TOPS Staffing (TOPS family of companies)

TOPS Staffing operates across five distinct segments or brands, each serving a different market: light industrial, accounting, engineering, regional oil and gas, and skilled trades. With different specialties come different workflows, different candidate pools, and different recruiter habits. Managing change across that kind of structure is rarely straightforward.

The bigger pressure, though, was external. Like most staffing firms, TOPS had been leaning heavily on Indeed to fill its candidate pipeline. At $20,000 a month, the spend was significant, and the returns were getting worse. The platform’s “apply to all” feature had flooded inboxes with unqualified applicants and, increasingly, AI-generated resumes that were difficult to screen at scale.

Inside the building, recruiters were starting each day the same way they always had: working through web submittals, checking orders, and opening each candidate file to read full resumes before making a yes-or-no call. The process worked, but it was slow, and the volume of noise coming in from job boards was making it slower.

Susie wasn’t waiting for the situation to become a crisis. “I never want to be behind. I always want to be ahead, and I really like to beat my competition,” she says. “I thought Amplify would be the way to do it. I was right.”

Susie is candid about what she would do differently. The champion model worked, but she ran it in parallel across brands rather than bringing champions together. Watching recruiters from different brands learn from each other is something she plans to build into the next phase.

A few principles shaped what worked:

• Start with one use case across all brands before expanding. Recruiting was the common thread. Getting that right first created consistency before moving into sales and operations.
• Make results visible. Champions’ gross margin improvements were the most persuasive argument for the rest of the team. Peer proof outperformed any top-down mandate.
• Automation and Amplify serve different jobs. Automation handles operational workflows. Amplify fills the recruiter and sales gaps. Layering them intentionally matters.
• Data quality is a prerequisite. Amplify’s summaries draw on everything in Bullhorn. The better the notes already in the system, the stronger the output.

The next phase for TOPS is Amplify Present, which will allow recruiters to generate client-ready candidate presentations without leaving Bullhorn. Susie also has her eye on Bullhorn’s work to address AI-generated resume fraud, an issue she sees accelerating across the industry.

For other firm owners considering the move to AI, her advice is direct: “We watched the internet change everything. We watched applicant tracking systems come in, AI is no different. Successful companies will get on board.”

TOPS has been on Bullhorn since 2008, one of our early customers. Almost 20 years later, they’re still leading their market. The reason, Susie says, has always been the same: staying ahead.