The Dry Run lets you roleplay a candidate through your own pipeline before anything goes live. The AI side is the real production engine — the same Qualifier, review gate, deep screen, and scoring — but nothing is sent to anyone, and nothing counts against your analytics.
Saving a campaign with Save & dry-run drops you into the Dry Run with that draft's copy loaded. You can also open Sourcing → Dry Run directly at any time.
- Pick the Desk to rehearse (it needs an active screening questionnaire with must-knows)
- Pick a Channel:
- WhatsApp chat — the candidate replies on WhatsApp and the AI screens them in-chat
- SMS → web form — candidates without WhatsApp get a link by SMS; you open the real screening form in a new tab and fill it in as the candidate
- Pick a Scenario — a coaching preset for how to play the candidate (you answer as yourself; there is no fictional persona)
- Click Start dry-run
- The cold email — if you arrived from a draft campaign, the session opens with the exact email the campaign sends, template tokens filled in the way a candidate would see them.
- The Qualifier — the basics and your must-knows are asked first, one at a time. Mismatches are flagged for your review, not knocked out, and vague answers get one polite probe, just like production.
- Your review gate — after the Qualifier, the lead lands in your real review queue. The Dry Run pauses with "Your turn as the recruiter": open the queue, approve or decline the lead the way you would any real candidate, then come back.
- The deep screen — on approval, the AI runs your full screening questionnaire.
- A real score — the answers go through the real scoring engine and come back with a qualification score and AI summary. It's not a canned demo number.
Sessions can also end the other honest ways: if you decline the lead at the gate, ask for a human (the AI escalates rather than bluffing), or reply STOP (the opt-out is honoured instantly).
For a draft campaign, the run ends in a single decision card: "Ready to launch?" with the go-live checklist inline:
- A connected, active mailbox
- An active screening questionnaire on the desk
- Must-knows configured
- Clients on file (submissions need someone to send to)
From there: Launch campaign (with a confirmation), Run another scenario, or adjust the desk's screening questions and rehearse again. (The outreach emails are managed by PlacementFlow — you can view them from the draft panel, but they aren't edited per campaign.)
Simulation candidates and conversations are tagged as simulations end to end: no emails, no WhatsApp messages, no notifications to clients, and nothing appears in your analytics or dashboards as real activity. A one-click purge removes all simulation data whenever you like.
- Runs the real screening engines against your questions — what you experience is production behaviour, not a mock.
- Scores the session with the real scoring model and shows you the genuine result.
- You approve the lead at the review gate mid-run, and only you can press Launch at the end.
- "This slot has no active screening questionnaire" — create one for the desk first; the Dry Run uses your real questions.
- "This questionnaire has no must-knows" — re-save the questionnaire in the builder with at least one must-know to enable the Qualifier gate.
- The score takes a moment — scoring runs asynchronously, same as production; the session polls until it lands.
Beyond the roleplay, the Dry Run can run a certification: each step exercises the real production systems with YOU as the counterparty, and collects evidence.
- Live probes check your foundations instantly: the cold-outreach engine connection, your mailbox (a real self-test email), your sending DNS, and text messaging.
- Text the real number from your own phone with your certification ref — the real webhook answers with your screening link, and the receipt lands on the certificate.
- Approve yourself at Needs Review → Qualifier and the real Stage-2 invitation arrives in your own inbox, sent from your own connected mailbox.
- Launch certification sends exactly ONE real cold email — to you. Your name, your personal ref in the signature, from the managed sending pool. Reply "Interested" and watch the reply classification and the automatic in-thread follow-up complete the loop.
- Go live starts real sourcing only after you have seen the whole machine work. Your trial starts here, never during certification.
Every check shows its grade: Proven (a real message round-tripped, receipt attached), Probed (live configuration check), or Rehearsed (real AI engines, simulated transport). Nothing is ever marked green without evidence.