How Unity Communications cut candidate drop-offs by 75% and improved new hire retention by 30% with Testlify

Candidates were dropping out. New hires were leaving. The pipeline was not working.

Unity Communications is an outsourcing and offshoring consultancy based in Gilbert, Arizona. They were losing candidates mid-process, hiring inconsistently, and watching new hires leave sooner than they should. The pipeline looked active but was not producing results the business could rely on.

Unity Communications provides outsourcing and offshoring services, which means the quality and reliability of their workforce is the product. When hiring is inconsistent, clients notice. The team was dealing with two problems at once: candidates were dropping out of the recruitment process before it completed, stretching already thin recruiting timelines, and the hires that did come through were not staying. Retention among new hires was lower than it should have been, which pointed to a mismatch happening somewhere in the evaluation process.

The manual processes in place made the root cause hard to address. There was no standardized way to evaluate technical skills across roles, no consistent method to assess whether a candidate was genuinely aligned with how the company operated, and no shared criteria between hiring managers. Different people were making different calls, and the variance in outcomes reflected it.

Every drop-off extended timelines and put pressure on existing teams covering open roles. Every early departure meant the cost and effort of hiring had to be absorbed again. The pattern was expensive, and the team knew it needed a structural fix.

“We were bringing people through a process that looked thorough but was not actually telling us what we needed to know. Drop-offs were high and the people we did hire were not always staying.”

HR Manager, Unity Communications

How Testlify was implemented

Custom tests for technical fit. Video screening for cultural fit. Both before the first live interview.

Unity Communications started by deploying Testlify across high-priority roles where hiring inconsistency was most acute. The team used Testlify’s test library for immediate coverage across domains, then worked with Testlify to build custom assessments focused on the specific skills each role required, including domain knowledge, analytical ability, and communication. Candidates were evaluated on these criteria before any live interview time was spent, which tightened the front end of the pipeline considerably.

The video response feature added a layer that the team had not had before. Before progressing a candidate to a live interview, hiring managers could review recorded video responses to assess communication style, professionalism, and how well the candidate articulated their thinking. For a company where client-facing communication is part of the job, that signal mattered and it was previously invisible until the interview stage.

The downstream effect showed up in retention. Candidates who came through the structured process were better matched on both technical ability and cultural fit, which meant fewer early departures. New hire retention improved by 30%, and candidate drop-offs during the process fell by 75%, cutting the recruitment cycle by 40%.

“The video responses alone changed how we evaluated candidates. We stopped being surprised in interviews and started arriving already confident about the people we were talking to.”

HR Manager, Unity Communications