Over a thousand staffing professionals gathered for Have interaction Boston 2026, and Bullhorn founder and CEO, Artwork Papas, wasted no time setting the tone. His opening keynote delivered a transparent message to the business: AI isn’t right here to interchange your folks. It’s right here to unleash their full potential.
Joined on stage by Bullhorn’s Chief Innovation and Labs Officer, Jason Heilman, Papas walked attendees by means of the market forces reshaping staffing, debuted a wave of recent Amplify capabilities, and challenged leaders to rethink your complete working mannequin of staffing, utilizing AI to not shrink groups, however to automate low-value work, redirect recruiter capability to strengthen customer support, and drive development that was beforehand not possible underneath a headcount-constrained mannequin.
Listed below are the highlights.
Three market forces reshaping the staffing business
Papas urged the viewers to step again and think about the broader forces at play, forces that ought to inform how staffing leaders take into consideration AI earlier than defaulting to the plain “do extra with much less” playbook.
Market pressure 1: AI-driven productiveness. The outcomes are plain. Bullhorn’s early Amplify adopters have seen large positive factors: a 40% enhance in submissions, a 65% enchancment in submission-to-placement ratios, a 23% soar in gross revenue, and 200 hours saved per week at one agency alone, liberating recruiters to deal with constructing relationships as a substitute of pushing paperwork. These aren’t intangible advantages; they signify huge, measurable enterprise worth created by weaving AI all through the recruitment course of.
Market pressure 2: Overwhelming quantity and fraud. AI doesn’t simply assist the great guys. Papas shared how automated job-application instruments now enable candidates to spam 1,500 purposes day by day, flooding recruiters with unqualified, and generally fraudulent, candidates. What seems like a high-volume drawback immediately is barely the start. Staffing corporations want AI not only for productiveness, however as a frontline protection towards a rising tide of bots and dangerous actors.
Market pressure 3: Margin stress and expertise pipeline disruption. Bullhorn’s personal information reveals a ten% margin compression over the past twelve months, and the stress is accelerating. On the similar time, Papas raised a query the business must grapple with: if corporations cease hiring junior recruiters as a result of AI handles the entry-level grind, who turns into the following technology of gross sales expertise? With no pipeline of individuals studying the craft immediately, corporations threat having nobody prepared to guide tomorrow.
The grind vs. high-value work
One of many keynote’s most compelling segments reframed how staffing corporations ought to take into consideration their folks. Papas broke the recruiter’s job into two halves: “the grind” (information entry, screening, chilly outreach, resume formatting) and the high-value work of negotiating, teaching, and shutting.
The information tells a stark story. In 2017, about 41% of recent recruiter hires had been nonetheless on the job two years later. By 2024, that quantity had dropped to 35%. The grind is getting worse, and it’s driving recruiter turnover to new highs.
Papas emphasised that Amplify’s digital staff ought to deal with the grind so human recruiters can deal with the work that truly drives income and that truly makes folks need to keep within the career. These AI-powered digital staff, constructed into the Amplify platform, ramp immediately, work across the clock, and have zero turnover.
Amplify in motion: From gross sales prospecting to candidate care
Jason Heilman then took the stage to indicate how greater than 200 staffing corporations are already utilizing Amplify to resolve a few of staffing’s greatest operational challenges, automating repetitive work so recruiters and account managers can focus extra of their time on the actions that drive income, placements, and stronger customer support.
AI-powered gross sales prospecting.
Planet Group shared how they used Amplify to seek out focused prospect lists, determine decision-makers, and generate personalised outreach, all in underneath a minute. The system pulled from each the open net and years of information the crew had constructed inside Bullhorn, connecting the dots between the 2 in methods no single instrument had executed earlier than.
“I can’t return to the best way I used to be working earlier than.”
– Planet Group, Bullhorn Amplify Pioneer
Heilman then confirmed how Bullhorn has graduated these conversational workflows right into a structured prospecting instrument. Gross sales reps can now seek for look-alike corporations, discover talent-matched prospects, or re-activate dormant shoppers, all backed by a database of 60 million firm profiles, 500 million contacts, and 800 million resumes.
Amplify all over the place. A key theme was that Amplify now follows customers wherever they work, not simply inside Bullhorn. Whether or not a rep is researching new prospects, getting a Groups notification a few booked assembly, reviewing a prep sheet earlier than a name, or on a reside Zoom dialog, Amplify is there capturing context, surfacing related information, and updating data. After a gross sales name, it pulls out key factors, motion gadgets, new details about the contact, and even creates job openings immediately in Bullhorn from what was mentioned.
Recruiting instruments and AI screening. Recruiters from TriStarr shared how Amplify reworked their workflows. When a brand new job is available in, Amplify instantly surfaces ranked candidates with detailed explanations of why every is a powerful match. One recruiter described how she asks Amplify to interrupt down unfamiliar jobs “as if I had been a 5 yr outdated.” TriStarr reported chopping new-recruiter ramp time from six months to roughly two months.
“If you happen to took Amplify away, it could be like taking away oxygen that people must breathe.”
– TriStarr, Bullhorn Amplify Pioneer
Heilman additionally highlighted Amplify’s AI screener, which now processes almost 100,000 screens per thirty days. Candidates throughout industries, job varieties, and wage ranges charge the expertise a mean of 4.5 out of 5 stars, whether or not the screening occurs through voice or textual content and throughout a number of languages.
Resume preparation. What was a fifteen-to-thirty-minute guide job, reformatting a candidate’s resume to match a consumer’s template, is now dealt with routinely. Amplify pulls in context from screens, conversations, and interactions to construct the strongest potential submission, formatted precisely to the company’s requirements.
Preventing fraud and defending income
Heilman devoted a good portion of the demo to Amplify’s new Confirm functionality, primarily a “bouncer” on the entrance door of each utility. The system detects bot conduct, VPN masking, and suspicious patterns that human recruiters would by no means catch, even with limitless time. Belief alerts observe candidates all through the method, from utility, by means of onboarding and doc verification, to ongoing task check-ins.
On the back-office facet, Bullhorn launched AI-powered auditing capabilities. As a substitute of hard-coding compliance guidelines, back-office groups can now describe what they need to examine in plain language (pay charge versus invoice charge mismatches, additional time coding errors, minimal wage violations) and Amplify runs these checks on each transaction. Papas shared an anecdote from a buyer who as soon as overpaid a candidate by $20,000 due to a keying error, a mistake this method is designed to catch earlier than it turns into pricey.
The pioneer information: Proof that daring pays off
Maybe essentially the most persuasive second of the keynote got here when Papas returned to share information from Bullhorn’s Amplify pioneers. Regardless of dealing with the identical 20% decline in job orders as the remainder of the market, corporations that saved their headcount regular or grew whereas utilizing Amplify noticed a 40% enhance in placements per recruiter in comparison with non-Amplify customers.
The important thing perception: these corporations didn’t use AI to chop workers. They used AI to take away the executive grind that slows recruiters and salespeople down, liberating them to deal with the high-value work closest to income, together with constructing relationships, transferring sooner with shoppers and candidates, bettering service supply, and in the end profitable extra enterprise and making extra placements.
And now they’re asking for the following step: AI embedded immediately into the workflow that tells recruiters and gross sales groups what motion to take subsequent to drive placements, income, and stronger buyer outcomes. Amplify is delivering precisely that, basically altering what it means to succeed.
Run with the daring
Papas closed with a problem to the room. When a novel know-how arrives, most individuals fixate on productiveness and value discount. However the Amplify Pioneer prospects who took the stage at Have interaction instructed a special story. They didn’t use AI to chop workers. They invested of their groups, leaned into Amplify, and got here out profitable. That’s what daring management appears like.
Bullhorn’s invitation to the staffing world: run with the daring.
