Temp agency: a single phone number for candidates and client companies

The candidate calls to register, to find out whether an assignment suits them, to flag their availability or to ask a question about an assignment in progress. The client company calls about a staffing need, often a pressing one, or to follow up on an assignment. Mixing the two conversations wastes everyone’s time.

Reception’s first question is therefore a simple one: “Are you calling as a candidate or on behalf of a company?”. It leads to two separate scripts, two message formats and, often, two different contacts within the agency.

Article L1221-6 of the French Labour Code sets the rule: the information requested from a job applicant may only serve to assess their ability to hold the job offered or their professional skills, and it must have a direct and necessary link with the job or with the assessment of those skills. The candidate, for their part, must answer in good faith.

The useful questions follow from this rule: name and contact details, the trade or position sought, qualifications, experience, authorisations, licences or certifications required for the position, availability, ability to travel to assignment sites. Reception does not have to assess the application: it prepares the interview with the recruiter.

Article L1132-1 of the Labour Code prohibits excluding a person from a recruitment procedure because of, among other things, their origin, sex, morals, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family situation or pregnancy, genetic characteristics, physical appearance, surname, place of residence, state of health, disability, religious beliefs, political opinions, trade-union activities or ability to express themselves in a language other than French.

For reception, the practical instruction is to ask no questions on these subjects and not to note them if the caller mentions them unprompted. A detail slipped into a message (“young mother”, “strong accent”) can later weigh on a decision and leave a trace. The question about place of residence is replaced by the one that matters for the assignment: can the person get to the workplace at the planned times?

For a client company, reception collects the company name, the contact person and their details, the position, the qualifications and authorisations required, the dates, the hours, the assignment location and the degree of urgency. That is the description of a need, not of a person’s profile.

A guide published in 2007 by the HALDE (the French equal-opportunities and anti-discrimination authority, succeeded in 2011 by the Défenseur des droits, the French Rights Defender), available in the Défenseur des droits legal database, notes that employment intermediaries may face directly or indirectly discriminatory requests from their client companies. It recommends highlighting only skills linked to the job and discussing the analysis of the need with the client as early as possible. If a client states a prohibited criterion, reception does not carry it into the request: it notes the objective need and flags the exchange to the agency manager.

A usable message fits in a few fixed fields: who is calling (candidate or company), name and number, subject, urgency, when the person can be reached. For a candidate, add the trade sought; for a company, the position and the start date. The recruiter then calls back already knowing what it is about.

Finally, article L1221-8 of the Labour Code provides that the candidate is expressly informed, before they are used, of the methods and techniques for assisting recruitment that are applied to them. If your reception relies on a tool, ask yourself how this principle applies to your situation and have it validated by your legal adviser.

Alyas, the AI voice agent, can ask the routing question at the start of the call, answer practical questions from the information you give it, collect the contact details and the subject of the request, and say when it does not know, offering to pass the request on. It announces at the start of the call that it is an AI and that the call is recorded, and each call is transcribed and summarised in your workspace. A caller who asks is transferred to your single transfer number. The questions to rule out are set in the instructions you give it; the transcript, however, picks up what the caller says unprompted, which is why it is worth limiting access to those who need it. A free 10-day trial, with no credit card required, lets you test them.