AI is here to revolutionize how you think about productivity

Leave the 24/7 grind in 2023. Forget “hustle harder;” it’s time to do less and achieve more.

Sound counterintuitive? In today’s hyper-competitive talent landscape, it’s tempting to try to squeeze every ounce of effort out of your recruiting team. But what if the real key to unlocking higher productivity and landing top talent lies not in working harder but in working smarter?

This isn’t a productivity hack. It’s a radical shift in mindset that encourages you to embrace technology as a strategic partner, not just a glorified filing cabinet. It’s about leveraging cutting-edge tools like generative AI and conversational AI chatbots to tackle the repetitive tasks that slow your recruiters and sales reps down. And it’s about freeing your team up for what they do best: building relationships and making meaningful connections with candidates and clients.

Imagine a world where AI handles the heavy lifting: automating lead distribution to double your conversion rate, eliminating the chokepoint of manual candidate outreach, and tapping into the power of generative AI to identify, pre-screen, and even engage with potential hires. 

This is the future of recruiting, and it’s happening now. 

Ready to revolutionize how you think about productivity in 2024? Here’s how.

Focus on getting your recruiting team to do less, not more

Let’s face it: staffing is full of repetitive tasks – they are, in many ways, the foundation of your business. It’s impossible to grow your staffing firm without tackling monotonous to-dos, like constant candidate outreach, tireless sourcing, qualifying, vetting, and reliable lead distribution.

But you wouldn’t build a house that’s just a foundation. You’ve hired skilled relationship architects to be your recruiters, and they thrive on the vital work of making connections, building the pillars of long-term client relationships, and opening the doors of opportunity for candidates. So you don’t want them to spend all their time in the basement pouring concrete. 

How do you free up your recruiters’ time to do what they do best—build the relationships your business thrives on—while ensuring the necessary but repetitive tasks still get done? The answer lies in AI. 

With generative AI integrated directly into your ATS/CRM, you’ll have this time-saving power directly at your team’s fingertips. This will help them seamlessly offload their most repetitive tasks.  

• Keep business moving with AI-powered tools built into your ATS. With integrations between generative AI, ChatGPT, and your ATS, your team can delegate monotonous work to AI, generate submittals automatically, summarize profiles with a click of a button, and create job orders in an instant, all without ever leaving your ATS.
• AI can craft candidate outreach like a pro. With generative AI, staffing and recruiting teams finally have a tool to help with the sheer volume of candidate outreach required to keep candidates engaged and happy. Your team can tap AI to craft time-consuming email sequences to passive candidates, rewrite job descriptions, and much more.
• Get help keeping clients happy without draining team resources. AI can also help with candidate-facing communications, from pitch decks to quarterly reports to regular check-ins. 

For more in-depth tips on how to use generative AI to save your teams’ time, check out the Ultimate AI Prompt Library for Staffing and Recruiting.

Tap into AI for your next hire

Most staffing executives associate growth with new hires. If you want to get more done and your current team is at capacity, you need to increase headcount, right? Not necessarily.

With Intelligent Digital Workers (IDWs), you can harness the power of machine learning, natural language processing, and AI to tackle your team’s busy work. IDWs can act like digital assistants, supporting your team and helping them make the most of their time – taking on the work that requires a human touch.

One example of an IDW is a smart chatbot. These aren’t the first-gen chatbots that trap your contacts in repetitive loops or get stuck in the helpless shrug of “I didn’t get that. Can you repeat your question?” 

Smart AI chatbots tap into advanced technology to learn from your conversations, making them savvy enough and dynamic enough to serve as the front line in your firm’s communication. Since smart chatbots can respond dynamically to unique situations, they’re capable enough to answer prospects’ questions, vet and qualify candidates, route them to the proper recruiter, and get them scheduled for a one-on-one meeting. 

This frees up your recruiters to focus on already qualified candidates. It also means that your IDWs can hold down the fort while your recruiters sleep, meaning your firm can be available 24/7 instead of just 9-5.

Implement AI lead distribution to boost your inbound placement rate

Staffing firms come in all shapes and sizes, with different specialties, skills, and niches. The one thing that every team has in common, no matter how seasoned, no matter how technologically savvy, is challenges with lead distribution.

Manual lead distribution has been the bane of the staffing industry’s existence as long as there have been leads to generate. For many firms, their lead distribution is less a system and more a spin of the roulette wheel. It often involves a series of emails that get routed to different team members. Even in the best of circumstances, in which lead owners are clearly defined within the process, manual lead distribution is riddled with delays. 

Lead notifications get lost in email inboxes between spam messages and meeting alerts, adding hours, maybe even days to your team’s response time. When it comes to staffing, the old adage is true: “Time kills all deals.” A slow lead notification process has a heavy price tag, costing you valuable minutes, candidate experience points, and top talent.

There’s a solution. With AI-powered lead distribution, your team can connect with candidates, convert consistently, and close faster. 

AI listens for all inbound leads, automatically reroutes data, and updates candidate records in ATS. It also intelligently distributes leads to the appropriate team member, following your firm’s rules. 

With real-time notifications sent directly to chat platforms like MS Teams or Slack, your team will never miss out on a lead or fumble that crucial first response with new prospects.

Prioritize redeployment and referrals to make the most of your existing database

Another way to rethink productivity is to maximize the return on the efforts that your team has already made. Your database is chock full of talent that you’ve already spent time on, learning their needs and building valuable relationships with them. 

Skimping on redeployment is like throwing away money – and adding unnecessary labor for your team. To leverage the full value of your team’s sourcing efforts and recover hidden revenue in your ATS, boost your redeployment efforts.  

• Track redeployment rate. Paying close attention to your redeployment rate is the first step towards understanding the efficacy of your re-engagement strategy. Less than six percent of firms track their redeployment rate, meaning there’s ample opportunity to beat out the competition just by understanding where you’re at and how you can improve.
• Maintain regular communication with employees. Keep your team top of mind with candidates at every stage of their journey with you. 
• Automated redeployment campaigns. Constant communication is tricky to achieve manually. Tap the automation to build out redeployment campaigns and rely on generative AI to help you improve and refine messaging.

Another way to maximize the efforts that your team has already put into your existing candidates is to prioritize referrals. Each happy candidate can introduce your recruiters to their talented friends. 

• Adopt or expand your referral program. A robust referral program turns all of your existing candidates into recruiters for you. This can exponentially increase the ROI of your recruiting efforts.
• Incentivize referrals. Offering dual referral bonuses (rewards to both referrers and the friends they bring in) creates a win-win situation for your existing candidates and the friends they bring in.
• Adopt an automated referral management program (ARM). An automated referral management program like Staffing Referrals can not only save you time but can bring more talent into the fold. ARMs can boost candidate referral rates by up to 57%.

Rethink your tech stack 

The staffing industry has gone through many tech revolutions in the past decade. Firms have gone from email-focused outreach to diversifying to text and social media touches to adopting a fully multi-channel approach. Firms have moved from spreadsheet-based data management to robust ATS/CRM systems. However, while most firms have drastically changed the tech they use, many haven’t changed the way they think about technology.

“Due to advancements in AI, clients and candidates are feeling the impact of a more personalized experience in all aspects of their lives,” said Whitney Gerrity, VP of Technology & Digital Innovation, LHH Recruitment Solutions. “This undoubtedly will lead them to expect the same elevated and personal experience when dealing with a staffing firm. Organizations can differentiate themselves by being early adopters of AI to provide clients and candidates with a more efficient, effective, and engaging process of finding the best match for their talent needs.”

Recruiting and sales teams tend to think of their tech as passive tools that they need to shoehorn into their existing workflows. This means that, while the tech may change, the way recruiters work and the way they implement technology often remains static. 

However, today’s leading-edge tech has become more collaborative. With tools like generative AI, your technology can be a creative partner in solving efficiency problems and remaining agile in an ever-changing market – but only if you and your teams think outside the box in terms of what you envision your tech can do. 

To truly change your relationship with tech, you have to change the way you think about what your technology can do for you. Explore these questions with your team:

• Where do you observe change resistance in your team regarding adapting to new technologies or changing their workflows?
• Explore the root of this resistance. What underlying beliefs or fears are tied to adopting new technology? How can leadership address the real employee needs that drive change avoidance?
• Identify passive tools in your tech stack. Like a passive employee, a passive tool waits to be told what to do. Explore how more active solutions, such as automation, artificial intelligence, or machine learning might improve your workflow. 
• What solutions have been in your tech stack for a few years? Are they holding you back or do they continue to evolve as you do? Examine critically how well they are working for you and if they are adapting to technological changes.
• Identify any gaps between your current tech strategy and your ideal. Are there any models in your peers’ tech stacks that you’d like to emulate? What is flowing? What could use an update?

After you explore these questions with your team, develop a concrete action plan for sparking a shift in your team’s mindset towards technology. See what innovative solutions arise.

Want more on how to accelerate your recruiting productivity? Check out our blog post on getting more done with Staffing Engine and Bullhorn.