Note taker for recruiting agencies: intake calls, phone screens, debriefs and offer calls

A note taker for a recruiting agency records the calls the work runs on — the intake where a client describes the role, the phone screen where a candidate talks through their background, the debrief where the client reacts to a candidate, the call where an offer is made — so you can listen rather than type. Dalm is a Mac app that records a call with nothing joining it. It turns speech into text on your Mac and sends the audio nowhere; the transcript itself is synced to our servers automatically, and a language model run by a third party reads it to write a summary and the documents you ask for. There is a Free plan.

What a recruiter carries between a client and a candidate

An agency recruiter, whether the firm calls itself a recruiting or a staffing agency, works between two sides that rarely hear each other directly. The client tells you what the role really needs, what the team is like and where the budget stops; the candidate tells you what they have done, what they want next and what would make them turn an offer down. Most of the job is carrying those words across — into a note for the client before an interview, into a prep call with the candidate, into the conversation where an offer is put — and each retelling from memory loses a little of what was actually said. What you need after every call is each side’s words as they were spoken, and a way to find them again before the next call.

On the phone, on a video call or at the client’s office

If your screens happen on the phone, start there: with the phone on speaker beside your Mac, Dalm records the call through the Mac’s microphone, the same way it records a meeting in a room — and that is how an intake at the client’s office is recorded too. On a video call it records your microphone and the sound of the call app, and nothing joins the call. When Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack or FaceTime takes the microphone, the app offers to record; a call that was never in your calendar starts with ⌃⌥M or the Meeting button. A recording made somewhere else can be brought in as a file. Step by step: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and a phone call.

Intake calls, phone screens, debriefs and offer calls: what you get after each

Dalm works out from the conversation what kind of meeting it was and puts that label at the top; you cannot pick or change it, and a conversation it cannot place is filed as a general meeting. What you get follows the label. The row below holds when the app labels a phone screen as a job interview:

The meeting	What you get after it	What it is for in your work
A phone screen with a candidate, when the app labels it a job interview	A short summary that fits on one screen, and a write-up laid out for a job interview	Where your note to the client about the candidate starts — in the candidate’s own words, checked against the transcript

A job intake call with a client about a new role, an interview debrief with the client after they meet a candidate, a call to make a verbal offer to a candidate and a reference check with someone who worked with the candidate have no label fixed in advance: each one gets the label that fits what was said in it, and the documents follow that label.

After any of them you also have the transcript and a summary written without you asking, in which each point keeps the words it came from, and a date or a person nobody named is left empty rather than guessed. Documents take one click. If you want the same write-up after every phone screen — say, why the candidate is looking, when they could start and what they asked about the role — describe it once in your own words as a template and tick the box to build it for each new meeting. A letter to the client after a call is covered on the client recap page.

Where a candidate’s words and a client’s words go

Both sides are heard on your Mac: their speech is recognised there, and none of it is ever sent anywhere as audio. The audio is deleted once the text exists. The words travel. The transcript of every call — what a candidate said about their current job, what a client said about their team — is synced to our servers automatically, with no setting that keeps it on the Mac, and a language model run by a third party reads it, with your notes, to write the summary and the documents. On our servers the text has no set expiry: it stays for as long as your account, or the agency’s workspace the meeting belongs to, exists, unless you delete it. What is kept where is set out on the privacy page.

Passing what one side said to the other

The risk in an agency is the retelling: what the candidate said reaches the client through you, and what the client said reaches the candidate the same way. In the summary, each point keeps the words it came from. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. So before a line about a candidate goes into your note to the client, you can read what they actually said around it; and before you tell a candidate what the client is after, you can check how the client put it on the intake call. What you make of a candidate, and what the client decides, stay with the people involved. Documents leave Dalm as copied text or as Markdown, Word or PDF files, and you send them.

Keeping each client, each role and each candidate apart

Tag meetings by client, by role or by candidate — each tag has a name you choose and a colour — and filter the list by tag, by person, by period or by kind of meeting. Search reads transcripts, meeting names and descriptions and the text of documents, though not your notes. Voices are not carried from one call to the next: in every meeting they are named again, the app may put a suggested name in place until you confirm it, and a name you give is kept as text. Next to your personal workspace you can be in the agency’s team; a meeting goes to the workspace that was selected when its recording started, and cannot be moved later. In the agency’s workspace the whole team sees a meeting by default, and a job interview can be set to elevated or protected privacy. The app suggests the kind of meeting — or lets you pick; for every other meeting, who sees what is on the team page. When someone is removed from the team, the meetings they recorded stay with the agency, and their dictations go with them.

From the intake call to the offer call

Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. Dalm’s assistant answers questions about one meeting at a time; asking one question across all your records is in development. When the app takes a new call to be part of a series with earlier ones, what was left open last time — a reference still to come, a question about the start date — comes back in the new summary, with when it first came up and how many times since. Your calls of the same kind with different candidates count as one series, so a point left open with one candidate can be offered in a call with another. It is carried over only when the app judges it came up again; otherwise it shows as “Possibly a continuation”. Before notes go to a client, look at every carried-over point.

What to tell candidates and clients before you record

Nothing joins the call and Dalm announces nothing, so telling people you are recording is up to you; before your first meeting, the app reminds you of that. Say it at the start of a screen, before a candidate decides how much to share, at the start of an intake, where a client may talk about people on their own team, and at the start of a reference check, where the person speaking is neither your client nor your candidate. What you can tell everyone on the call is what happens to their words: the audio stays on your Mac and is deleted, and the text goes to our servers and is read by a third-party language model. Whether the law where you, the candidate or the client are lets you record, and what notice it asks for, is not something this page settles — the rules on recording consent differ by place.

When Dalm is not the right fit for a recruiting agency

• When a client or a candidate asks that the conversation not be kept by an outside service, even as text. The transcript goes to our servers, and a language model reads it.
• When you want the recording itself — to hear how a candidate answered, not only what they said. The audio is deleted once the text exists, and there is nothing to play back.
• When notes have to land in your applicant tracking system or CRM on their own. Documents leave as text, Word or PDF, and you put them there.
• When most of your calls happen on a mobile phone away from your Mac. A phone call is recorded on the Mac, through its microphone, with the phone on speaker beside it.
• When the agency works on Windows or on Intel Macs. Dalm needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later.
• When a call is very short: a recording under 100 words is not counted as a meeting.

Free for one recruiter, Team for the agency

Recording, transcripts and summaries come with the Free plan, which is a plan rather than a trial. An agency that works as a team shares one dictionary — client company names, job titles, the names candidates go by — along with templates and tags; who sees whose meetings is on the team page, and what the paid plans add is on the pricing page. Dalm needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and an account; while it is not public, the way in is the waitlist.