Top 7 Recruitment & Screening Calls for CPA Firms

If you run hiring at a CPA firm, you already know the math is against you. The US lost roughly 340,000 accounting practitioners between 2019 and 2024, CPA exam candidates dropped 33% since 2016, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 115,300 annual openings for accountants and auditors through 2035. When a staff or senior accountant role opens, you're competing with every other firm for a shrinking pool, and the candidates who are any good get multiple offers within days. The bottleneck usually isn't sourcing. It's the screening call itself. Somebody has to pick up the phone, ask the same fifteen questions, and write down the answers, over and over, while busy season grinds on. That's where recruitment and screening call tools earn their keep. Some run AI phone screens around the clock. Others automate video or skills assessments, or handle the background checks that come after a good screen. We've compared seven options that CPA firms can realistically put to work, from managed AI calling campaigns to screening platforms built for high-volume hiring. Here's what each one actually does, what it costs where pricing is public, and where it fits.

#1 My AI Call Center — Calling starts at 9¢ per connected minute, tiered by volume; most campaigns add a one-time setup and flat monthly management fee, quoted before launch. First campaign review is free.

My AI Call Center is a done-for-you managed outbound calling service, not software you have to learn and staff. You buy campaigns, and their team runs them for you, each one scoped around a single clear goal, whether that's screening candidates, confirming interview attendance, or re-engaging past applicants. For CPA firms hiring in volume, the Recruitment & Screening campaign type is the fit: structured calls against your approved candidate list, with outcomes routed back into the CRM and scheduling tools you already run. Hot candidates transfer to your team live or land in your CRM with disposition codes and per-call notes attached. What sets the service apart is list discipline and honest reporting. They only call approved, permissioned, or reviewed lists, and they check list source and consent records before any campaign launches. Bought lists without clear permission records get flagged and, in most cases, declined. They'll tell you plainly if a list won't support the campaign before you spend anything. On compliance, AI voices are treated as artificial voices under the TCPA, with prior express consent required, AI disclosure on every call, keyword opt-outs honored immediately, and DNC requests carried into your client records. You approve the script, escalation path, and opt-out handling before anything launches. Pricing is refreshingly simple: calling starts at 9 cents per connected minute, tiered by volume, with the rate locked for the campaign. Most campaigns add a one-time setup and a flat monthly management fee, both quoted before launch, and there are no per-seat charges or platform bills. The first campaign review is free, so you know the full number before approving anything. For a multi-office CPA firm that needs to screen fifty tax-season candidates without pulling a senior off client work, that's a campaign you can budget in one conversation.

Best for: Multi-office CPA firms and staffing teams (roughly 1-200+ staff) that want structured screening and recruitment calls run for them, without building a bigger call center.

#2 Puck — Contact for pricing

Puck runs early-stage candidate screening as a two-way conversational audio interview through its AI Recruiter. Candidates start from an SMS or email link, need no camera or app, and finish a roughly 10-minute screen whenever it suits them, which matters when you're reaching staff accountants who are interviewing on lunch breaks. According to their site, Puck's AI suggests questions and evaluation categories based on the job description, and the recruiter can modify or add their own, so a CPA firm can tailor screens to things like tax software experience or busy-season availability. After the call, Puck's AI scores the interview and returns the recording, transcript, and score to a dashboard, and a human recruiter decides who moves forward. That last part is worth noting: the AI grades, but people still make the call. Puck also includes AI resume review, a lightweight ATS, and a talent CRM, plus native integrations with Greenhouse, Ashby, and Lever. It's built for inbound-heavy, high-volume hiring, so a bespoke partner-level search may still want a more hands-on process. Pricing wasn't published in our research, so contact them directly.

Best for: Inbound-heavy CPA firm hiring teams that want candidates screened quickly without scheduling live calls.

#3 Paradox — Contact for pricing

Paradox, best known for its Olivia assistant, handles screening, scheduling, and follow-ups through text-based conversation on top of your existing ATS. For a CPA firm posting a staff accountant role and getting a flood of applications, Olivia can text knockout questions, schedule interviews, and send reminders without a recruiter touching a calendar. According to their site, the philosophy is replacing hiring friction with conversations, which in practice means candidates interact by text rather than filling out forms. Paradox integrates with major HR systems including Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle Taleo, Greenhouse, and iCIMS, and it also handles onboarding automation such as document collection. It's built for high-volume hiring where response speed wins candidates, and it shows up consistently in comparisons of conversational AI screening tools. Note that the screening is text-first rather than voice-first, so if your candidate pool responds better to a phone call than an SMS thread, that's a real difference from the phone-based tools on this list. Pricing wasn't published in our research.

Best for: CPA firms and staffing teams doing high-volume hiring where speed of first response decides outcomes.

#4 Classet — Starts at $249/month billed annually ($349 month-to-month), including 50 completed interviews; no per-seat or integration fees.

Classet is an AI phone screening solution built for high-volume hiring, with its AI voice recruiter, Joy, calling candidates within seconds of application and running structured phone interviews around the clock. According to their site, Joy screens in 25+ languages and can handle 150 applicants in under 10 minutes, which is the kind of throughput that matters if your firm posts a seasonal tax-preparer role and gets a weekend surge of applications. Setup is claimed at under a day with no IT department required, and their ATS Sync connects to a large number of applicant tracking systems. The company's own data makes a timing argument: their March 2026 Candidate Experience Report found each day of delay reduces retail candidate conversion by 50 to 70%, and 55% of candidates apply outside standard weekday hours. Those figures come from retail hiring, so treat them as directional for accounting roles, but the underlying logic holds for any candidate applying to multiple employers at once. Pricing starts at $249 a month billed annually ($349 month-to-month) with 50 completed interviews included, and no per-seat or integration fees, which makes it one of the few transparently priced options on this list.

Best for: Firms that need instant, high-volume phone screening right after a candidate applies, especially for seasonal or support roles.

#5 Metaview — Contact for pricing

Metaview takes a different angle on screening: instead of phone calls, its Application Review product evaluates every inbound applicant against an Ideal Candidate Profile generated from the job post and refined by every accept and reject decision your team makes. The closed feedback loop is the differentiator. When your recruiters reject 30 candidates for the same reason, the criteria tighten for the next batch automatically, rather than staying frozen like a static keyword filter. For a CPA firm drowning in resumes for a staff accountant posting, that self-calibration is the appeal. According to their site, Metaview provides plain-language reasoning behind every evaluation, with full edit control, built-in fraud detection on by default, and native ATS sync with Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, Teamtailor, and others. You can add custom AI columns for criteria like location fit or domain experience, which is useful for weighting public accounting experience or specific software skills. It's application review rather than a screening call, so it sits upstream of the phone screen in your funnel. If your only need is parsing resumes into searchable fields inside an existing ATS, Metaview is more product than you need. Pricing wasn't published in our research.

Best for: CPA firms running high-volume inbound applications where screening criteria should sharpen with every hiring cycle.

#6 HireVire — Essentials $39/month, Professional $99/month, Agency $199/month (all billed annually); free trial available.

HireVire is an automated screening platform built around asynchronous responses: candidates answer structured questions by video, audio, or file upload, eliminating the initial live screening call entirely. According to their site, it supports AI transcription in 90+ languages, requires no login for candidates, integrates with 5,000+ apps via Zapier, and includes custom branding and automated email workflows. For a CPA firm, the practical use is sending a short set of questions to every applicant and reviewing recorded answers in a batch, on your schedule, instead of playing phone tag across a week. It's also one of the most affordable full-featured options we found, with published pricing starting at $39 a month billed annually, a $99 Professional tier, and a $199 Agency tier, plus a free trial. The trade-off is depth: HireVire's own materials note that some advanced features are limited to higher tiers, native integrations are thinner than enterprise tools, and analytics on the Essentials plan are basic. Asynchronous video also has a known dropout problem; Classet's research found video screening carries a 42% dropout rate in retail contexts, so expect some candidates to abandon the exercise. Still, for structured screening at a small firm's budget, it's a legitimate option.

Best for: Growing CPA firms and small recruiting teams that want structured, asynchronous screening at a low monthly cost.

#7 Checkr — Contact for pricing

Checkr covers the stage that comes after a good screen: background and identity checks. According to the 2026 comparison research we reviewed, Checkr delivers a modern approach to employment screening, combining automation, compliance tools, and a mobile-friendly candidate portal that simplifies the process for applicants. For CPA firms, where hires handle sensitive client financial data and professional credentials matter, running FCRA-compliant background checks is a standard part of the hiring workflow rather than an optional extra. The same research notes Checkr's strengths in automated workflows and built-in compliance, along with a G2 rating of 4.3 out of 5. The honest limitation is flexibility: the platform's heavy automation and standardized workflows may offer limited flexibility for organizations needing highly tailored or complex screening programs. For most CPA firms, a standard package (identity, employment verification, education, criminal history) is exactly what's needed, and standardization is a feature rather than a bug. It's also worth noting Checkr appeared in Metaview's 2026 screening platform comparison as the background and identity screening entry, covering the compliance layer the conversation-based tools don't. Pricing wasn't published in our research, so contact them for a quote.

Best for: CPA firms that need scalable, compliant background and identity checks as the final stage of their screening process.

Picking the right screening approach for your CPA firm comes down to where your bottleneck actually sits. If recruiters are burning hours on repetitive first-round calls against a candidate list you already trust, a managed option like My AI Call Center lets you hand that off entirely: campaigns scoped around one clear goal, consent-checked lists, calls starting at 9 cents per connected minute, and outcomes routed straight into your CRM. If you'd rather own the tooling, Puck and Classet run AI phone screens at volume, Paradox handles it by text, Metaview sharpens your application review, HireVire covers asynchronous screening on a small budget, and Checkr closes the loop with compliant background checks. Whatever you choose, the talent math from the intro hasn't changed: candidates in this market don't wait. The firms that screen first, screen consistently, and document every outcome are the ones that fill seats before their competitors return the first voicemail. Start by defining the one outcome you need from the call, then pick the tool or service built to deliver exactly that.

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