[Podcast] Industry Spotlight | Maurice Fuller – President at StaffingTec – AI Trends in Staffing and Recruiting to Increase Autonomy, Efficiency, and Experience

Maurice Fuller [00:00:00]:
AI is only going to make that marketing role more and more important to identify potential customers and candidates, to engage with those candidates effectively, and to provide that overall experience. Oftentimes, marketing plays a really important role in seeing the big picture of how the entire staffing firm is delivering their services and delivering that experience. And so the tools that marketing has available to us are increasingly infused with AI and with automation, just like our staffing firms are. And so it’s going to make marketing more powerful, more important, and more strategic in the operations of the staffing firm. And so that’s why I want to specifically call it out, because that role is becoming more and more prominent within staffing firms. And you’re seeing that as evidenced by the growth of all the third party marketing firms that have emerged over the last decade within the staffing industry.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:01]:
Hi, I’m Kortney Harmon, director of industry relations at Crelate. Over the past decade, I’ve trained thousands of frontline recruiters and have worked with hundreds of business owners and executives to help their firms and agencies grow. This is the full desk Experience, a crelate original podcast where we will be talking about growth blockers across your people, processes and technologies. Welcome to another episode of the full Desk Experience.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:37]:
Welcome back to another episode of the full Desk Experience. Industry Spotlight this is part two of our conversation with Maurice Fuller. In the first half of the show, we explored the potential of artificial intelligence and its impact on the staffing and recruiting industry. We also began diving into Maurice’s list of top ten AI trends to watch out for. Listen in as we wrap up the remaining AI tech trends and what you need to know for the talent industry for the years to come. Let’s talk about the next one. Let’s talk about staffing AI platforms overall. Talk to me about what the impact is going to be on talent businesses with those AI platforms.

Maurice Fuller [00:02:18]:
Yeah, so the way I think about staffing cloud platforms, it’s the combination of all the technologies that you are using, all of which is in the cloud to deliver your services. So at the core of it, you have your ATS and then you have different technologies that integrate with your ATS. And so more and more we are going to have AI technologies that plug in to our ATS. The ATS itself, all the ATS providers are developing increasingly with AI technologies, and also we have solutions that are being developed by third party providers that plug into that and integrate into it. So it’s the complete integration of all of the different technologies that you’re using to deliver your services, which increasingly will be AI infused and AI solutions to deliver services.

Kortney Harmon [00:03:17]:
How do you think that’s going to change for those people in operations that are running their staffing firms now? How does it look different for them? Because I think we try to plug in, it’s coming from an ATS that has an open API. How does that change for those staffing leaders? Or what does that look like in the future for that platform?

Maurice Fuller [00:03:37]:
Earlier we talked about hyper automation and how hyper automation is driving real productivity gains. But what I see happening, I’m telling all of our clients, look, you should be steadily investing in automation. This is a high ROI return on investment of your efforts and money investments. But we’re at the stage now where AI is coming very rapidly right behind that. And so we’re getting really close to a crossover point where the investments in AI are going to match the return on investments in automation. I think we’re very close to that, like within six months of that point. And so you will never stop investing in automation because the rules based aspect of this computing is super important. The ROI that we’re going to start to see on investments in AI will exceed those of the investments in automation.

Maurice Fuller [00:04:37]:
And so more and more of the solutions that we bolt on to our overall cloud platform will be AI driven. And so from a recruitment standpoint, it means higher levels of efficiency and automation and improving the overall experience, higher speed, enabling us to work at a higher level of value added. I think that’s the key point that I’m trying to make, is that if anything, when we’re in the staffing technology business, it’s always a struggle to justify ROI and showing the customer the ROI that they’re receiving. But if anything, with AI, it’s going to become even more clear that the customers are seeing significant ROI in their investments.

Kortney Harmon [00:05:21]:
Amazing. You talked a few times already about operations, so I think that leads us to our next one. It’s really top of mind and kind of where we focus on the podcast is really about process and operations and data. Talk to me about data powered operations. How do you think that’s going to change with the course of AI?

Maurice Fuller [00:05:40]:
Right. Any staffing firm that has ever started automating their business, they realize immediately within a few automations, hey, our data is not very clean, we’ve got to focus on cleaning up our data. And this is the first step in the awareness of building a data driven staffing firm is running these automations. And so usually within the first dozen automation staffing firm leaders realize, okay, we’ve got to focus on cleaning up our data. And they take steps to do that, oftentimes using automation tools or third party tools, and then running these automations and setting up processes and procedures to maintain clean data. Historically, the ATS has just been this gigantic repository where we throw information in and we haven’t really paid enough attention to data hygiene. It hasn’t really mattered. But now when we’re running workflows and sequences, we can’t run those effectively without clean data.

Maurice Fuller [00:06:43]:
So I think about data, the data within our system and algorithms, taking advantage of that data to streamline and automate the operations of our business, and using tools like workflows, sequences, low code programming, direct programming to APIs in order to facilitate that automation. So the key to streamlining workflows throughout the entire business is the data. And the data is a single source of truth. And if you look at any other industry, take banking for example. I mean, if you’re a bank, your data has to be incredibly accurate in order for the business to operate right. If you look at an organization like LinkedIn, or indeed those companies are entirely powered by data and algorithms, or if you think about something like Expedia or Booking.com, where they’re doing travel reservations, again, the data has to be extremely accurate. The same thing is increasingly happening within staffing organizations. Our data has to be extremely accurate in order for us to automate our staffing organizations.

Maurice Fuller [00:07:57]:
If you want to get to 100 automations running your business, your data has to be incredibly clean and accurate.

Kortney Harmon [00:08:05]:
Amazing. So true. And oftentimes that’s the end result of us going so busily into our day. So I love that. Data is huge in decision making and knowing where we need to take our business. Moving on to our next topic, you talked about intelligent applications. Talk to me about what that means and how would you define an intelligent application. And maybe what you’re seeing, it’s really.

Maurice Fuller [00:08:29]:
Interesting how quickly these intelligent applications are emerging. So I want to talk a little bit about Microsoft. Microsoft was really one of the first companies to recognize the importance of these large language models, and they partnered up with OpenAI early on to bring these capabilities to all of their customers. And now they have added these copilots, which is the form of these intelligent applications, to all of their applications. So what is a copilot? A copilot is a tool that enables us to streamline different facets of our work. So, for example, if you think about the copilots within Microsoft Outlook, and it can help draft an initial email for you, it can help you look at a whole string of emails and kind of summarize what the gist of the email is. And we’re only at the very beginning stages of these copilots. It’s like Windows 1.0, it’s very primitive at this point, but when you look at it and where it can possibly lead with higher and higher levels of intelligence in these large language models, it’s going to enable us to streamline more and more facets of our work.

Maurice Fuller [00:09:49]:
And what’s so exciting is that it’s going to enable us to get more and more into kind of a flow state where we’re operating at a higher level of efficiencies too much. There’s a lot of disjointed activities between the different applications, but the AI is going to help us sort of seamlessly bridge the different applications and operate more efficiently. So that’s Microsoft, that’s their copilot. It’s been available now for a few months and it’s $30 per month extra. Many ATS providers have been focusing on building copilots for their solutions that provide enhanced services. For example, taking a job description and turning that into a job posting, or perhaps creating a personalized email that reaches out to a candidate and telling them about an opportunity written in a language that aligns with their demographic, personalized to their background and their situation, to the best of our ability. Previously, if we had to write 100 personalized emails, it could take us days. But now with a click of a button, we can quickly create 100 personalized emails and send those out and generate higher response rates and a better experience with a candidate who gets an email that’s customized to them.

Maurice Fuller [00:11:13]:
So that’s where we’re beginning to see that show up is in these copilots and also intelligent applications that plug into our systems. We’re also seeing this in other areas as well. So for example, QuickBooks, I know that Intuit invested a few billion dollars into the development of their copilots and AIS. So for example, now they have the capability that you can talk to a trained tax expert or trained financial expert, or a trained accounting expert. And so if you have questions that you would normally need to talk to a specialist about, they’ve embedded answers to a lot of these questions directly into these AIs, which provides a lot of value added services. I think we’ll see that kind of capability as well. There’s a lot of different ways that we can provide value added services to our candidates and to our clients, taking advantage of large language models. I think that’s the key to survival.

Maurice Fuller [00:12:14]:
One of the keys to survival in the future is taking the services that we currently provide and reimagining them, sort of taking them to the next level in terms of the level of value that we provide to them, not only.

Kortney Harmon [00:12:29]:
Streamlining more efficient, but we’re taking the speed of our industry and putting it on steroids as well.

Maurice Fuller [00:12:36]:
Exactly.

Kortney Harmon [00:12:37]:
All right, so the next topic for you is total experience. Obviously, I’m going to let you just talk about that. I don’t even know how to ask where you’re going with this. So talk to me about the total experience of AI.

Maurice Fuller [00:12:50]:
Yeah. So if you think about a traditional staffing firm, like let’s go back 20 years, what was the experience? Well, you might have seen a primitive website, you might have seen a job board posting, but for the most part, the experience that you had with a staffing firm was the way that you engaged with that recruiter by phone and the way that you engaged with a candidate through, or the way the candidate experience was through the email communications and maybe some in person. Like if you actually went into the staffing firm office and met with the recruiter, it was entirely different. It was more kind of traditional way. Now, as staffing firms increasingly become software driven, it’s the experience that candidates have with your software. So the websites have become richer and more sophisticated and more complex. Emails, more and more are automated text messages that we send, automated. But also it’s the conversational experience.

Maurice Fuller [00:13:54]:
Right. We talked about conversational AI. And so the experience is really every way that you experience as a human being, every way that you experience that staffing firm, part of it being software, part of it being email, text messages, the website. And so it’s so important that as staffing firm operational leaders, we pay a lot of attention to what is that experience like, from the way that they experience the job posting and the read it, respond to it, the way they respond with their resume, how we autorespond and acknowledge the receipt of the resume, how we get in touch with them, how we interview them, how we follow up, how we keep them apprised of the status of their application, let them know about interviews, follow up on interviews. That forms the total experience. Just like when we interact with Amazon, we have a way that we perceive the experience with Amazon or any other SaaS experience. So more and more staffing firms are going to be like SaaS firms, right, where the service that we’re providing is like a SaaS kind of service with more and more automation. And it’s more and more of a software experience.

Maurice Fuller [00:15:16]:
And for many staffing firm leaders, that’s really different because they’ve come up and grown up in an era where everything was done through human beings and now they’re having to rethink what that is like, providing more and more of a software experience. And so we rely really heavily on our vendors, ATS vendors and other partners to help provide that experience. But a lot of that we have to design ourselves in terms of the way we put that entire cloud solution in place and deliver the entirety of that experience to the candidates.

Kortney Harmon [00:15:48]:
Very interesting. And part of that experience goes to kind of your next point is really the AI marketing. We’ve already probably seen some of those pieces, but talk to me what you think that’s going to look like in the future here. Yeah.

Maurice Fuller [00:16:01]:
So building on what I mentioned before, where staffing firms are becoming increasingly like SaaS services, within SaaS organizations, marketing is a really important function to make the sales team more efficient, to drive awareness with customers. And AI is only going to make that marketing role more and more important to identify potential customers and candidates, to engage with those candidates effectively, and to provide that overall experience. Oftentimes, marketing plays a really important role in seeing the big picture of how the entire staffing firm is delivering their services and delivering that experience. And so the tools that marketing has available to us are increasingly infused with AI and with automation, just like our staffing firms are. And so it’s going to make marketing more powerful, more important and more strategic in the operations of the staffing firm. And so that’s why I want to specifically call it out, because that role is becoming more and more prominent within staffing firms. And you’re seeing that as evidenced by the growth of all the third party marketing firms that have emerged over the last decade within the staffing industry.

Kortney Harmon [00:17:20]:
It’s very interesting and we’ve seen that firsthand. Again, only going to accelerate with all good things also comes something that we have to be cautious of. So that leads us to our next topic where it’s responsible AI. We’ve been seeing a lot of AI topics when it comes to bias and stuff that is actually hitting our legislative branches. So talk to me about responsible AI and what that means for our industry.

Maurice Fuller [00:17:47]:
Yeah, it’s imperative that we think about AI and we implement it and run it in a safe and responsible way. It’s been built using ethical principles. It’s fair, it’s accountable, it’s transparent. So more often than not, staffing firms will be acquiring AI capabilities from third parties. Whether these capabilities emerge through the ATS or third party products. It’s important to be aware of the ways that AI can cause problems. For example, bias is often mentioned. It was interesting because I was recently looking at a demo of an AI product for staffing recruiting, and it actually had a button that you could push that would debias the responses.

Maurice Fuller [00:18:39]:
And a lot of this has to do with the way that the AI is trained. Oftentimes we’re working with AI and we have no idea how that AI was trained. Right. We don’t know what data was used to train the AI. So we’re relying really heavily on the vendors that we’re working with to provide solutions that are safe and responsible and free of bias. And so we need to ask really good questions of the vendors that we’re working with, and we need to pay attention to these things. So when we implement AI and we see issues with it that relate to safe and responsible AI, we can call these out. And I was working with a large staffing firm, and the CEO asked this question around AI.

Maurice Fuller [00:19:26]:
Is there anyone that’s actually auditing this AI to verify that it’s free of bias, that it’s operating in a responsible way, it’s operating in a way that’s legally compliant? And I went back to the vendor and I asked them this question and they said, no, not at this time. So I think for staffing from leaders that are very cautious, are very cognizant of the risks that are involved in running this, regulatory risks and compliance risks and risks relative to lawsuits, particularly large staffing firms that have a lot at stake. I think they’re going to be paying a lot of attention to this area to ensure that they’re not exposing their staffing firms to lawsuits and other forms of risk that could be expensive.

Kortney Harmon [00:20:17]:
It’s kind of scary, and that’s interesting to think of it from that perspective of who’s monitoring the AI, we see it a lot more. And I was just at Massachusetts, the staffing conference, and there was a lot of discussions on what’s going on in the legislative branches about AI. And I’m sure that’s only, we’re only at the tip of the iceberg for that. We only have two more topics. Maurice, two more of your ten. So we’ll go through. The second to last one that you have here is autonomous staffing. Talk to me about what that looks like with the future of our industry.

Maurice Fuller [00:20:50]:
So this is one that we’ve had on our list for many years, and the idea is that we have staffing firms that fill orders autonomously without any recruiter intervention at all. And we’ve had staffing firms now that are doing this, that are running fully autonomously, that are filling anywhere from 60% to 80% of their orders without recruiter involved at all. Now, it could be the recruiter might have been involved early on to do an initial interview and set them up properly within the system, and then from that point forward, they are continuously placed over and over again without recruiters being directly involved. So when I talk to certain technologists that are building solutions for the staffing industry, they’re feeling increasingly confident that large parts of the staffing and recruiting process can now be fully automated, that we’re going to be able to fill orders with brand new candidates without recruiters directly involved in interviewing those candidates. The technology handles every aspect of that. With that in mind, we believe that within ten years, 30% of all orders in the staffing industry will be filled autonomously without recruiters involved at all, just purely through technology. And so we’ll see a rise over the next several years, more and more orders being filled without recruiters. And also a higher percentage of the work that recruiters are currently doing will be performed using technologies.

Maurice Fuller [00:22:31]:
And we already see this today, like, if you go to upwork, Upwork doesn’t have any recruiters at all. It’s just entirely software based and other services like that, even something like fiver. Right. There’s no recruiters that are involved, and yet the technology facilitates buyers and sellers meeting and essentially creating staffing processes to support the hiring manager. It’s not necessarily as personalized as you might like it to be, but you can imagine upwork and fiver becoming increasingly personalized with some of this AI technology, which streamlines the connection between the hiring manager and the candidate.

Kortney Harmon [00:23:11]:
You said 30% in ten years. Is that what you said?

Maurice Fuller [00:23:15]:
30% in ten years? Yeah. And I would say it’s less than 10% today.

Kortney Harmon [00:23:19]:
Okay, that was my next question.

Maurice Fuller [00:23:21]:
And 30%, I think, is really conservative. When I talk to technology leaders, they ask me, like, why are you only saying 30%? We think it’s going to be much higher. And that is because the industry has always been kind of slow to adopt new technologies, so it’ll be an accelerated curve.

Kortney Harmon [00:23:38]:
Very interesting. Last but not least, Maurice. AI driven firms. What is AI embedded across our operations and make our staffing and recruiting firms look like for the future?

Maurice Fuller [00:23:51]:
There are people who are envisioning and are designing from the ground up staffing firms that are entirely driven by AI. So what does that really mean? So you have parts of the staffing firm that are running with traditional computing, traditional rules based computing. Then you have accelerated computing that’s filling in a lot of these gaps with large language models. So people who are thinking about this are thinking, where are all the different opportunities where we can take advantage of large language models and chat GPT to plug all these different gaps where human beings have to be directly involved in that process? And what would an entirely AI driven staffing firm actually look like? So I would say this concept is on the drawing board, and people are, in certain areas, are very seriously thinking about this and putting these kind of operations together. And I’m quite confident in the next couple of years we’re going to see staffing firms that are operating in a fully autonomous way, that are heavily driven by AI, that are filling orders with zero human involvement at all. It’s kind of conceptual at this point, but like I said very early on, AI fills a lot of these technological gaps that we couldn’t address previously with rules based computing. And it’s kind of the missing piece of the puzzle that’s going to help us automate the vast majority of staffing operations. And what this ultimately means is that recruiters are going to become much more productive than they are today.

Maurice Fuller [00:25:30]:
Over the next ten years, we could easily see recruiters becoming three and four X more productive a decade from now, because so much of what we’re currently doing is being handled by AI. And this is going to enable us to spend the vast majority of our time focusing on the best parts of the job, advising candidates, consulting with them, negotiating with them, helping them with their careers, and just bringing significantly more value to all the stakeholders that we serve.

Kortney Harmon [00:26:02]:
Crazy to think where we can be in ten short years from now. Maurice, I don’t have anything else. You have been a wealth of information, and you have my brain racing, which I’m sure all of our listeners here, their brain is racing as well. Is there anything else that you want to highlight that we didn’t go over thus far? Because we covered a lot?

Maurice Fuller [00:26:21]:
I would like to mention one more trend, and that is something that Gartner has pointed out, which are these kind of business procurement bots. I haven’t seen these yet, but Gartner, which is at the forefront of a lot of trends, is talking about these bots that could spin out of purchasing. So, for example, if a big organization is looking for staffing and recruiting services, it might have these bots go out onto the Internet and start looking at all of our websites and looking for potential suppliers. And if a supplier looks like it might be one that they want to do business with, it might issue or train or have a bot connect with that business and engage with that business to say, hey, we’re looking for a supplier with particular capabilities and engage in a conversation with that supplier. This is where marketing plays a really big role because someone or some system needs to respond to these business bots that are going to emerge. I think this is a very valid thing that we’re going to see all of a sudden out of nowhere. If you’re running a staffing firm, you’re going to have an encounter with one of these bots and you’re going to say, what is this? Right? And that will be the beginning of more and more and more of these business procurement bots coming into existence that are working on behalf of our clients. So it’s something to pay attention to.

Maurice Fuller [00:27:52]:
And when you see the first one arrive, don’t be surprised. But it also tells me that your website is going to be very critical and that, let’s say you’re Microsoft, for example, and you’re looking for new suppliers in staffing. You might go out looking at all kinds of different suppliers and vendors, and you might size up vendors based on their website and based on their LinkedIn presence and based on their job postings and decide if this is a vendor that you want to do business with and provide them the opportunity to work with your firm. So your external presence, your web presence, is going to become more and more important to obtaining business again. I would say AI is going to be just a huge generator of value going forward and it’s going to generate tremendous wealth in the next 25 years. So it’s a really exciting time to be in the industry. But the key is to, if you have a career right now, is to really think deeply about how to leverage and take advantage of AI in your own career. If you’re running a staffing firm, think deeply about how AI is going to affect your firm and how you can get ahead of this to survive and thrive in the years ahead.

Maurice Fuller [00:29:08]:
And if you’re not paying a lot of attention to this, either from a career standpoint or from a business standpoint, it could really be massively disruptive to your situation.

Kortney Harmon [00:29:18]:
Maurice, that was incredible. You have truly painted a vivid picture about how AI can really revolutionize our industry, from intelligent applications to responsible AI. As always, your insights are truly valuable. I am sure our listeners are going to get a lot out of this as well. We’ll include your LinkedIn profile, as always, in our show notes for people to connect with you. So thank you so much for joining us. Once again, we really, truly appreciate you.

Maurice Fuller [00:29:49]:
Yeah, thank you very much, Kortney. I wish everybody the very best in.

Kortney Harmon [00:29:53]:
Their careers, as always, for our listeners, thank you for joining the full desk experience, industry spotlight, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed this episode. Don’t forget to, like, subscribe and share with your colleagues. Until next time, happy recruiting.

Kortney Harmon [00:30:09]:
I’m Kortney Harmon with Krillate. Thanks for joining the full desk experience. Please feel free to submit any questions for next session to [email protected] or ask us live next session if you enjoyed our show.

Kortney Harmon [00:30:24]:
Be sure to subscribe to our podcast.

Kortney Harmon [00:30:26]:
Wherever you listen, and sign up to attend future events that happen once a month. Close.