A need to increase speed to market
Employment Enterprises is an award-winning, woman-owned staffing firm with over 45 years of experience. They operate both a professional staffing division and an employer-of-record division.
Employment Enterprises’s slower time-to-submit was causing them to lose out on making placements despite having strong candidates. Colleen Clokus, Chief Operating Officer, said, “The competition is fierce. They’re getting candidates out within minutes while we were waiting to even start sourcing because we wanted to make sure we were getting a 100% match. By the time the call’s over, they had candidates submitted, but we were just too late…We needed to decrease our days to submit and days to fill.”
Turning to Bullhorn Amplify
Employment Enterprises thought AI could help and saw it as the future. “We knew AI was replacing a lot of the administrative and repetitive tasks in our industry, and we needed our speed to market to remain competitive,” said Clokus.
At first, Employment Enterprises was concerned about data security, which was the main blocker in adopting any AI tool. Once they realized their data would be secure with Bullhorn Amplify, they went from AI skeptics to eager adopters. “Bullhorn was able to assure us that Amplify was set up to work safely within our firewalls, so that proprietary information about pricing, solutions, candidates, and clients weren’t getting out on the web. Once we knew that that was something that we could maintain, we felt so much more comfortable moving forward,” shared Clokus.
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Growing AI adoption
Employment Enterprises prioritized adopting AI across their whole staffing firm. “It started at the top with an Amplify taskforce made up of our IT director, the CFO, myself, and our VP of Recruiting. We started testing Amplify and then rolled it out to our recruiters and sales team. They immediately saw success because it made things much easier,” said Clokus. “We moved our VP of Recruiting into a role to drive the adoption, the testing, the training, the rollout through our staffing division to see where else we can deploy AI and efficiencies across our whole enterprise. We wouldn’t be here today if we didn’t have that person doing that.”
The Amplify taskforce took a firm stance on adoption, asking for feedback and holding their teams accountable. “We could literally see: have you tested it? I would walk down the hall and ask, ‘How did that go? I saw it went out. Did you have time to do it today?’” said Clokus. “We just said that using AI isn’t an option. We’re measuring it, and you’re going to use it, and this is how it is.”
Amplify adoption grew quickly, but recruiters were initially hesitant about a few use cases. “They were concerned that nobody wants to talk to a virtual screener. When we rolled it out to the teams, we told them to email the screener to your sister, your husband, your wife, or somebody you know and ask them what they think. No one complained, and people actually enjoyed the experience,” said Clokus.
Their team that worked on higher-volume, lower-margin roles embraced Amplify first. “They think Amplify is a godsend. They love it because they can quickly find 20-30 people and send the screener to identify people who are interested in the role. Now they have a list of qualified people they can call. Amplify is writing candidate bios and reformatting resumes. So now, all of a sudden their gross profit has gone up and their quality is better. The replacements are minimal. You have more replacements when you’re at a lower dollar amount than you do in professional, but they’re the ones that are seeing benefits of using AI and are pushing the folks above to use it,” said Clokus.
Amplify use cases
Employment Enterprises prioritized Amplify use cases that addressed their bottlenecks. “Where were the most repetitive tasks or tasks that took the most time for our staff? Bottlenecks were recruiters writing candidate bios, reformatting resumes, calling candidates, pre-screening candidates, then scheduling interviews, then having virtual or in-person interviews,” shared Clokus.
Candidate screening and matching: Employment Enterprises can cast a wide net so they can ultimately submit better-qualified candidates faster with Amplify. “We’re able to run searches in Bullhorn and then send 20-40 screeners out. You might get five back, but…now our recruiters are talking to five people who are qualified, engaged, and interested in the job, and they can get those candidates interviewed and submit quicker to our customers. They’ve seen hours of efficiencies,” said Clokus.
Content generation: Employment Enterprises sped up generating candidate bios, reformatting resumes, and creating compelling quality checks for client submissions with Amplify. “Amplify will look at the job for keywords, the candidate’s resume, their interview notes, their screening notes, and their bio, and Amplify pulls all that together in a bio as to why they think they’d be good for this job – in seconds. That took a couple of hours before Amplify, but now it only takes an hour of researching to see if that’s a good person for the job,” said Clokus.
Interview preparation: Employment Enterprises uses Amplify to find the perfect match. “We get the job description, and we ask Amplify what questions do we need to ask from the customer, but then what questions should we be asking of the candidate? So it helps you create really good interview questions so that you’re finding the best match,” said Clokus.
Sales use case is next: Employment Enterprises is starting to use Amplify for their sales activities. “Salespeople spend time laboring on what to say to a prospect in an email,” said Clokus. “So now they’re able to use Amplify Chat to look at the last 10 jobs we filled, look at my last notes, my contact notes with that customer or that prospect, and then help craft an email at the desk level. They send me a notification 2 days later to follow up. And then maybe send something else two days later and document a note in Bullhorn.”
Amplify is driving results
Consistent 23% weekly gross profit increase: Since launching Amplify in July, Employment Enterprises has increased their profit by achieving better quality placements. “We increased our weekly gross profit by 23% since we launched Amplify…That’s big for us to see that increase week over week. And this is outside of any fees we might have; this is just straight contract work,” said Clokus. “We’re having more success filling higher-level professional roles than we did in the past. And part of that is we’re asking better questions and finding better-quality people. Because of that, we’re making so much more money per fill than we’ve ever done.”
Improved time-to-fill: Their VMS business has grown as they’ve accelerated their submission process. “As soon as we started deploying Amplify, our VMS business has gone up, just because we’re getting the candidates faster,” said Clokus.
38% reduction in job board spend: Better database utilization means less reliance on external job boards. “So, the first place I go to find candidates is Bullhorn because we have 200,000 candidates in our database,” said Clokus. “We’ve reduced the job board spend by 38% since we launched Amplify. We’re going to reduce our seats for Indeed and LinkedIn as a result.”
Stronger connections: More importantly, recruiters have more time for what matters: building strong relationships. “The biggest thing is we want the recruiters to have a good interview where they’re really talking to that person and having a better engagement,” said Clokus. “They’re having better quality connections with the candidate, which is how you’re more successful in filling the role.”
Adjusted KPIs: With Amplify’s impact, Employment Enterprises raised the bar across their KPIs. “We increased our submissions goal and showcasing goal, where we take a candidate and market that person to a client for all of our recruiters,” said Clokus. “We added some additional goals. How many screeners did you send? How many placements did we get from screens and the number of prompts generated?”
Looking ahead
The company’s advice to other firms beginning their AI journey is clear and comprehensive. “Be careful how you and your teams are using AI. Somebody could be on ChatGPT, putting in all your information, so be careful and watch how your teams are sharing proprietary information. That is our competitive advantage against a lot of competition, and people need to be serious about that,” cautioned Clokus.
They also credit Bullhorn’s Amplify team for being true partners who listen to feedback and celebrate successes alongside customers as part of the Pioneer program. “The Amplify team’s been really great to work with, because they listen when we ask for changes, or if we have challenges. And they also want us to succeed, and they’re there with us when we celebrate the small wins,” said Clokus. “I don’t know if I’ve seen this level of engagement [with other ATS providers]… they truly care, and we’ve enjoyed that.”
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