Your clients turn to you and your staffing agency for your knowledge and expertise in planning, scheduling, and maintaining flexible and temporary staff. Your recruitment methods are robust, your client’s HR team appreciates your timeliness and efficiency, and candidates are impressed by your smooth hiring process.
But what if artificial intelligence (AI) could further enhance these processes within your staffing agency?
Whether your staffing agency serves hospitality, IT or healthcare, AI can improve your operations. For example, AI can improve a prospective candidate’s experience in working with your staffing agency and, more specifically, reduce precious time in the process of turning candidates into contractors.
This post shows how you can use AI within your staffing agency. Below, we’ll cover the current landscape and use cases for AI, as well as essential features to look for in your next AI staffing tool. We even help you kickstart your search with a few suggestions to help you on your way.
The Current Landscape: AI in Staffing Agencies
Revenue for the global staffing industry reached an all-time high in 2022, worth almost 650 billion US dollars. While this means more opportunities for your staffing agency, it also means keeping up with growing demands from clients while maintaining your productivity.
AI can help you keep up with this global growth as rapid advancements in AI-driven solutions continue to emerge. It helps you upgrade your internal systems and provide talent-facing solutions to create a frictionless candidate experience.
Other valuable use cases for AI pertain to recruitment marketing. For example, AI can help staffing agencies create personalized messages to potential candidates and create valuable top-of-funnel content as part of the recruitment pipeline.
Despite AI’s undeniable value within staffing agencies, widespread adoption has yet to be seen. In a recent study, 54% of respondents indicated that they plan to use AI-driven solutions within the next year. However, only 10% of respondents have actually begun implementing AI-powered client services.
With this data in mind, it’s clear that many staffing agencies remain uninformed and unaware of the opportunities, approaches, and complexities of deploying this technology. By embedding AI into your staffing and recruitment strategies, you gain a competitive advantage in your recruitment and candidate scheduling tactics.
4 Use Cases for AI at Staffing Agencies
Figuring out how to use AI in a staffing agency context can feel nebulous. It’s important to remember that you’ve already implemented other technologies – and AI is yet another tool in your tool belt. As a staffing agency leader, chances are you’re already taking advantage of staffing tools to hire skilled candidates for your clients. For instance, many staffing agencies use robust staff scheduling software that quickly broadcasts available opportunities to a wider network and gathers interested candidates.
So, how can you implement AI right now for your recruiters and your agency? Below we’ve outlined a few specific examples that paint a picture of how you can start implementing AI into your recruiting processes.
1. Write Accurate Job Descriptions
You already know one of the best ways to attract and retain qualified candidates is to establish clearly defined roles and responsibilities as part of the job listing. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude by Anthropic help with this task by utilizing effective, prompt engineering. With this use case, it’s all about the quality of your prompt. Start by providing detailed instructions about:
- The role you want AI to play (i.e. “You are a skilled recruiter with nine years’ experience connecting qualified candidates to clients within the healthcare industry.”)
- The job you’re hiring for (i.e. IT Consultant)
- The role and responsibilities
- The required skills
- The tone and voice for the job description
- Any details you don’t want the tool to include
It’s important to remember that the first job description provided by your generative AI tool of choice will likely be less than satisfactory. It might take a couple of rounds of further suggestions for the model to return a tailored job description to suit your needs. You’ll likely also need to edit the job description even further to make it work for your hiring opportunity, but think of AI as a starting point for you to tweak.
2. Robust Candidate Communication
While the adoption of AI-powered client services is slowly growing, staffing agencies continue to take advantage of AI-driven solutions for candidate correspondence and notifications. Using AI-powered templates and automated email sequences, recruiters save precious time with ready-made messaging.
Chatbots are also becoming an integral part of communication with potential candidates among staffing agencies. Program your chatbot directly onto your website’s homepage to answer potential candidate questions and redirect queries to your company’s best contact.
As AI-powered chatbots become more realistic, they provide more authentic responses, saving your recruiters countless hours of back-and-forth correspondence between potential and current candidates.
3. Scaled Staff Scheduling
You know the importance of having powerful automated tools to meet the demands for staff scheduling, planning and recruiting. In fact, AI has been a driving force behind this for many years - but what about forecasting future demand?
While your recruiters likely maintain a list of qualified, pre-screened workers ready to pick up employment at a moment’s notice, we’re starting to see AI staff technology take it a step further. Instead of just a manual list, ongoing developments in HR Tech and AI can power the automation of tasks like staff scheduling and backfilling client shifts.
Benefits for Staffing Agencies That Adopt AI
You might have already gleaned a few valuable benefits from the use cases above. Not only does it increase your recruiter’s efficiency and productivity, it improves accuracy in matching potential candidates to positions, enhances the overall candidate experience, and offers cost-effective savings to reinvest back into other areas of your staffing agency. Now we’ll take a closer look at a few more key highlights when it comes to incorporating AI into your staffing agency.
Minimize Human Error
At one time, your manual processes might have enabled your staffing agency to run like a well-oiled machine. However, as your agency continues to scale, client demand to fill their open job opportunities and manage candidate schedules increases. This is where manual errors can start to arise as client requests pour in.
In these cases, AI has the ability to review your existing or historical data to make informed decisions on your behalf. For example, AI can operate shift management based on candidate availability, company needs, and any other parameters that usually help you to complete the task.
Reduce Conscious Bias
The ability to maintain unconscious bias is especially important in scenarios where you’re recruiting diversity hires. With 76% of job seekers saying they consider diversity a key factor in accepting a job offer, it’s important to get it right as part of your recruitment strategies and process.
AI helps to make this process a smoother one by minimizing bias throughout your recruiting and hiring process. Although traditional methods of candidate selection still offer efficiency for talent acquisition, AI is not impacted by potential prejudices or biases related to names, sexuality, or ethnicity. It simply matches the most qualified candidate to your client’s job opportunities.
Essential Features to Look For in Your Next AI Tool
Before you start your own research of which AI tools to adopt as part of your staffing agency, make sure the staff scheduling software you adopt aligns with the industries you serve, your unique needs and use cases. Talk with your IT department and vendor partners, and chat with your recruiters about potential gaps in your current processes and how AI might be able to strengthen your procedures. When exploring AI tools, consider the following features.
Customizability
Consider the customizability of your proposed tool of choice, as well as its integration capabilities with your existing staffing software and tools. If free trials or demo sign-ups are available, take advantage of those, too.
It's important that your AI tool is easily customizable to suit the needs of your recruiters, as they will be the primary users of the software. Take note of features like tailored reporting, customizable templates for automated messages, and support service offerings.
Data Analytics
By having robust reporting features as part of your next AI tool, you gain valuable, data-driven insight into candidate work history, performance, skill set, expected salaries and more, helping you match candidates to jobs faster. By analyzing historical data, you can identify hiring trends, budget opportunities for onboarding your temporary workforce, and forecast future growth opportunities.
Candidate Matching
Leverage today’s technology to reduce countless manual hours spent pouring over candidate profiles within your ATS. The right AI tool can source candidates from your existing database and match them to your job openings for you. Look for an AI tool that analyzes the job description and skill set of your potential candidates and offers matching tools that utilize multiple data points.
The Best AI Tools for Staffing Agencies
We’ve highlighted a few AI tools specific to the staffing industry to kickstart your search. These are designed to enhance your current hiring processes and provide data-driven insights to forecast future staffing needs.
RecruiterFlow
RecruiterFlow is a candidate engagement platform that offers complimentary AI features to help give your recruiting journey a boost. RecruiterFlow offers users access to its ChatGPT integration, which allows you to create job descriptions, maintain candidate communications, and devise email campaigns from one central dashboard.
Manatal
Recruitment software Manatal streamlines your recruitment processes and client management by simplifying tasks using its AI-powered recommendation engine.
The software offers customizable fields and searchable criteria to filter candidates recommended by its AI offerings to shortlist top candidate choices. What’s more, the platform scores candidates via its AI engine based on job requirements, helping you identify the best talent for a given opportunity.
Bullhorn
Customer relationship management (CRM) company, Bullhorn, offers staffing agencies Bullhorn Copilot, its suite of AI recruiter capabilities that embeds AI into your existing workflows.
The Best Tech Solution for Managing and Scheduling Your Temp Staff: Workstaff
The right technology can boost your existing processes by automating tasks, minimizing human error, and maintaining consistent communications with candidates. By embracing the right HR Tech software as part of your overall tech stack, you gain opportunities for future growth.
Workstaff’s staffing agency software utilizes real-time tracking, letting agencies manage rostering processes and ensure prompt responses to client needs. Take the next step in revolutionizing your staffing processes—try Workstaff for free today!
