AT A GLANCE

TriStarr, a Lancaster, PA-based boutique staffing firm, used their team of three recruiters to:

  • cut new recruiter ramp-up time by 67%
  • grow gross profit
  • reduce candidate sourcing from 45 minutes to under 10

About TriStarr

TriStarr specializes in placing candidates in clerical, administrative, finance, and specialty roles. With roughly 10 employees and a recruiting team of three — two of whom joined with no prior staffing experience — the firm has never been the biggest player in its market. That hasn’t stopped them from acting like one.

The Challenge

After COVID, TriStarr lost half its recruiting team. Getting a new recruiter to a full desk had always taken six months, a timeline the firm couldn’t afford with a leaner team and growing demand.

Manual work made it worse. Sourcing a single search took 30 to 45 minutes. Comparing candidates meant pulling up multiple resumes and interview notes by hand. Researching an unfamiliar role meant leaving Bullhorn entirely, which required anonymizing all client and candidate data before use. On the sales side, researching new prospects meant hours on LinkedIn and company websites before a single outreach email could go out.

Before Amplify Chat, we had to pull up both resumes, both sets of interview notes, and compare and contrast all of these individual pieces of information. It’s always a great learning experience, but it’s definitely very tedious and time-consuming.
Lauren Hunter-Parish Lead Staffing Manager

The Solution

TriStarr joined Bullhorn’s Amplify Pioneer program, getting early access to features as they were released. Operations Analyst Paige Fiore rolled them out in stages, so adoption felt gradual rather than disruptive. Now, Amplify is part of nearly every role at TriStarr. Across recruiting, sales, and operations, the tool works differently for each person, but the result is the same: less grind, more time on the work that drives placements.

Recruiting

Staffing managers Shannon Millar and Kristina Cordova use Amplify Chat to rank and compare candidates, find matches for open roles, and research unfamiliar job titles from scratch.

Millar’s go-to for a role she doesn’t know: ask Amplify to explain it like she’s five years old, then follow up on pay ranges, how to position it to candidates, and which interview questions reveal the right fit. Both recruiters build interview prep scorecards in Amplify before every screening call.

Leadership

Lead Staffing Manager Lauren Hunter-Parish uses the AI pre-screener to prioritize outreach, focusing first on candidates who completed the screen with high scores rather than starting from a raw list. She uses Amplify Chat to compare candidates, generate interview questions, and prepare for client meetings. For a client she’d never worked with before, Amplify surfaced a full summary of the company’s history and TriStarr’s prior relationship in seconds.

Sales

Director of Business Development Erika Bodell uses Amplify Chat to research prospects, identify stakeholders, and build targeted outreach lists. This work used to take hours, and now takes under a minute. She generated a list of 102 government and education targets for a campaign, then asked Amplify to find similar companies outside her database. It returned 52 prioritized new prospects in about 40 seconds, each with a personalized draft email ready to send.

Operations

Fiore builds pre-made prompts in Prompt Studio so recruiters can get what they need from Amplify without having to write prompts from scratch. She also ran a two-month adoption competition that surfaced unexpected use cases, including recruiters using Amplify to build featured candidate profiles for TriStarr’s website.

The Results

6 mo →
2 mo

Recruiter ramp time

~2%

Gross profit increase

45 min →
<10 min

Sourcing time

2 hrs →
30 sec

Prospect research

New recruiter ramp time dropped from six months to two. Millar and Cordova, both new to the industry when they joined, reached full desks faster than any previous hire at TriStarr. Gross profit grew approximately 2% since joining the Pioneer program in June 2025, even as the team got smaller. Sourcing that took Cordova 30 to 45 minutes before Amplify now takes 5 to 10. Recently, a client expected a long wait on candidates; Millar used Amplify to search the existing pipeline and delivered three qualified submissions the same week.

We are going toe-to-toe with the bigger firms locally and we’re only 10 people. We’re filling jobs faster and better than some of those other firms.
Paige Fiore Operations Analyst

Lessons Learned

Roll it out in stages. Releasing features gradually prevented people being overwhelmed and kept the team excited rather than defensive. By the time the full product was available, adoption felt natural.

Start with what they’re already doing. Fiore found out what her team was using ChatGPT for and showed how Amplify did it better — securely, inside Bullhorn. That made the case for changing concrete and low-risk.

Reduce the friction of prompting. Pre-built prompts in Prompt Studio mean recruiters don’t have to know how to use AI well, they just click. Lowering the barrier raises the floor.

Your team is already using AI. You just probably don’t know it. So why not build it into their actual workflows and keep your data secure?
Paige Fiore Operations Analyst

Looking Ahead

Fiore is expanding the Prompt Studio library and tracking time-to-fill and client interview request rates as the next benchmarks. Bodell uses Amplify to prospect into new geographic markets. As demand shifts further toward direct hire, the team is taking on roles outside their traditional niche, confident that Amplify can get them up to speed on any new territory quickly. As Lauren, nearly 20 years into her career, puts it: “It’s not fair that I didn’t have this. But I love it for them.”

If you’re not using Amplify yet, what are you waiting for? This has allowed us, as a three-woman staffing team, to keep up with orders — and whatever we’re unsure of, it’s literally in there for us.
Shannon Millar Staffing Manager

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