Connecting the Dots with Bots, with Greg Symons and The Staffing Engine Team

With the launch of Blueprint for Talent Services, we had the opportunity to spend the week in Austin, TX at the SIA Executive Forum. With Blueprint’s focus on all things Salesforce, it was a pleasure running into the minds behind Staffing Engine to learn more about how they’re integrating their conversational AI bots into Salesforce. After hearing about the potential impact that Staffing Engine could have on the staffing industry, I had to schedule a demo to learn more about their tech. 

I got the opportunity to speak with Matt and Jay from the Staffing Engine Team, and from what little I saw, I was very impressed. What they showed me from their demo was what they call the first of its kind Recruiting Acceleration Platform; a highly customizable, highly sophisticated, and highly on-demand platform that combines conversational AI bots, meeting booking, and integrations (like Salesforce!) that enables a staffing firm to supercharge its operations.

I was still curious after the demo and still had some questions I wanted to ask Matt and Jay about their tech, here are the questions and the in-depth responses they gave me:

What was the problem you saw in the market that prompted you to create Staffing Engine?

We now live in an on-demand world. Instead of going to the corner for a taxi, we have an app to call a car right to us. No more driving to rent videos, everything is streaming. And now we don’t have to call each other for everything, we can just send a quick message.

But staffing firms aren’t able to create this type of on-demand experience because they’re still doing everything via emails, phone calls, and website forms.

• Website visitors have to fill out a form and wait or call you to connect with someone
• Phone tag and slow email back and forth with busy candidates kills productivity
• Forcing recruiters to work long hours and do manual routine tasks causes burnout

Each step of this old manual way of recruiting can take days to weeks and will cause candidates to look for another firm that’s easier to work with.  

At Staffing Engine, we’re on a mission to help staffing firms create an on-demand experience with candidates and clients to accelerate the recruiting process. 

• Website visitors can now engage and get connected with someone in real-time  
• Chatbots scale the number of conversations staffing firms can manage, qualify candidates with smart questions, and based on how they answer route them to the correct recruiter or salesperson
• A virtual recruiter available 24/7, speeding up routine conversations allowing recruiters to be more efficient and focus on building relationships

This new accelerated way of recruiting speeds up each step from days/weeks to minutes/hours and will create an experience that builds relationships with the top talent keeping them connected to your staffing firm.  

How does Staffing Engine fit into the tech stacks that are widely used in the industry today? Compliment/Compete, Etc?

Staffing Engine fills gaps in the staffing industry tech stack in several key spots. Or as our advisor Lauren Jones from Leap Consulting says “connecting the dots with bots!” 

We’re defining a new category of software called Recruiting Acceleration which combines conversational AI, web chatbots, live chat, meeting booking, real-time alerts, and integrations with the staffing tech stack. 

That means we connect to almost every part of the staffing tech stack to bring to life an on-demand experience for candidates and clients.

Conversational AI Chatbots live on your website, text messaging, and social media scaling the number of conversations your team can manage. They’re available 24/7 to engage people, collect qualifying information, and record everything back to the correct properties in your ATS database. 

Recruiters and salespeople can allow bots to book qualified meetings for them as well as send meeting booking links that directly integrate with Google Calendar and Outlook.

And if someone wants to talk to a real person, your team can have live-chat conversations with website visitors right from a channel in MS Teams or Slack. No new software to train your team on they can use the tools they’re familiar with.  

Your team can also stay tuned in and work faster with real-time notifications from Staffing Engine Bots as well as Bullhorn directly into MS Teams, Slack, GChat or Zoom Chat.   

As the labor market continues to tighten, how is Staffing Engine positioned to help staffing companies identify and place more candidates?

When you really break down the recruiting process, it comes down to conversations and relationships. 

As the labor market continues to tighten, staffing firms need to find ways to speed up routine conversations and enable recruiters and salespeople to focus on building relationships in their industry. 

With Staffing Engine, agencies can increase their existing team’s productivity by enabling virtual recruiting assistants to qualify and route candidates reducing repetitive tasks. At the end of the day, it’s about creating on-demand experience candidates will keep coming back for.   

What’s next for Staffing Engine?

On our mission to accelerate the recruitment process we started with the inbound strategy. Our goal was to enable staffing firms to connect with more candidates on their website, with text messaging and social media direct messages to get them qualified and directly into their database. 

Next, we’re focusing on internal team productivity as well as the outbound strategy to enable recruiters to enroll lists of candidates to be qualified automatically by AI chatbots and routed to the next step in the process.

Thanks for a great Demo and Interview! 

Over the past few years, we’ve seen more and more companies develop bespoke apps that solve a unique problem that staffing companies face vs. the companies that have built large, enterprise applications that do EVERYTHING, (whether you need it or not). The addition of these bespoke solutions offers staffing companies more flexibility than they’ve ever had before to truly design a solution on a platform that drives efficiencies for their team while keeping the total cost of ownership down.

Staffing Engine is doing exactly that, building a highly customized and integrated technology that allows a staffing and recruiting company to dynamically accelerate their operations. Staffing Engine’s work is just the start of a greater technological shift that is currently going on in the industry, and I think that we’re going to see a lot more companies in the future following in their footsteps.