Peoplebank focuses on IT & Digital recruitment offering its services throughout Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. They were founded over 30 years ago in 1990 and have since grown organically and through acquisitions. In 2019, PeopleBank and the Chandler Macleod Group merged to form one of Australia’s largest multi-specialist talent solution companies and through that growth, PeopleBank has maintained its strict specialist focus on the IT and digital recruitment market. Their purpose: to connect and enable so everyone can make their difference.

With over 17 years as a Bullhorn customer, PeopleBank has long invested in technology as a competitive advantage. When Laura Byrne, Head of Digital Strategy and Innovation, returned to the business in early 2024, the question was no longer whether AI would matter, it was about how Peoplebank could leverage it across their business in a way that would drive real impact. After 1,000 hours of research across 120 vendors, they chose Bullhorn Amplify. Within the first pilot, they screened three times more candidates than their recruiters could reach manually and saved 272 hours of recruiter time.

Pressure on capacity

Pressure on capacity

Prior to implementing Bullhorn Amplify, Peoplebank faced a demand issue as it was outpacing recruiter capacity. Recruiters were stretched doing everyday tasks while trying to connect with qualified candidates and maintain relationships with clients, Speed to market was a growing expectation from clients and candidates alike, but the existing setup made rapid responses from consultants difficult to maintain at scale.

The tech stack had grown organically so recruiters were frequently pulled out of their primary workflows which made it hard to run consistent processes across the team.

On top of this, the quality of incoming applications was declining. With candidates using AI tools to tailor CVs broadly rather than specifically for a role the applicant pool was getting harder to manage.

An after hours gap

After normal business hours, there was no coverage. So candidates applying outside business hours sat in a queue until the next morning. For Peoplebank, that lag was a real disadvantage as it was missing out on good IT talent.

Byrne spent her first year back with Peoplebank researching AI options thoroughly, this included more than 1,000 hours of evaluation assessing over 120 vendors. The brief was clear though, they wanted to find a connected approach to recruitment that would improve capacity and speed, close the after-hours gap, and make recruitment more about the relationships, not less.

We prioritised impact over quantity. We were very specific and intentional about what Peoplebank were doing. We saw the opportunity for AI to help us to make recruitment more human rather than less.
Laura Byrne Head of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Peoplebank

Bullhorn Amplify: meeting recruiters where they are

After evaluating the market extensively, PeopleBank chose Bullhorn Amplify.

Byrne noted, “Amplify is an ecosystem, not a point solution.” This meant rather than solving one narrow problem, Amplify gave PeopleBank the ability to address challenges across their full recruitment lifecycle without having to leave their core platform. Amplify meets PeopleBank’s recruiters where they already are on a daily basis. This allowed Byrne and her team to remove any friction entirely from their workflow.

As a buy-first business without a large internal development team, PeopleBank needed the ability to configure and build solutions without heavy technical overhead. Amplify gave their team genuine flexibility and room to test and innovate upon their initial use cases. For example, PeopleBank could decide exactly how autonomous or human-led each workflow would be. This was essential to comply with their ethical approach to AI policies and helped them to design experiences that worked for the neurodivergent candidates common in IT and technology recruitment.

When implementation began in July 2025, PeopleBank focused first on a single high-impact use case: an after-hours AI screening agent. They named her AIDA (short for AI Aid) following a staff naming competition. By early August, AIDA was live!

272 hours saved. 3x more candidates screened.

In order to truly test the effectiveness of AIDA, Byrne knew they needed a large set of data so they allowed 1,000 candidates to go through AIDA’s screening process.

The results on capacity were clear. With AIDA, People were able to screen 3x the number of candidates versus what a recruiter could feasibly do.

Their candidate experience results were equally strong. 50% of candidates offered the screening via AIDA chose to do so and of that group 80% immediately opted in to be considered and screened for additional roles. Additionally, Peoplebank saw a 4.4 out of 5 satisfaction score from the candidates that completed the screening.

The screening offered by Peopleback extended the working day without adding headcount, covering the after-hours window that had previously gone unserviced. Candidates who applied in the evening were screened, assessed, and engaged before the team arrived the next morning. This time saving for their team equated to 272 hours.

There really shouldn’t be a scenario where any job takes longer than four hours for something to be happening. That’s not something we could have said twelve months ago.
Laura Byrne Head of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Peoplebank

Redefining what smart recruitment looks like

Byrne continues to spearhead the expansion of Amplify use cases rapidly across the business as they refine what it means to measure recruiter productivity.

The traditional metrics of recruitment businesses including number of phone screens per day, CVs submitted and authority to represent are all under review. As automation takes on more of the transactional work, and AI screens their candidates, Peoplebank’s goal is to identify what a truly augmented, high-performing recruiter looks like and build the measurement framework to match.

AI doesn’t replace recruiters, but it does change our expectations around speed and responsiveness.
Laura Byrne Head of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Peoplebank

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