think about it. Who’s going to have a more successful start to the week: the recruiter who starts Monday morning with 15 genuinely qualified candidates instead of 150 unvetted applications will always outperform?  

How can your organization build the conditions to make that the norm?  

 Leoforce partners with recruiting teams and platforms to bring AI-powered sourcing precision to talent acquisition.