Matt Dichter: Cool. Well, I think that we are alive. Hello everyone. This is Matt Dichter. VP of Sales at Staffing Engine. I am here with Adam Butera, Director of Digital Operations at Lead Health Staff. Adam, why don't you say a quick hello. 

Adam Butera: All right, buddy. Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully Matt and I can provide you with some value today.

Matt Dichter: Yeah, and thanks to Jan and the team at WSS, and Candidate.ly, I'm thrilled to be here. We were all blown away by the job that Jan did last year and attracting leadership and recruiters to this conference and happy to be a part of it this year. Definitely as far as house cleaning, feel free to participate in the chat and the I already see our friends, Kelly and LJ dropping in, and we'll definitely be checking that as we roll and we'll be addressing any questions that come in.

Matt Dichter: One of the other things that I've seen in a couple of other sessions is people dropping in their LinkedIn profiles. Definitely feel free to do that and connect with each other. Adam and I will go back afterwards and connect with you all and feel free to reach out to us directly on LinkedIn.

Matt Dichter: We're excited to get started. And we're giving, talking about all kinds of things on this. The headline is how to impact candidate and client experience with both automation and recruiting, acceleration recruiting automation has been a term thrown down and people's recruiting vernacular for years now.

Matt Dichter: And acceleration is kind of new. And I think that my company's staffing engine is bringing that to market. But before we start and really get into the technology side of things, Adam, why don't you give a little bit of your background and sort of how you got to lead and what you did before.

Adam Butera: Yeah, I'd love to. So I was a recruiter many years ago and actually ran up a little desk and after a brief stint and joined that, I actually went over to Monster on the vendor side and I was working in the staffing vertical, specifically starting out doing some training for some of the largest staffing companies in the world.

Adam Butera: And then quickly moved into an account management role. Had a nice long stint there at monster. Great group of people ended up going over to some startups, like Sense and worked there for quite a while. And then sort of after the COVID transition ended up having lead, reach out to me, looking for somebody to help with set up their instance of sense that they had just purchased.

Adam Butera: And we got to talking and there was a lot more opportunity to really. Just put some of my knowledge from the vendor side and implementations and things to good use and help lead, try and build out their tech stack. I was fortunate enough to come on at a time where they had just decided to kind of scrap their tech stack and start over fresh.

Adam Butera: So it really couldn't have gone better. And the timing couldn't have been more perfect as far as a blank canvas is concerned. And just got really lucky to join a team like that and to have the opportunity to kind of flip everything that I had learned and take it and put it into practice. So I jokingly say after all those years of talking to people and getting frustrated that people weren't listening to me now, I'm the guy that does anyone's 

Matt Dichter: You took a little bit of a row best traveled, starting on the agency side, going into recruiting tech and then coming back around and to insist on a staffing agency.

Matt Dichter: And we'll talk more about the technology make-overs that you've helped. We'd kindly go through, cause I think that's one of the more enticing parts of today's conversation. A little bit of my background. I joined Bullhorn, so recruiting technology shortly after college was really one of my first jobs in the professional arena.

Matt Dichter: And that's where I got to know the staffing and recruiting industry had a great eight and a half a year run over at Bullhorn joined Staffing Engine back in September, the executive team here at staffing engine had a lot of experience both starting in co-founding TextUs and bringing that awesome tool to market.

Matt Dichter: And then Jay Cutler, who's our VP of Partnerships who I've formerly worked with at Bullhorn was really instrumental in showing me all the cool things that Staffing Engine had built. And so, Excited to be here and share a little bit more about as a tool, what we're working on, but also, you know, Adam and the team at lead were Staffing Engines first customers.

Matt Dichter: So, so excited to share their story. But before we get into that, why don't we talk a little bit about lead growth? Because I think that's one of the most exciting things. And, you know, when you look at, you know, SIA and the fastest growing list you see lead health staff everywhere. And yes the healthcare market is booming.

Matt Dichter: It is the fastest growing segment, but even despite that, you're still at the top of all the lists as fast as growing healthcare companies. Talk a little bit about that, Adam, in the rollercoaster ride that you've been on. 

Adam Butera: The rollercoaster, for sure. I mean 100%, this would be. Team effort, right?

Adam Butera: It's all thanks to our amazing recruiters and account managers that are just grinding day in and day out. Not even mentioning the compliance team and payroll and everybody else that's put in plenty of hours to try and keep up with things as we've grown a little bit faster than we were expecting for sure. But yeah, it's been challenging, but we jokingly say it's been the best stress test possible.

Adam Butera: Really. We've got to kind of push everything that we've built a lot faster and a lot harder than we ever expected to. And that's, I think, given us a great platform to kind of start to build more and more that can scale, and we know that as time goes on, we'll be able to scale it. 

Matt Dichter: Yeah. Obviously there's tons of, you know, competitors out there, you know, bigger and smaller.

Matt Dichter: What do you think sort of has separated you all and allowed you to grow? And what role has technology played in 

Adam Butera: That is a great question. I think we are fortunate enough to have had some wise people before myself and Laban, our CEO and Kyle, our COO, and Justin, our Chief Growth Officer to really make some hard decisions to scrap the tech stack and start fresh and give everybody a fresh start building this out.

Adam Butera: And that was really in my opinion the game changer, because that allowed us to really overhaul our data, start with clean data and then build on technology. Right? So we were fortunate to have some great team members come and help build out the company from the recruiting and account management side. You know, the best sider on our client services side to help us.

Adam Butera: But then, you know, being able to build some technology to help support. Take a lot of the administrative tasks off people's plates as we jokingly talk about. 

Matt Dichter: Yeah. I see Lauren, Chi-Ming in a clean data mix, that's all the difference. What are some of the, what are some of the, I guess, challenges or things that you had to, I guess, address as you went through your technology make-over and also what are some of the strategies for people that are tuning in as to how to get maximum adoption of technology tools?

Matt Dichter: Because that's something that I think everyone really struggles with. 

Adam Butera: It is. And I think we've been really lucky that we've sort of started from the ground up. When I came in, I had a lot of ideas about things that I wanted to do, and I'm sure everybody else did as well, but I think we did a decent job of taking a step back and asking questions.

Adam Butera: And just trying to on in on what our team was doing, what struggles they were having, what obstacles they were facing and trying to solve those problems for them. I think one of the biggest things with implementation is buy-in and you're never going to get buy-in from your team, unless they're on board from the beginning.

Adam Butera: And then actually knowing what I guess having an input and where those problems are, what problems are trying to solve makes a big difference. So we got a question from Lauren about where to start. I think, you know, start from the basics, start with a team and sit down at their desk. What does their day look like?

Adam Butera: What does the average day look like? What are they doing? Just take a look at, you know, where they're clicking, where they're pointing that mouse, right, where they're going, what tools they're using that day. And you'd be surprised. A lot of the things people don't know, they don't know. Right. Not realizing that some of these small things could be changed or tweaked.

Adam Butera: And we could save you a minute, two minutes here, which extrapolated across your week or your month or your year is an enormous amount of time saved. And then half of that time will be better spent. Right. Those are pretty simple questions to ask, but I think just dropping that right in you know, dropping those questions into a very basic framework is huge.

Matt Dichter: Yeah. And are there, is there anything that you, I mean, having a bit on both sides of it, are there things that you learned when you were at Monster and Sense of the technology side that you've been able to bring into your day to day at lead to help benefit and grow the team and also enable them from a technology standpoint?

Adam Butera: I mean, for sure from. Having that experience has changed my perspective on how we adopt technology and which partners we choose to partner with. Right? Which vendors we choose to partner with. I think that background has changed that completely for us in that, you know, we start from the ground up and look at processes and what we'd like to do, where are these roadblocks?

Adam Butera: Where's the friction points? How can we remove them? We get some ideas and we develop a process that we'd like to put in place. And then we find partners that we'd like to be a part of that and help us grow towards that. But the interesting thing about the experiences is that it's shown me that there's nothing perfect out there.

Adam Butera: So as much as you have a design of what you want your process to be, I hate to use the word compromise because I don't necessarily think it's a compromise. You have to remember what the end goal is. Why were you trying to solve that problem? What was the friction you were trying to remove and perhaps how you get from A to B was a little bit different than how you originally thought it would be.

Adam Butera: And I think that's really important and something that I would not have known had I not come from that side of things to know and understand that there's limitations here and there, right. And good partners can be flexible and agile when they can, but there are certain limitations to any technology and a certain amount of patience that comes with that.

Adam Butera: And you sort of have to have this mutual relationship where you work together and figure out how to get to that goal. 

Matt Dichter: I can say coming from my team standpoint and how I had a working relationship and partnership with you and the team from the lead. It's scary when you join a startup and, you know, you're getting your first customers and, you know, you think, you know, all the answers and then you actually, you know, talk and watch how your customers are using it day in and day out.

Matt Dichter: And also having that buffer and ability to get feedback directly from them. I know one of the things that has been great from the team at lead is, you know, being able to consistently hop on calls to solicit feedback and, you know, run product ideas and ask, you know, are these really going to be tools and solutions that help you solve problems?

Matt Dichter: Or did we just think it's really cool, but it doesn't actually, you know, you're going out and trying to, you know, remove from your as a bottleneck. 

Adam Butera: It's true. And I think you also get a lot on the engineering and development side, right? Some ideas about what would be really great or really efficient or effective.

Adam Butera: We all know that staffing is its own little animal, right? And it doesn't always do things the way that you would assume it would. And so for some reason, over the years, and this is another thing I noticed on the vendor side is staffing companies too often want to keep everything very close to the chest, right?

Adam Butera: And don't want to give up their trade secrets about what they're using or how they're using technology. And we've taken a very different approach of we're an open book. I'm happy to tell anybody who we partner with, what tools we use, how we use them. I feel like you can have the exact same tech stack that I do, and the way that you implement it, the way that you roll that out to your client base is going to be completely different because your brand's different and your message is different and it should be.

Adam Butera: And quite frankly, If you could do something better than we can, which there's many people that do, that's great, that raises the bar. So even if I tell you something and you'd go out and do it better than me, that's amazing, that just raises the bar. And at the end of the day, we're trying to make the industry better.

Adam Butera: So 

Matt Dichter: A lot of the tools on the market are extremely configurable. And when you talk about like, just using ATS, CRM, as an example, the way that organizations deploy tools like Bullhorn, Target Recruit, Avionte, you know, different instances of those tools can look so different. So they might, you know, help you accomplish the same goal.

Matt Dichter: But the path to getting to that goal can look wildly different. 

Adam Butera: Yes.

Matt Dichter: And that is amazing to me that, you know, so many agencies are willing to hop on calls and be references and recommend the tools that they're using. But just knowing the fact that, you know, they might buy that tool and not implement it properly or input implemented differently to meet different goals is definitely interesting.

Adam Butera: It is really interesting. And you never really know, right. Talking to folks when you're trying to bounce around ideas, Sometimes, those completely different ends can really help a lot to open up some doors or broaden your thinking about how you can get from point A to point B right. Or even at the problems that you've had.

Adam Butera: I know a lot of times on reference calls or in those situations people might be apprehensive to talk about problems or hiccups that they've had they've found. And I don't feel that's a problem at all, because again, no technology is perfect. So I'd rather know what speed bumps or roadblocks you ran into and how you navigate it around them or what your work around was.

Adam Butera: So that saves me a bunch of times, so I don't have the same problem. And then we get back to like the partnerships, right? So you guys are a great example of the types of partners that we want to choose, which is people that want to ask the questions that don't want to roll out a product and. Here's what we built.

Adam Butera: Go use it. Here's how it works. And then kind of walk away. Right? We operate very much like a startup does. So we want a true partner that wants to get in there, roll up their sleeves and build something with us. And again, we can help you build a better product that you can sell to everyone else, then great.

Adam Butera: Your product gets better. We get better. Everybody wins. Right? So it's really that collaborative effort, but you need a true partner. That's willing to be creative. Like you guys are right. And really kind of evaluate and take a step back and maybe have the humility to say, this is the way we thought we designed it.

Adam Butera: We're not a hundred percent sure that this is the way you're going to want to use it. So let's talk about that. 

Matt Dichter: Yeah, it's an interesting, just as a real life example, you know, Staffing Engine went to market and, you know, coined this recruitment acceleration platform into us that meant, you know, ways that we could impact the candidate and client experience and help sort of at the very top of the funnel.

Matt Dichter: Ensure that candidates and clients who are coming in, get to the appropriate person faster to reduce friction and ultimately shrink time, this submittal and time to hire. And I think that we started with that idea and we're like, oh, chatbots can be a great way to get there. Can be a great way to take an already great brand like Lead Healthstaff and X, and even extend that brand.

Matt Dichter: In every sort of interaction they have with website visitors, or we call it a digital storefront. That's really what websites have become over the last couple of years. And in that time we realized that we're not just going to be a chatbot company. We're going to be a company that provides other tools to agencies anywhere in the recruitment process where there's friction.

Matt Dichter: And engine alerts, which we had a conversation with just a week ago is going to be a tool that ultimately helps the individual ATS user respond to inbound inquiries, respond to applicants faster, and that's just been a great working relationship and it's been great getting ideas from you all.

Adam Butera: That's a great example of your end goal, right? What staffing engine wanted to do and maybe originally thinking it was chatbots, but then, you know, pivoting to or expanding to, I should say to engine alerts really well now we're kind of clearing those bottlenecks on both sides, right? So we're taking care of it from the website side and from the, what would be our clients, right?

Adam Butera: Whether that's our actual hospital facilities or our nurse clinician partners. And now we're actually clearing the bottleneck on the recruitment side, which, you know, this is a strange time in recruiting where we never thought we'd have an overabundance of qualified candidates that want to work with us.

Adam Butera: And that's very odd for a thing, but you know, clearly this is where the bottlenecks are happening now. How do we prioritize? How do we optimize? How do we get the speed with which the speed that, that recruiters can really adapt and understand. What is the highest priority for me to address right now and what is a little bit lesser priority to address later because that time has become so much more valuable to them.

Matt Dichter: What are the other interesting things? Over the last couple of days in different sessions, we keep hearing about being able to meet candidates where they are, and it varies widely by industry vertical within staffing. You know, people who are, you know, nursing might have a different way of interacting with agencies that are versus, you know, Light Industrial Staffing or, you know, IT, Accounting, Finance.

Matt Dichter: One of the things I think that we've seen in working with leading in our other early health care agencies is more and more millennials and gen Z who have entered the workforce wanting different channels of communication. Know, where are you seeing candidates go these days?

Matt Dichter: And how are you using technology to meet them wherever they might go? 

Adam Butera: Yeah, it's definitely gotta be that omni-channel approach. Right? I mean, there's no easy way to just say, Hey everybody, you know, just start texting now. Right. Because obviously nursing's a great example. We've got, you know, generation gaps between where some nurses might be and their, guess, appreciation for technology right is very different that they may be using an app.

Adam Butera: They may be using a desktop from one to the other. So they are also within that. How does that person want to have a relationship with you ? Are they more transactional? Is that they're so the personality type, do they have a lot of questions and need more guidance? So for us, we think it's very important for us to have that Omni channel approach of being able to meet people where they are.

Adam Butera: So if there's somebody that's all mobile, which a lot of nurses happened to be, right, then we're going to need time saved and we're going to need an act of kind of plug in there so that we can meet them through the app. We could have the ability to send text messages like that.

Adam Butera: Right. But we've also got to have the robust website and chatbots and those sorts of things to meet everybody there because of all the traffic that gets directed there and that it changes dramatically from one to the other. But I do think that there's a similar experience on all those platforms.

Adam Butera: At least that's what we're, I guess, trying to build on the most to get back to your original question of what do I think is most important for us a lot of is trying to maintain a very similar experience across all of those platforms. So it's not different for the person that goes to the website versus the app.

Adam Butera: They still feel like they're talking to our brand. 

Matt Dichter: Yeah. And there's such a fine balance between, you know, how much you automate versus when you insert the, you know, the personal touch and the actual interaction, because we have, you know, we say it all the time. We're not trying, we're not in the business of trying to help our clients replace recruiters with technology.

Matt Dichter: We need them to be able to do more with less, and be able to deflect a lot of those mundane tasks so that recruiters and salespeople can ultimately have more conversations and focus on relationship versus, you know, sending over some data around, you know, missing time sheets or pay or whatever it might be that can be automated.

Matt Dichter: There was a really interesting study that came out by IBM that said that 80% of standard questions that come in can be automated by, you know, some sort of automated, whether it's a chat bot, whether it's an automated FAQ page, whatever it might be. And so we're trying to help recruiters in salespeople free up their time.

Matt Dichter: They don't get bogged down, you know, scheduling, you know, time over, back and forth, over email, hopping on a call only to find out that they could have deflected that question where you're all you're in the process 

Adam Butera: That is 100%, right. If technology has come so far that we can, you know, as we joke, when they say we can allow the robots to do quite a bit, it could never take the place of people and building relationships.

Adam Butera: And that's exactly what we need recruiters to do. And that's exactly the value that people get from working with a company and right. Lead is the relationship itself, right? So the whole goal is to really streamline the process so that the robots do all the things that robots can do and people spend their time doing what they'd like to be doing with people who want to be doing it with them.

Adam Butera: Right? So we're not just on the phone because now they have more time to be on the phone. They're actually on the phone with people that want to be on the phone with them getting career advice, right? Finding out where their next assignment is going to be, because maybe something fell through and they really need something coming up quickly.

Adam Butera: All sorts of scenarios that can come about that you would need to talk to somebody in person or need some guidance from somebody that's been doing this awhile and worked with hundreds of nurses. And that's where, you know, lead comes into play, but they certainly don't need to be, you know, sending out information right.

Adam Butera: Or sending mundane emails or even scheduling. Right. Thanks to the Staffing Engine. We have, you know, the goal is to basically have. Nurses and nurse partners booking time on our recruiters calendars for the blocks of time that they want to be taking calls. Right? So now we're creating this kind of match of people that want to be talking to people who want to talk to them.

Matt Dichter: Yeah. The other big thing, too, that I think that we've identified is that and we've all had this, these experiences when we deal with automation. But sometimes you're communicating with, you know, artificial intelligence or a bot, and you're just wanting that human touch. And so being able to know that we're working on getting lead here, but being able to introduce a human in the loop or live chat experience where they can actually have a candidate or traveler beyond a website, Be able to communicate with a recruiter or engagement specialist in Microsoft teams, in Slack, in G chat in tools that they already know and being able to service them and be able to basically take that chain of communication and store it in their ATS.

Matt Dichter: I'm an ultimately become a conduit between the staff and the agency's website, their collaboration tools and their ATS CRM is something that's very important to us. And we've already have some customers live doing that, and it's been a game changer for them. 

Adam Butera: Yeah. It's, you know, we get back to that, meet people where they are.

Adam Butera: And that to me is on the, you know, on our side of the house, right. As far as meeting our recruiters, where they are meeting our account managers, where they are, do you, would you prefer to be in, in chat? Great. Here's where we are, where you can be in to get your alerts or to have your conversations live.

Adam Butera: Right. So it's kind of meeting our team where they are, and also trying to find out who's available 'cause, there's nothing more frustrating than going to find a bot asking to speak to somebody and then sitting on hold right there until that person's gone off the website. Right. I also think it's important to not try to cover up what the robot is? Right? I mean, there's some automations that it's fine. I could, you know, be seen as the recruiter or the salesperson, but when it comes to bots, I like the transparency of you're talking to a robot. Now let's get you a live person. We all know what we all use. So let's make the robot as efficient as we can, or the bot as efficient as we can so that it answers the pertinent questions, gets to the point and then facilitates you to have a conversation with the right person on the other end, whether that is moving to a live chat or back to our scheduling tool or the right departmental person.

Adam Butera: We've got to make sure that we're getting to them when they want to be when they want to be addressed, right. When they've got time available. 

Matt Dichter: It's one of the, one of the most important things when you're talking about AI and bots and that sort of thing is making the end user very much aware that what they're do, that they're communicating with a bot so that they don't think that they're communicating with a human, because if it's, if they're expecting as human and they don't, they can't get the interest they want, that just leads to frustration.

Matt Dichter: And so we've found that we have to make it very clear during that process to know that, okay, right now I'm talking to a bot or if I want to talk to a live person, here's how I get there. 

Adam Butera: It does. I mean, it removes that initial frustration just to begin with, right. There's no confusion there. You know, you're dealing with a bot, you know, there's limitations.

Adam Butera: There may be a second. But I think it just makes things that much simpler. 

Matt Dichter: So, switching gears a little bit, and I'm sure that this is going to yet Lauren Jones and some people talk a little bit about the power of strong technology stacks and the power of integration between the tools that you're implementing and what that means.

Adam Butera: Yeah, it's paramount. I mean, this gets back to the clean data and I know that's much easier said than done. And Lauren going to test it's much easier said than done, but it does come back to true to clean data. But you know, for us, and I talked about this a little bit before finding, you know, these processes and then finding partners that we can plug into these different areas of our business.

Adam Butera: Right. And not really we've made the decision to not. One company, you do everything, but have partners that specialize in certain aspects of our business. Right? So enable you to do a, you know, onboarding, right? In a sense for engagement in the Staffing Engine, right? For our chat bot and for our engine alerts and a few others.

Adam Butera: But for us, it was important to have everybody kind of be in these areas, but it's most important that everybody plays nicely in the sandbox together, as I like to say, right, we've got to make sure that everything can at least communicate with in our case Bullhorn. Right. But communicate with your source of data.

Adam Butera: So as long as everybody can communicate with your source of data, that's half the battle. Now, if you can get them to communicate with each other, that can speed things up as well. But, you know, we found that ultimately. Can all have a good integration with that source of data people you can make things work and there may be some concessions, but you can make things work.

Adam Butera: And I think for anybody starting out in this and trying to build that tech stack, that's kind of, one of the most important things I would say is need to have a strong ATS like we love Bullhorn for that reason with their open API APIs, right. It's been a great partner, a great platform for us. That's what makes the tool API being able to communicate with all of our other partners rather than being able to plug in where they need to for specific areas.

Adam Butera: But, you know, that's also scalability, right? So as. As we scale. And as we grow, if there comes out partners that can do a much better job in that core area of our business, right? We want to be in a position that we can unplug and plug in somebody else. You know, we've obviously we're loyal to our partners, don't get me wrong, but there needs to be that level of comfort there too.

Adam Butera: There's nothing worse than being trapped with technology that you know is failing you and flawed and is not able to progress. And you being stuck there and that controls so much of the rest of your business. Right? I think that scalability is so much of what I've seen. And in some other companies is that they perhaps build something proprietary and it becomes a linchpin and they just.

Adam Butera: You know, it works for a few years, but they just can't scale beyond that because of how much everything talks to each other. Right. 

Matt Dichter: When we talk about immigration, I see your point. I do think that it always starts with that core digitization platform. So your Bullhorn, you're a Salesforce, that's sort of your central hub.

Matt Dichter: And then you look at partners that, you know, spoke off of that. So that might be your recruiter communication tools, like, you know, like Textus, like CloudCall your automation tools, like you're Herefish and your Sense of acceleration tools. Yes. I'll hype the staffing engine all day, but then when you can actually.

Matt Dichter: String functionality between those tools together. And we have our early customers starting to look at how they can extend us. So as an example of that, you know, we initially deployed bots that existed on one customer's website, social media and SMS business line. But there are also Herefish users and they're like, well, what if we're, what if we took the bot that we built will be on the website?

Matt Dichter: And actually send it out via email or via text message to a group of passive candidates. And that basically helps qualify outbound, passive candidates or passive contacts. And we thought that was a really genius idea. So then you start basically combining your outbound marketing automation tool, your texting communication tool and your AI acceleration tool all together.

Matt Dichter: That's where you start really being able to do some powerful things. 

Adam Butera: You do. That's it. I mean, again, if we can, you can make that stuff work as we're mentioning some things, right. We can make that stuff work if it all works with Bullhorn, but to your point, if you could have some. Intercompany sort of playing nicely, then I think things work out better, which, you know, the early days of the snapping engine when first coming on board was a lot of conversations around that.

Adam Butera: Right? If you had any conversations with Sense, where, what are the APIs look like? Are you open to those conversations? And for us, for vendor partners, a lot about, are you open to those conversations, open to other partners that maybe even do something similar, but there's some differences that we use and you can see how that could benefit you.

Adam Butera: We have to have creative ways to think about this stuff. So for me, a lot of that collaboration has been created. Creative ideas that we've come up with. And some of the interesting things we're doing to your point to have that technology go from being what was, is designed to do, and then taking it to that next level of really true automation, that's improving our business process.

Matt Dichter: Okay. So, LJ asked a good question here that I think we talked a little bit about, but this is an important question, a time you're entertaining deployment of artificial intelligence technology, which is how do you maintain the humanity as you consider something as sophisticated as a bot to represent your company?

Matt Dichter: How do we make sure that the bots do their job without losing the humanity that a best snyder brings to the table? I'll let you start. And then I'll chime in with some thoughts there.

Adam Butera: I mean, for us, it's. Letting the technology do what technology is supposed to do. Right? All those interactions that a human wouldn't expect to have a personal interaction about are the things that the bots can do.

Adam Butera: Right. But if at any point there's something that should be personal or have a personal touch, it should absolutely be done by a human. And part of that is just trying to understand which parts of your process can be automated and have the bots take over versus which parts we need to deflect to. Right.

Adam Butera: We're at a point where, you know, it's, the conversation has X has gone, as far as it's going to go with the robot, we need to get a human involved. And so a lot of that is taking away the friction between those two as well. Right? How do we get it from robot to human in a frictionless environment? 

Adam Butera: So that when that person is done, they already have time on the calendar to talk to somebody perhaps, right. Or somebody is already calling them because they're ready to speak to somebody right then. So you kind of want to let the robots do what nobody expects a human to do, and then facilitate that as frictionless as possible and to get to a human, to make sure that we are still having that personal touch.

Adam Butera: We are still having real conversations. I mean, any good salesperson will tell you that, you know, reaching out with what your company does is not going to get you very far, but understanding who you're talking to is going to get you much further, right? So you have to implore that employee in that. 

Matt Dichter: And I think it all comes back down to like during implementation, really making sure that the people internally understand, you know, the purpose of this is not to be a 24/7 recruiter.

Matt Dichter: It should be a 24/7 recruiter assistant. So that certain activities, like questions around benefits, do we provide housing you know, where do I go to enter timesheets? You know, those sort of easy to answer questions can be answered by, you know, this deployment or this bot, and then questions around, you know, pay and, you know, rates and, you know, the actual selling of the job in advertising of the job that should be handled by a real person, you know, over the phone or via web, you know, virtual conversation, whatever it might be.

Matt Dichter: There're very certain types of activities that you want your recruiters and sales people to have. 

Adam Butera: Yeah, for sure. And goes back to kind of, one of our original points was asking internally, right? Where the problems are, where the friction is, where the bottlenecks are and trying to solve those. So as you are deploying these and implementation, you can address, this is what solving that problem, or this is how we're solving that problem so that they get that time to do those other things.

Adam Butera: But those, it doesn't have to be, you know, this is what leadership has decided to do, and this is what we're moving to. I think it's all part of that process from the get-go of really understanding your core business, what makes your people tick and then, you know, taking it a step further. Once you get that technology, now that we've got free time, it becomes more about operationally.

Adam Butera: Where do people go? What do people do? Right? The role of a recruiter is going to change. We're always going to need human beings to be recruiters because that's a human being's job. It's not a robot's job that builds those relationships. What are the aspects of their job? They like each other as individuals, right?

Adam Butera: And then how do you apply them operationally to different parts of your business to make it more successful now that you have the technology? And to me, that's really where things are starting to get very interesting is the kind of scrap everything and start over with humans. And what do people like to do?

Adam Butera: What brings them joy on a personal level, right? What brings one recruiter joy versus another one, and making sure that we can try and provide as much of that as possible and their daily lives. 

Matt Dichter: What are the things that you and I spoke about last week that I found very interesting. And I think as a departure from a lot of the ways that different agencies think about things we talked about, you mentioned compromise earlier and we talked about.

Matt Dichter: Do you match your process with technology? Do you match your technology with your process? What does that look like? And I think that the team at lead has taken a little bit of a different approach to that. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, your insurance there and sort of how you see those two interacting together?

Adam Butera: Yeah, I think that's probably a big difference is we've we have taken that approach of this is the process we want because at the end goals along the way are these are all the things we need to get to, you know, at the end of the day, we're just trying to help nurses and trying to help patients, right.

Adam Butera: That. The core of what we're doing. So that's really what's driving every decision that we're making. But so we have this process in this goal and we know we need a compliance partner or an engagement partner or an ATS. And then we try and find a partner that fits into there. And that's where I said, we've got to be open to that compromise and be malleable ourselves to say, you know, we may not take a right turn.

Adam Butera: We may take a left turn here, but we're still going to end up where we need to go and that's fine, but we just can't have those preconceived notions about how a technology is supposed to work, because anybody on your side can tell you it's much easier said than done when you get to an engineering perspective.

Adam Butera: And there's a lot of ripples that happen with any technology, right? So if you change something here, what are the effects down the line or in other areas that get affected? Right? So you've got to try and in my opinion, both work together as a true partnership. To understand. Okay, what compromise are you willing to make?

Adam Butera: What compromises can we make? How can we both get there? And I don't think the compromises are all on, on the, you on your own Staffing Engines and as well, you know, from my perspective, coming from the, from that side of the business, you know, I'm a big fan of making concessions from our side, because I understand that it's it's easier for the company to monetize, right?

Adam Butera: It's easier to build that product and sell to the masses if they build something that integrates with Bullhorn and not with my homegrown ATS. Right? And I'd rather that you guys build something that works for the masses, because this gets back to our industry, getting better. The more you can monetize your product and you can sell it and grow your company, the better your product's going to get, which in turn means we reap the benefits of that.

Adam Butera: So we're willing to make those compromises from our side as well of, Hey, this we're going to have to switch this up a little bit internally, but as long as. We remove this friction again. That's the important part. Yeah. 

Matt Dichter: Compromises being made as a very good sign that you're actually in a healthy working partnership.

Matt Dichter: I don't know about other people in the chat, but. We've all had really difficult clients before. And we've even, I've even had to fire some clients, whether, you know, they're, they've been abusive to pizza people or coworkers or that sort of thing. And it's not just the vendor having to make compromises for the end user or vice versa, but it really needs to be a working relationship where both sides figure out how to make it successful.

Matt Dichter: And for both sides, I think there were some of my opinion. 

Adam Butera: I know you're a hundred percent right. And it's trust, right? I mean, I think that people get too rigid with, to your point. They have a set way that they want to do this and they will push their partner as hard as they can to get what they want. And it will, it could work.

Adam Butera: And there's a lot of partners that will concede and build what they need them to build. But I can tell you that in most cases it's a short-term gain because you've got somebody to build something and it's going to work today, tomorrow, maybe even for the next couple of years, but I'd put money down that says it's not scalable.

Adam Butera: That trust of knowing, well, why can't you guys do it the way that I want to do it? And I guarantee you, if you start to peel back the layers on that, the reason why they can't do it is probably a reason why you shouldn't do it from your side is because we get back to these ripples, right? Everything affects everything else within our business.

Adam Butera: So if I change this process, it's going to indirectly affect five other things within my business. And we can account for all of those, but we want to make sure that we're not etching this in stone, right. 

Matt Dichter: So we've got about 10 minutes left, then we'll open it up for questions. Why don't we finish off by talking a little bit about what we see coming down the line.

Matt Dichter: And I guess I, to start that off, I would ask what are some of the current challenges in your day-to-day operations that you foresee being able to solve with technology that you're either implementing now or thinking about implementing, moving forward? 

Adam Butera: Yeah, I mean, it's connectivity, right? I think that's the vision that we have is to really create a platform for folks.

Adam Butera: And I don't want to overuse a word that's been sprayed off and on. in the industry right now. Right. But to create a place that can meet people, not just in the ways that they want to be met, but also delivering the information that they want to receive. Right. So being able to tap into that and create a certain amount of connectivity so that you know, for us, people are drawn to lead and it may not, it doesn't have to be for their next nursing assignment.

Adam Butera: Right. I think the long-term goal for us is to really build a community that's connected to each other so that, you know, clinicians can come together and bond and talk to each other and get tips and tricks from each other. And oh, by the way, they happened to get a job from lead as well. But that's not what drove them there and that's okay.

Adam Butera: Right. If we are providing value to that community, that's ultimately the goal that we're building towards. And for us, that's about building this connectivity and this platform that people can really find the value that they need within it. Right? Whether that's, you know, I want to find the best place to get coffee, or I need the best dive bar to go to after work.

Adam Butera: I've had a hard day, right? And we want crowdsourced information. We all want that. We have it at our fingertips today. Right. And everywhere we go, whether it's Amazon or Netflix, right. We have all of that crowdsourced information. And so how can we take that and apply that to our space, right. And really make it geared for our people.

Adam Butera: And a lot of that is asked and that's probably the biggest challenge is soliciting and getting people to want to give that information and give their time up and getting that from as many people as possible so that we can make sure it's robust enough. 

Matt Dichter: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up connectivity. And in speaking with, you know, our CMO Kim always says, you know, there's really two ways to boost connectivity and that's what real time apps do in real time messaging.

Matt Dichter: And this started back when I was still with Bullhorn and it's, I even think more strongly now than ever, but as we sort of move into 2022 and beyond I really see staffing agencies utilizing apps to digitally transform. And I know that you mentioned time saved and we're really eager to work with those guys in Bullhorn connect and work in and, you know, gig grown in.

Matt Dichter: But these are all tools that we see a lot of agencies getting into and starting to embrace. And you know, where that manifests with our company. I think today we've done a really good job building a strong top of the funnel. You know, candidate, client qualification feed that can get people in touch with recruiters or salespeople faster than before, where we're going.

Matt Dichter: In 2022 and beyond is being able to layer into those apps because once someone becomes a provider or a consultant or a worker of a company, they're probably not going back to that agency's website for answers to their questions. They're going to be going to an app that they're going to be, they're going to be going into the app for information about onboarding credentialing, if you're in healthcare timesheets payroll, that sort of thing.

Matt Dichter: And so we need we need to not only live on websites, social media and text messaging lines, but we also need to later in those apps so that we can provide what I call a concierge like service to consultants and workers, once they become an employee of the agency 

Adam Butera: Hundred percent, I mean, that's, we're all using apps today for everything that we do, right.

Adam Butera: Everything we're using apps for. So it's a shame that we haven't really seen as much of that as I would've expected in staffing. I think we're with a lot of things in staffing technology a little bit further behind than it should be. Right. But for us, it's a no brainer. We needed an app to your point, everybody's on there, you know, what is on their phone and that's that connectivity, but that's also another way to communicate with them, right?

Adam Butera: We're unfortunately starting to beat up text messaging in a lot of the ways that we've beat up email in the past, right. And spammed, and we're sitting a lot more and more of that via text. And so I do see the app and notify in-app notifications, going a long way to provide communication. But the great thing about that is now it's user control.

Adam Butera: So now they get to decide how they want to consume the information and when they want to consume the information was that there was a question coming in about, 

Matt Dichter: yeah, well, I think he's a hundred percent agree with Charlene here, but yeah, easy, FAQ's bought complex things that require critical thinking or, you know, a human touch, you know, you need a, you need to use a human form.

Adam Butera: That's that door, our same experience. Right. So we talk about the app. I mean, having that app and having that bot answer those frequently asked questions. I mean, plus you haven't even begun to scratch the surface of a lot of the somewhat creepy things that an app can do at a location. Right. But, you know, we say that as though it's some terrifying thing, but how much better off would we be if we were actually getting real time, you know, advice about where to eat based on where I'm actually walking to.

Adam Butera: You know, timecards clock me in based on where I showed up. Right. Those kinds of things. And we, not that we want that much of a big brother kind of scenario, but we're on the phone side of like, Hey, these guys know, I love to hike. I happen to have the weekend off. They're giving me some great tips on where to go or where I'm here.

Adam Butera: They're recommending some restaurant. I mean, that's a lot of value that we can provide that is much far beyond what we're doing as far as placing nurses on assignment. But we get back from that, just giving, bringing value, we're trying to make people's lives better. And that's the kind of value integrate.

Matt Dichter: Something interesting you said, but I think the staffing and recruiting industry as a whole at least in the last decade that I've been a part of it.

Matt Dichter: We really are technology laggards and you think you look at. You know, industries like banking and healthcare. A lot of this automation acceleration stuff has already taken off. Now there's no doubt that the last couple of years have accelerated a lot of that. And I think that staffing agencies have realized that all right, well, in the past you could only grow by hiring more recruiters and throwing headcount at it.

Matt Dichter: Now you can actually implement tools that make your existing user base and existing recruiters, more productive. And the companies that are both hiring recruiters and implementing technology to make them more productive are the ones like lead, who are growing the fastest 

Adam Butera: And was a staggered approach, right? So you kind of, you have your team and then you figure out where those friction points are and bottlenecks are, and you find technology to fill in those gaps. Right. And then perhaps you bring in more. More people come in and supplement in other areas. And then there's more bottlenecks and gaps as you scale and grow.

Adam Butera: And you sort of take this approach of one versus the other. And I definitely don't think that it's all technology or all people to your point. And unfortunately staffing has been very lacking in technology adoption to say the least, but I was recently at an SIA event. And I think one of the overarching messages was the self realization that the way that we've been doing things is not working the way that we've all been doing.

Adam Butera: Things have not been working as well as we've all wanted it to. And so we need to take a good, hard look at ourselves and how we're doing things and be open to trying new things, to asking hard questions, to digging, into solving those really tough problems. And Being agile, right.

Adam Butera: Because the way we've been doing it, hasn't been working all that. Great. And if you don't think so, just ask any of your candidates, how they feel about the process, right. And they'll be sure to tell you 

Matt Dichter: yeah. And that's you know, injuries down there agreeing with you on text messaging. I wouldn't say getting played out, but moving more towards that, that email type of communication.

Matt Dichter: And I'm just excited to see what types of technology come out that address that you know I wouldn't be very good at sales. If I said that, cold calling was dead. I think that we still need to use the phone. We are one of our, one of our primary partners at a tool called Onereach AI.

Matt Dichter: And they had a really interesting post recently, where they were using some automation to do AI based calling to basically confirm appointments and that sort of thing. And I could definitely see that ticking off. In fact, we were at SIA healthcare towards the end of the year, and we had a number of people ask us about AI calling and whether or not that's going to be the wave of the future.

Matt Dichter: And if we see that happening and you know, again, it's, you're talking about balancing automation with the human touch and you still want your recruiters on the phones. You still want your sales people making calls. I don't see that as a replacement for that, but if we're talking about like, you know, day or next day interview and confirmation, that could definitely have a use case 

Adam Butera: They could, but I and our COO Kyle put it best when he says.

Adam Butera: Yeah, I buy from companies I buy from people and that gets back to your robots. Can't make those phone calls, can't make dials. Right. And back to how we are communicating with the app, or even with text messaging, that's not necessarily that primary outreach. What that is back to kind of Andrew is I think point is like, that's the sticky part, right?

Adam Butera: Is having those, that ability to communicate with people in the way they would be communicated with. So if they pick up the app and they say, these are the things I want to know about, and I don't want to know about these things. Well, now they're in control and they're probably going to have a lot of brand loyalty because they're only getting information that they want to consume and the way and the time that they want to consume it.

Adam Butera: Right. And there's a lot to be said for that. As far as you know, people get into their habits as we all do. Right. So if you have a partner that's treating you well, that's getting you all the things that you want. Why are you looking elsewhere? And that, that stickiness part right.

Matt Dichter: One last question before we open it up to questions, obviously, Adam, I know that you look at technologies and evaluate a lot of different tech tools and recruiting tools that are out there.

Matt Dichter: You've done a good job plugging Bullhorn, Sense, TimeSaved, Staffing Engine. Are there any other really cool cutting edge tools that you've seen that you would recommend people go take a look at? 

Adam Butera: Yeah, I think that it's interesting to see the way that our spaces is moving around and being more open to transparency, which is something that we are a hundred percent behind, just as far as simple things like pay rates that were always played closer to the chest or being open to partner with somebody that might be considered a competitor like a fusion marketplace, right.

Adam Butera: We partner with fusion on the future marketplace for all intensive purposes. Fusion is a competitor of ours, right? Amazing partner, building an amazing product, right. That we are happy to be a part of, right. That is the future of having that transparency and designing a tool that is built for nurses.

Adam Butera: I think Vivian has another good example. It used to be nurse fly you know, building a tool that is really geared around who their client is. Right. And for such long job boards. And I can say these job boards were rebuilding it based on who is paying the bills and not building it on who is actually the ones that were driving that traffic there.

Adam Butera: Right. And that was the candidates. And so building a platform that's for those candidates. People will buy it. If you have candidates. I think Vivian has done an amazing job at building something that clearly nurses love to use and want to be a part of. And for us, I'm all in for that. I want to be.

Matt Dichter: It's amazing. How fusion, marketplace, Vivian other types of freelance tools, like ShiftGig and you have really taken off really in, across all verticals. It's all about, you know, making it easier on the end user to find work that they want to go to. 

Adam Butera: Yeah. It's easier on the end user, right?

Adam Butera: You've got the, have that in mind, in my opinion. There's another great one. That's doing that. Certainly with a wallet, right. Is trying to build something that's geared towards those nurses and the problems and the friction points that they're experiencing in our case. And how do you solve that for them?

Adam Butera: That's the person I want to partner with because they're solving the problem for the people that I need to solve problems for. Right? It's not my recruiters. It's not my salespeople. I'm sorry, team. I love you guys all very much. And I want to make your lives all better. But at the end of the day, this is about nurses and patient care.

Adam Butera: And that's what has to drive our decisions. Right? And we still want our business to operate, but that's who we have to appeal to. And we can't lose sight of that. 

Matt Dichter: Cool. Well, Adam, thanks for the time. All the candor. Let's wait, we got a couple of minutes left here. Any, anyone in the chat have questions for either Adam or myself to fire away.

Matt Dichter: And if we don't get any, we're going to have to start making Adam it's all bad dad jokes. So I would rather have interesting questions about that.

Adam Butera: I appreciate all you guys joining today, for sure as well.

Matt Dichter: Anyone 

Adam Butera: Have we just done such a great job of giving you all the information that you need, that you couldn't possibly have any questions? I feel like the goat Lauren Jones must have some questions.

Adam Butera: No,

Matt Dichter: we've got some ads

Matt Dichter: LJ things for a yes, definitely. Thanks for firing us questions as you went. 

Adam Butera: I appreciate that guys. Appreciate you guys being interactive. And obviously feel free to reach out and connect. As Matt said earlier with both of us on LinkedIn, if you have questions, you know, just want to pick our brains, as you can tell, I can be verbose and I'm always happy to talk nerd, if you will. 

Matt Dichter: What resources would you suggest for people to learn more?

Matt Dichter: Great question. I'm going to, I'm going to go from well, first of all, I'm biased and I, and our CML puts out some amazing content. I also, I steadfastly and consistently download all types of awesome sales type materials JB sales and obviously a lot of agencies here have you know, have a sales team who you're outbound calling that sort of thing.

Matt Dichter: J B sales does a great job. Publishing content for sales people. Other resources. I use a vidyard, a lot of vidyards grate for sales people, rather than your typical, you know, for you know, cold calling or emailing and being able to create short video clips and putting them in your outbound outreach.

Matt Dichter: I think video's the wave of the future for anyone in sales or recruiting who are reaching out to people. It shares how deeds supporting LinkedIn in mail or email, if you're able to you know, include video in your outreach and stand out a little bit that way. I've had a lot of success using tools like vidyard, and so definitely.

Matt Dichter: Highly recommend that and see the, see a few people here agreeing with me. But yeah 

Adam Butera: You brought up a great point and then even get into like, evaluating those tools, right? With things like gong and things like that, where you can actually use those as really effective learning tools for your team, whether that's sales or recruiting, right.

Adam Butera: To dig into some of those video calls and dissect those and just help each other learn, Hey, here's how I answered this tough question. Here's how I pivoted from this. Or this comes up often or frequently, you know, frequent objections, things like that, all kinds of stuff you can learn. But the other piece I would say is open your mind to things outside of your space too.

Matt Dichter: Yeah. So now we're funded with questions and are running out of time, but yeah. LJ asked about staffing centric resources. I'm biased towards you on the experience podcast. So we actually just recorded an episode there. It's awesome. Matt, from Sense just asked you know, video idea, free recommendations for video sends from a sales stand point.

Matt Dichter: I use video in all parts of my sales process, whether it's, you know, prospecting to get a foot in the door and display my personality. I think after a good discovery session or presentation, you should have a great way to recap that is via sales. Something that I think sales and recruiting both do is send out contracts and deal sheets sometimes.

Matt Dichter: Rather than just sending it over a contract over email, I'm accompanying it with a video. Walking them through the important pieces of a proposal or contractor is incredibly useful. And I do that quite often. So, such as my thoughts, 

Adam Butera: I think authenticity is the number one thing I could say. So think outside the box and don't be scared to be yourself.

Adam Butera: I would say if you're sending videos have fun with it, right? I mean, try it. You'd be surprised how effective and authentic video as a breakup email can really do for you with a client that you haven't been able to get ahold of. And you just send them a funny little 

Matt Dichter: Especially, In staffing and recruiting where there's so much competition, whether you're SMB, mid-market and enterprise, you're competing with a lot of other staffing agencies out there.

Matt Dichter: And so you have to find a way to stand out if you're a recruiter. And so video's a great way to do that. 

Adam Butera: Yeah. And stutter stumble. Don't have to have it scripted, like be yourself.

Adam Butera: clearly Adam doesn't prepare so 

Matt Dichter: cool. Well, thanks so much guys. Appreciate all the engagement and time for everyone who stuck around with us. 

Adam Butera: Thank you so much, guys.