At Interact Boston 2026, Gross sales and Technique Director at Bullhorn, Laura Bumby, opened the session with a reframe. The largest candidate acquisition downside in staffing isn’t sourcing. It’s the price of the folks doing the sourcing. SG&A runs at roughly 20% of income throughout the trade. Junior recruiter turnover sits at round 30% yearly. New hires take anyplace from six to 12 months earlier than they meaningfully contribute to the enterprise. And sitting beneath all of that may be a candidate database most corporations are underneath using.
Laura led the dialog with three staffing leaders at completely different factors of their Amplify journey: Kelly Santiago, VP of recruitment operations at Tal Healthcare, Jared Drymond, senior affiliate of technical recruitment at Tential, and James Hawley, co-founder of NextPath.
Right here’s what they shared.
The hidden price construction most corporations aren’t
For many of staffing’s historical past, the reply to capability challenges has been so as to add extra folks. Extra recruiters to work extra jobs, extra coordinators to deal with extra admin, extra hires to chase extra development. The price of that mannequin, turnover, ramp time, and candidate databases full of individuals nobody ever contacts, has compounded quietly within the background.
For Santiago at Tal Healthcare, the database downside was seen and concrete. Candidates have been flowing in and going dormant. Recruiters working closest to income have been rejecting candidates and transferring on with out participating. Not as a result of these candidates had nothing to supply, however as a result of they weren’t the suitable match for the open function in entrance of them. Candidates who may need been excellent for a unique place, or for a hard-to-fill search the workforce hadn’t but related them to, have been falling out of the funnel totally and taking their goodwill with them. The model injury was actual, and the income sitting untouched within the database was simply as actual.
Amplify adjustments the place recruiters enter the workflow. Digital employees soak up the top-of-funnel grind, screening, sourcing, knowledge entry, resume formatting, in order that by the point a recruiter picks up a candidate, the groundwork is already carried out.
Meaning candidates who aren’t proper for the open function don’t simply get rejected and forgotten. They get screened, their data will get captured, and that knowledge turns into helpful the following time a related search opens up.
Tal Healthcare: Rebuild the workflow, don’t simply add AI to it
Tal Healthcare got here into Amplify with a significant head begin. Years of deliberate automation work meant clear knowledge, organized workflows, and a workforce already snug with know-how. That basis made it doable to maneuver rapidly.
Moderately than layering AI onto present processes, Santiago and her workforce rebuilt workflows from scratch. The job opening course of is without doubt one of the clearest examples. Beforehand, opening a brand new function required an operations workforce member to construct the job description, somebody to generate screening questions, and the director of consumer success to offer expertise insights. The method concerned two or three folks and will take half-hour to a number of hours relying on availability. Now, Amplify generates the job description, expertise insights for the recruiter, market suggestions for the account supervisor, and screening questions in minutes.
That intuition proved out rapidly. A candidate got here by way of the screener who wasn’t a match for the function they’d utilized to, however the screening abstract revealed they have been open to relocating. Tal had a troublesome search in Albany that the workforce would by no means have thought of that candidate for. With the perception from the display screen, they introduced the candidate to the consumer as a inventive choice in a talent-short market. The consumer interviewed them instantly.
“We have been doubtlessly lacking out on these placements with out gathering that data.”
— Kelly Santiago, VP of recruitment operations, Tal Healthcare
One assumption Santiago’s workforce examined early was whether or not physicians would interact with an AI screener. They constructed two separate screening experiences, one for physicians and one for everybody else, anticipating a significant distinction in response charges. There was none. Satisfaction scores held constant throughout all candidate sorts at round 4.5 out of 5.
Tential: Earn inner belief earlier than scaling
Drymond and the workforce at Tential took a extra measured path. Moderately than transferring quick throughout the entire workforce, they began with a small pilot, expanded to some extra recruiters, then rolled out to the broader workforce. The priority wasn’t exterior. It was inner belief. Rolling out one thing that didn’t work, even as soon as, would imply spending vital power rebuilding confidence earlier than adoption might transfer ahead.
One of many clearest proof factors got here from a deliberate constraint. Management eliminated LinkedIn from recruiters for a month. Utilizing solely the Amplify screener and their present database, Tential’s recruiters held their very own towards colleagues who had the complete suite of job boards accessible. Two years earlier, that might have felt inconceivable. However extra importantly, the recruiters knew it too. Seeing it in their very own numbers made the case in a manner no coaching session might.
To maintain adoption, Drymond’s workforce made immediate utilization a tracked efficiency metric, 20 prompts per week per individual, sitting alongside pre-screens and interviews in particular person efficiency dashboards. They opened an inner Groups channel known as Amplify Pioneers the place the workforce shared wins, failures, and prompts. Early posts have been principally about issues that didn’t work. Having the Amplify workforce reply publicly, so everybody might see the solutions, turned these posts into shared studying. A brilliant customers of the week program throughout screener and immediate classes acknowledged the workforce members driving adoption ahead.
NextPath: What a rocky begin really teaches you
Hawley purchased Amplify for FOMO. His phrases. The early expertise at NextPath was rocky. Issues weren’t prepared, adoption was sluggish, and the workforce struggled to discover a foothold.
The primary rollout mistake was going too large too quick. Placing Amplify in entrance of the entire workforce earlier than it was absolutely confirmed meant that when a couple of issues didn’t work, that was all anybody talked about. Rebuilding belief after that took time.
The turning level got here when Amplify Chat launched. Hawley spent a weekend exploring it and couldn’t cease. His CFO observed, as a result of the emails that might usually have landed in her inbox didn’t. He’d used Amplify to deal with them. From that time, NextPath’s utilization went up and stayed up.
The strategy Hawley now recommends is to start out with the people who find themselves keen to strive it, allow them to construct momentum, and let the skeptics watch. When resistant workforce members see friends transferring up leaderboards and dealing extra effectively, the query shifts from why would I take advantage of this to how do I get entry. Tal Healthcare named their screener agent Talia. NextPath named theirs Alice. Each groups discovered that giving the agent a reputation made adoption really feel extra like gaining a colleague than surrendering course of to a machine.
“Staffing has at all times been people-powered and that isn’t altering.”
— James Hawley, Co-founder, NextPath
From attempting to find candidates to farming the database you have already got
The shift all three organizations described is similar at its core. Staffing corporations have spent years attempting to find candidates externally whereas sitting on databases full of individuals they already know. Amplify makes farming that database viable at scale. The screening agent is a giant a part of how.
The screening agent meets candidates the place they’re, on weekends, throughout night time shifts, on work breaks. Physicians finishing screens between rounds. IT contractors responding at instances when no recruiter could be accessible. Each applicant will get a response, and the recruiter inherits a ranked, screened shortlist relatively than a stack of unread purposes.
Amplify Chat provides one other layer. Hawley described utilizing it to floor international nationals within the NextPath database with particular visa statuses, wage notes from unstructured fields, and availability particulars, pulling collectively a professional checklist for a troublesome function in minutes. No job board can attain into notes and match throughout that many variables directly.
Three beginning factors emerged constantly throughout Santiago, Drymond, and Hawley’s organizations: enrich knowledge and job descriptions to construct a powerful basis, deploy the screener to deal with applicant quantity on the prime of the funnel, and use Amplify Chat for analysis and candidate rating. Every builds on the final, and none of them require a recruiter to maintain doing the work that was consuming their day earlier than.
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