How Xneelo filled key sales and marketing roles in under a month and cut time to activation by 41% with Testlify

The HR team were spending most of their time on candidates who were never going to be hired.

Xneelo is a B2B technology company based in Cape Town, South Africa. Their HR team was drowning in applications for sales and marketing roles, spending hours on manual screening and preliminary interviews with candidates who were never going to make it past the first round. The process was eating time the team did not have.

Xneelo provides hosting and web infrastructure services to business customers across South Africa. Growing the commercial team meant hiring for sales and marketing roles where the volume of inbound applications was consistently high, but the proportion of genuinely qualified candidates was not. The HR team was filtering through large numbers of resumes and running preliminary phone screens with applicants who did not meet the basic requirements of the role.

There was no standardized method to evaluate skills before that phone screen happened. Every hiring manager applied their own criteria, which meant candidates were assessed differently depending on who was reviewing them. Shortlists were inconsistent, decisions were harder to justify, and the time the team spent on early-stage screening had grown to the point where it was crowding out everything else.

With several roles open simultaneously and no structure to accelerate the front end of the process, filling positions was taking far longer than the business needed.

“We were spending hours every week screening people who were never right for the role. There was no way to know that until we had already invested the time.”

Human Resource Specialist, Xneelo

How Testlify was implemented

Assessments that filtered on skill first were integrated into the tools the team already used.

Xneelo started with Testlify’s pre-built assessments for sales and marketing roles, evaluating candidates on communication, problem-solving, and product understanding before any phone screen took place. For roles where the day-to-day requirements were more specific, hiring managers worked with Testlify to build custom assessments based on real tasks the role would involve, giving the team a clearer read on job readiness from the start.

Testlify was integrated directly into Xneelo’s applicant tracking system. Recruiters could send assessments, track completions, and review results without switching between platforms. The entire early-stage workflow ran in one place, cutting the coordination overhead that had added friction to every hire.

Within one month, the results were visible. Qualified candidates reaching the interview stage increased by 40%. The HR team recovered 15 hours per week previously spent on manual screening. Roles that had been open were filled, and hiring managers had performance data on every candidate before a conversation started.

“Within weeks we could see the difference in the quality of candidates coming through. The team finally had time to focus on the people who were actually worth hiring.”

Human Resource Specialist, Xneelo