After eight and a half amazing and rewarding years at Bullhorn, I recently joined Staffing Engine to lead our sales team. The decision was not an easy one, as there are tons of exciting and groundbreaking technology companies out there…both in the recruiting ecosystem and outside of it. I talked with many of them. So why did I choose Staffing Engine?
An Established and Experienced Team
A primary driver for deciding to join Staffing Engine is the leadership team that was already in place. In 2015 Ted Guggenheim, Andrew Kimmell, and Mike Hickman together co-founded TextUs and successfully brought TextUs to market. Collectively they designed and delivered the best-in-class text messaging platform for staffing and recruiting.
Last January the three of them, along with the fourth co-Founder Jay Cutler, created Staffing Engine. I worked closely with Jay for many years at Bullhorn, where he was instrumental in vetting potential partnerships and was highly regarded by both customers and Bullhorn staff alike.
Interestingly, Ted had tried recruiting me to work for TextUs for many years. The timing just wasn’t quite right despite knowing TextUs was an incredible solution that was transforming how staffing agencies communicate with candidates.
This time, however, I had an opportunity to get in early at a start-up that Ted is convinced has unlimited upside. Between the team and the incredible tech, I just couldn’t turn down the opportunity!
Introducing Recruiting Acceleration AI to The Staffing Industry
Most of the companies I spoke with about a new opportunity were very well established, had big teams and departments already in place, and had already made their first $1M+ in revenue. Staffing Engine did not. Did I mention that I love challenges?
For starters, the company is only a year old. The first year was dedicated to getting the right team in place, creating exciting technology, and integrating with leading tech platforms (more on that shortly).
Perhaps most Importantly, Staffing Engine’s investor and tech partner, OneReach.ai, is an award-winning conversational AI platform so much of the heavy lifting was already in place.
We just needed to take this incredible AI platform and customize it for certain intricacies and workflows desperately needed by staffing and recruiting agencies. And then build out our integrations with leading the platforms like Bullhorn, Salesforce, MS Teams, and Slack. The result is the world’s first Recruiting Acceleration AI Platform that is Staffing Engine.
Now, if you ask someone about recruitment automation, they probably know that you are talking about tools like Herefish and Sense.
And when you hear communication, you think of TextUs and CloudCall.
But what about when someone asks you what recruitment acceleration AI platform you’re using? The answer is Staffing Engine.
Outside of the recruiting industry, conversational AI has already taken off to help sales teams book more meetings, fill more pipeline, and close more deals. Companies are investing millions of dollars into conversational AI and chatbot technologies like Drift. In fact, 50% of businesses plan to spend more on chatbots than mobile apps, and that is only expected to increase in the coming years. So why hasn’t the recruitment industry been taken by storm?
Building Integrations to the Right Solutions
Imagine a perfect candidate lands on your web page, or starts following you on Facebook or Instagram. They want to get in touch with a recruiter, and they are a millennial who is used to using chat and messaging, which is their preferred method of communication over the phone.
For most agencies today, they either provide this candidate the option of a quick application, they allow them to apply directly to a job, or they let them fill out a form while they wait (hope?) for a recruiter to reach back out to them.
What if that request slips through the cracks?
Or it takes 24 hours for a recruiter or sales rep to reach back out to them, and in that time they went to another staffing agency’s website? And that website had something interesting embedded in it.
The candidate was immediately welcomed by an automated chat solution that qualified them as in fact being a top candidate. And that candidate decided they wanted to talk to a live recruiter, and instantaneously was put in touch with them.
And guess what? That internal recruiter didn’t have to learn to adopt any new technology.
Because they were sitting in MS Teams (or Slack), and immediately could talk to the candidate on the agency’s website in real-time… and ALL that critical back and forth communication was captured and stored live, in real-time, in the agency’s ATS/CRM.
THAT’S the value of recruitment acceleration AI… And that’s the premium that Staffing Engine has placed on building integrations into leading CRM platforms like Bullhorn and Salesforce, leading collaboration tools like Teams and Slack, and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. And we’re just getting started!
Want to Learn More?
While chatbots and conversational AI are one piece of the pie, our team has some incredible ideas that we are already putting into action that will change the way recruiters and salespeople interact with their candidates and clients.
As a start-up, we are hungry for forward-thinking recruiting agencies that will be more than just customers. We’re looking for true, tech-forward partners that like to learn, brainstorm, pilot out new ideas, and grow with us. Reach out to me if you’d like to learn more about how we are defining Recruiting Acceleration AI!
P.S. We’re here to help!
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