Episode Overview:

In this episode, host Bob Pettke welcomes David Searns, CEO of Haley Marketing, to discuss strategic marketing for staffing firms. David identifies the biggest missed opportunity as the failure to “play the long game,” stressing that firms must consistently nurture the 60% of prospects who are not yet ready to buy. He outlines a dual approach to driving leads: using targeted, direct campaigns to secure “hot” clients while simultaneously establishing credibility through expert content to become the trusted partner for future business. David also advises companies with limited budgets to build their foundation first—defining their mission and messaging—before investing in a great website and marketing collateral.

The conversation concludes with a deep dive into the transformative role of AI marketing in the staffing industry. David explains that AI can revolutionize content creation, help companies develop more accurate buyer profiles, and support both junior and senior staff in strategic thinking. Ultimately, AI is positioned as a powerful tool to enhance the human elements of sales and recruiting, helping staffing firms make better decisions and maximize their long-term market potential.

Listen to the Episode:

Episode Transcript:

Bob Pettke: [00:00:00] Coming to you from the Ultra-Staff Studios in Chicago. Welcome to the Staffing Buzz Network with your host Bob Pettke.

Hello everybody, and welcome back to your new favorite podcast here at the Staffing Buzz Network. I am Bob Pettke. I am the Chief Sales Officer here at ABD Automated Business Designs. And speaking of favorites, the favorite of many. We have an ATS platform for staffing companies like yours.

If it’s not your favorite. Set up a time where we could do a demo, but our software is called Ultra-Staff EDGE. We’ve got a full front office, back office solution. We’ve got some AI integrations that are really streamlining how you’re able to put people to work. And so yeah. So we’re excited to talk to you today about not so much about Ultra-Staff EDGE, but this is our second podcast in a series that’s going over [00:01:00] the Midwest Staffing Conference. We’re working hand in hand with the folks there and that conference. It’s a tremendous conference. It’s a terrific contest. It’s a big conference. It’s a good conference. It’s gonna be held April 23rd and 24th.

And what makes this good and big and terrific is it’s really geared for companies like yours to first and foremost, go and listen to subject matter experts, talk about some things that can help you run your business. Equally important, we’ve got different partners and vendors that are there,

So if you’re entertaining doing some different things, maybe trying to figure out a way to market your business to your potential clients and prospects, I should say, along the way, it’s a very good opportunity. So that’s gonna be the Midwest Staffing Conference. It’s April 23rd and 24th,

Not far from the airport here, outside of Chicago, at the Drury Lane Conference Center in Oak Brook. Now, just so [00:02:00] you know, this is a highly anticipated two-day event. Okay. It’s designed for staffing professionals from all over the Midwest to come together and share their expertise, collaborate, and learn from industry leaders.

You can go ahead and make sure you register early. I think there’s still an early bird member discount. You can actually, if you want information and if you’re a member of ISSA, the Illinois Search and Staffing Association, you might have that, you might have WAS members, which is for Wisconsin and Michigan.

But if you’re not involved in any of those and you just want more information or you’d like to attend, you can email the Illinois Search and Staffing Association at info@issaworks.com. So yeah, great opportunity, great speakers. It’s really one of the besides the ones that are put by, put on by ASA and SIA, and I’ve been to most of them; this is a big one.

This is a [00:03:00] great one for you to attend and really get a lot of information and a lot of take back. With that said, I’m excited to talk about our guest today because we’re gonna bring somebody on here who actually is going to be a speaker at our conference. And so I’m gonna bring on David Searns.

You’re gonna see him pop on here in a second. David, I’m gonna talk about you here for a second, first, before we get going. But just to give you an idea who David is, he’s the CEO of Haley Marketing. And if you’re not familiar with that already. I don’t know why, but I’m gonna remind you.

It’s a web design and recruitment marketing firm that focuses exclusively on staffing and recruiting industries. Now, for the past 27 years, David and his team have helped staffing companies stand out from the competition, improve recruiting response, increase sales productivity, and stay top of mind with employers and talent.

Furthermore, Haley Marketing and their sister company, [00:04:00] our recruiters’ websites offer web design, blogging, and social media job advertising, management, email, and direct marketing. And they work, with SEO, PPC, reputation management, it’s a, with a strategy in development for creative services.

Man, I got a lot there that I shared. David, welcome to the Staffing Buzz Network.

David Searn: Thanks, Bob. Glad to be here. Yeah. Sorry for all the alphabet soup of marketing things that we do.

Bob Pettke: No, I forgot to say L-M-N-O-P. No good stuff, David. So David, as we went through this history, 27 years you’ve been doing this right.

And as a featured partner with ABD, from what I understand, word around town here is you might be one of the first partners we had as far as integrations and things like that go. And if we go into the DeLorean and go back in time, we won’t go to the seventies, but we can go, not that, we can go back a little bit.

So talk to us a little bit about that, about your relationship with ABD and how that’s grown, and where we’re at today.

David Searn: Sure. It’s been, it has been a [00:05:00] longstanding relationship. Great company, great people. I’ve been privileged to actually speak at some of the user conferences for ABD in the past, but, going back in time, I can go all the way back to 2005, and we were only a couple years into building websites for staffing companies.

And a client said, Hey, look, I’ve got an ATS, I’ve got all these jobs in here. I know I want my jobs on my website. How do we make that happen? And we kinda looked at one another and said. Sure, no problem. And then we looked at one another again and said, How are we gonna make that happen?

We started building a career portal software product, and our goal was to make it easier for candidates. To search and apply. So more of those website visitors turn into applicants that staffing companies can place. And with ABD, we’ve had a great relationship figuring out how do we help provide a really good candidate experience, but also make it very beneficial for the staffing company to get more people to find [00:06:00] the jobs and to apply to the jobs.

Like, I know a lot of ATSs may have a native career portal software. But for the ATS, that’s a feature in a larger number of things that an ATS does. And with our software, that’s what it’s built to do is that one thing. Good example, making sure that every job is appearing as its own independent webpage on your domain, optimized for search engines, optimized to get you on Google for jobs, so we can get your jobs found.

When you’re on the website, we can make it have almost an indeed feel. So on any page, we can just drop in a widget and make a search jobs box appear, or allow you to pick featured jobs to show up. And I won’t go through all the features of the software, but the idea is we wanna help an ATS, we wanna help ABD, we wanna help Ultra-Staff users to get even more value out of the product.

Because ultimately it’s about getting candidates to find the jobs, apply to the jobs, and then getting them placed with the clients.

Bob Pettke: No, [00:07:00] absolutely. And it’s just one of many different facets that you bring to the staffing community. 27 years. If we,

David Searn: I won’t even tell you that.

Bob Pettke: It’s actually 28 now. 28.

David Searn: I lost count,

Bob Pettke: Jennifer. told me, but we’ll be all right. Tell me about the changes you’ve seen, just a little bit of man, what a difference between then and now.

There are probably some things that were happening.

David Searn: Is this a seven-hour-long podcast?

Bob Pettke: Man, I wish.

David Searn: I could talk so very quickly and sort when we got started, Bob.

We were trying to bring a very simple concept. It was called either relationship marketing or nurture marketing, and this is in the mid-1990s. We were trying to bring this to the staffing industry. Today, we’d call it content marketing, and so in the mid-1990s, most staffing companies didn’t have a website.

Most staffing companies communicated almost exclusively by salespeople picking up phones and knocking on doors. And then we came and said, you know what? We can help you do more to stand out and stay top [00:08:00] of mind and sell more. And so in 1996, it was all direct mail to support outbound sales efforts. What could we do to make it look like a salesperson was unbelievable at follow-up and sharing really good content that would create reasons to make sales calls?

That was 1996, and then that led to email marketing in the late nineties, which led us into website development, and then around 2008, 2009, and all these little things like Facebook came onto the scene, and SEO became something that everybody knew what it meant.

And so our digital marketing took off, and from 2009 to 2000 and let’s say 2019, we, our company, grew 10x and mostly in the areas of digital marketing, helping companies to build their brand and stand out online and still support sales. And then on the recruiting side, we got into about 2018 job spend management, because staffing companies, the biggest[00:09:00] budget they have for anything that is marketing related is typically what they spend on job boards.

So those ads were always their purview of, it was Monster and CareerBuilder, and then it was Indeed and ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn. It was difficult for an outside party that really add a lot of value, but along came this little thing called programmatic job advertising management.

And now there became software platforms where we could increase the efficiency of managing that. So to finish, fast forwarding to 2025, the industry went from very old school snail mail to support sales to a lot of technology, Whether the technology is digital marketing, the technology is software platforms to manage advertising and manage other types of paid ads and now I’d be remiss and I’m sure we’ll talk about it, AI just jumping in and changing the game in both staffing and my world of marketing.

So the biggest change has been that evolution of technology, but in parallel has [00:10:00] been an evolution in how staffing companies work with clients, getting much more sophisticated about service delivery, things like VMS platforms and MSP platforms, and the evolution of the applicant tracking systems to doing so much more to facilitate automating processes and delivering a superior client and candidate experience.

Bob Pettke: I see it firsthand, right? Having that whole history and staffing myself. The utilization of technology, direct marketing, digital marketing you have helped change the trajectory of how a lot of these mid-size, small to mid-size companies go to market.

You’ve there’s a big change in how they approach technology. Now I’m still surprised there are some for, I don’t wanna say dinosaurs, but maybe you’re reluctant to change, and change is a good thing. And when we talk about changing trajectory, it’s for the positive, right?

And there are probably some missed opportunities when it comes to making sure that you’re marketing [00:11:00] and you’re utilizing the tools of the here and now to do that. So my question to you, with that top of mind, is what do you think is the biggest missed opportunity you see when staffing companies do not market themselves the way that they should?

David Searn: Baba, the answer is not Oh, they’re not doing enough with SEO or they’re not doing enough on social media. I think the biggest missed opportunity is it’s referred to it as playing the long game. So what I mean by that is there’s a really famous book, it’s one of my favorites from the 1990s.

I can look up and see it on my bookshelf. It’s called The Ultimate Sales Machine by a guy named Chet Holmes.

Bob Pettke: Sure.

David Searn: So one of the things Chet talked about in the book is that in B2B sales, when you’re out prospecting, if you’re lucky, maybe 3% of the people you’re trying to get ahold of, if you can even get ahold of them, are actively in the market for whatever you’re selling.

Maybe there’s another six or 7% that, okay, they’re [00:12:00] dissatisfied enough with the current vendor to continue consider someone new. Now you got an addressable market of maybe 10% of the people you can get a hold of. But what Chet said in the book, he said the top 10% is where your salespeople should spend their time.

Those are your hot prospects. Those are the people you’re trying to win deals from. But then there’s three buckets of 30% after that. There’s 30% who are like they don’t think they’re in the market. They don’t think they have a need. There’s 30% that like, they know this is not important.

They’re not in the market today. Maybe it will be in the future, but it’s just, it’s not a priority. And then there’s 30% that you could be giving away free, temporary employ staffing services, and they don’t care. They’re not gonna buy from you. So what Chet said in the book is and this missed opportunity is the middle, 60%.

60% of the people you’re prospecting they’re tomorrow’s customers. Are you doing enough to find those people? Are you doing enough to nurture [00:13:00] relationships? Are you doing enough to effectively position your company so that when they have a need, you’re the company that’s top of mind as the next vendor they wanna work with, the next staffing partner. Or even better, have you positioned yourself in a way that they start to see you as, oh wow, these guys are really not like everybody else.

And if you can do that, it doesn’t happen right away. And that’s one of the biggest missed opportunities is so much marketing. There’s too much of a very short-term focus. If you take a medium-term and a long-term focus, you’re gonna get much more results from your marketing and much more return on investment.

So to me, that’s the biggest missed opportunity, is taking that longer view of the market.

Bob Pettke: It, it’s the continued struggle, right? It’s the day-to-day battle, the struggle bus exists, and being able to just have that, top of mind, that mindset to be able to be calculated and go after that, it makes perfect sense.

But in the day-to-day grind, people are looking for something that they can do right now. And to your point, the business is [00:14:00] there to do that. But with that being said, and I know when it comes to marketing and especially for sales, everyone seems to want lead generation, so realistically, what can marketing do to drive sales leads for staffing agencies?

David Searn: So I’m gonna give you probably a two-pronged approach for how to drive sales leads and that lead gen. Number one is how do I find the low-hanging fruit, the people who are in that top 10%? So what I can do now is I can have a direct marketing campaign. So if, for example, Bob, you run a staffing company in Chicago, and you said, We do light industrial staffing and we want manufacturing facilities of a certain size and shape, that’s our ideal customer.

The more closely you can paint the picture of what that bullseye on the target looks like for your business, then you build a list of those companies and you go after them. And when you go after them, you wanna focus on what’s their pain point is right now. And it’s probably not staffing. [00:15:00] It’s probably something else.

And if you think of staffing, not as the solution you’re selling, but think of it more as the tool that provides a solution. An example would be if you went to Home Depot and you bought a quarter-inch drill bit, you don’t really need that piece of steel. You need is a quarter-inch hole somewhere.

So you buy the drill bit to get the hole. Your clients are buying staffing ’cause there’s some hole they need to have drilled. So think of staffing as that drill bit. So the first thing in lead gen is I wanna go after my ideal clients, and I wanna say, Hey, we know companies like you have these holes, they need to drill.

And we’re really good at drilling those holes. We’re the best drill bit in the market. Here’s why. And that’s how you get that top 10%. The other side is, I have to assume that 90 to 97% of the people I’m reaching out to they have current staffing vendors. They’re happy with those vendors. Those vendors don’t stink.[00:16:00]

They’re doing a good job, but at some point, something will happen to that organization that will cause them to look for a new staffing partner. I wanna be the trusted expert when that happens. And this is where content marketing comes into play. So I wanna play the long game here. By nurturing relationships. I may send out articles.

This is where blogging becomes important, where sales follow-up and newsletters become important. I may do a podcast just like we’re doing right now. I might put on a webinar. I might create a series of YouTube videos, but I wanna share ideas that illustrate to my ideal customers. I get it. I understand what your business is about.

I understand your pain points. I understand that the workforce management challenges you have, and I’m going to share solutions. Maybe there’s solutions that I have as a staffing provider. Maybe there’s solutions I bring in because I can connect you to people who know something about those problems. But if you consistently do that month in and month out, that’s how you play that long game.

So for lead gen, [00:17:00] absolutely go for the low-hanging fruit first. Know your ideal customers’ direct market. When I say direct market, that doesn’t mean just make calls. That doesn’t mean send 10,000 emails. That means I need a multi-channel, multi-step approach. I’m doing email, I’m doing social outreach. I’m picking up the phone.

I’m doing everything possible to get in front of that person. Old school, I’m gonna drop something off. If it’s local, you know what? It’s a hell of a lot harder to miss a package than it is to miss an email. So I’m gonna do that stuff to get their attention. But after that initial campaign, if they’re not ready to buy, then I have to have a game plan to stay in touch long-term with a consistent message,

Consistent positioning, really good content.

Bob Pettke: No, and I like that because one of the things in staffing, and again, it all depends on the line of business, right? But. People buy from people they like and people they trust. So first and foremost, or one of the ways you do that is by getting out there and letting people see you so they can like you and trust you.

But any kind of supporting [00:18:00] documentation or branding or any the things that you had mentioned already, those are, those things are gonna just, further solidify a level of credibility, a level of trust, and a level of likability.

David Searn: A hundred percent. If I, Bob, if I came to you and I found out some of the things that really matter to you, let’s say as a podcast host, and you’re worried about how do I get the best guests on?

How do I ask the questions? How do I get the best guests coming to me? I might share strategies with you to do all those things, even though I’m not selling you podcast guest booking services, but by showing that I’m interested in what you do, and I have an understanding of the challenges. Now you’re gonna be like, I, David, just like you said, I kinda like working with him ’cause he seems to understand and get me.

Now, I can do that through one-to-one conversations, and great salespeople do that, but I can also do that one-to-many if I really know that target audience and everybody in that audience shares common needs and challenges, and desires, and that’s what the marketing is all about, is the common interests.

Bob Pettke: David, we live [00:19:00] in a world where staffing companies, staffing agencies, they come in all sizes and shapes, right? And, I’m a firm believer that if you can do this thing for an extended period of time, you’ve beaten the odds, right? You can get in a room of 10 people at some point, and they might all open up staffing company check back in 12 to 18 months, and you might only have two or three that are surviving in doing that. So with that said, and that in mind, and even companies that might even be bigger in scale, but let’s talk about like people with a limited budget.

How can a staffing company on the limited budget what are some of the best marketing investments that they can make for something like when they’re in that predicament?

David Searn: Yeah. One of the things we see all the time, Bob, is that they, the owners of staffing companies, tend to have shiny object syndrome.

Well, they’ll try marketing because, oh, I gotta be on social media, or, oh, I really wanna rank higher with SEO, and they’ll chase the shiny object for two to three months. [00:20:00] Yeah. And the shiny object, it doesn’t materialize in two to three months, they move on to the next shiny object. So if I’m a small company and I’ve got very limited budgets, I actually want to think about this as strategically as I can.

I put a little thinking time in before I put any dollars up. So if you think about really good marketing, like a pyramid, and I want you to visualize a pyramid, the foundation of that pyramid is not marketing. It’s your company’s mission. Why do you exist? It’s your vision. Where are you going? How are you gonna change the world?

It’s your core values. What do you stand for? Because that’s the foundation of your marketing, your sales, your recruiting. You wanna find companies, you wanna find candidates that resonate with what you’re all about. Then the next layer up in there is the messaging. So how do I tell the world what we’re all about?

How do I put this into language that makes sense for the customer, so it’s not about me? It sounds like it’s about them. If you’re into storytelling, this is where I think, what’s this core story that is the [00:21:00] foundation of our business? A quick side note, so I’m working on our newsletter for this weekend.

We took our sales and marketing teams to Orlando last week to do planning for this year. And we went to one of my favorite places in the world, a big shop called Gideons. You ever heard of Gideon’s?

Bob Pettke: I haven’t, no.

David Searn: So Gideon’s is famous for these amazing, and amazing chocolate chip cookies.

People will wait in line every single day, more than an hour to enter the shop, to buy a cookie. And they don’t buy one. They spend 50 to 60 bucks buying cookies by the time they walk out of the shop. But if you, where I’m going with this is, they started with a great product. The staffing company that knows what it’s all about.

What’s the product for their ideal customer? We want to think about that product. So that’s the very first thing I would do is my product. The messaging then is the story and that Gideon’s the owner of the company, a guy named Steve Lewis had this story of this child named [00:22:00] Gideon in the 19th century who had a passion to make cookies and he built this entire brand around

a 19th century child who had a passion for making incredible cookies and everything about this store is around that. The store, when you go in there, looks like a Victorian library. Okay? It doesn’t look like a cookie job, and the pictures on the walls are all these amazing illustrations of this- They look a cross between monsters and cute kids.

Like you can’t really tell where they were going, but it’s so distinctive. So that’s where I’m going on the messaging is. How do I tell the story of my company in a way that’s memorable? Gideon’s did it by making and inventing a fairytale that actually became the foundation of how they do everything.

Staffing companies, so often our messaging is very literal. Here’s why our services are better. There’s 25,000 companies saying, Here’s why our services are better. It doesn’t stand out. What’s your story? Then the next layer in your pyramid, after you have that messaging, is then it comes to your [00:23:00] website. So staffing industry analysts did some research years ago, and they said the single highest return on investment marketing a staffing company can do is a great website.

And if you think about it, you know it’s your virtual branch office. There’s gonna be 10, maybe a hundred times more clients and candidates that see your website than every step foot in your offices or talk to your salespeople. So we need a dynamite website. Then we may need some other materials that sales and recruiters can use so that they’re telling your story consistently.

Maybe it’s sell sheets, landing pages, maybe it’s videos. But what collateral do we arm our team with so they talk the way we want them to talk? Then the next layer up is, are the actual direct marketing campaigns, the recruitment marketing campaigns, the content and inbound marketing campaigns, things that support the top of the pyramid, ’cause that very peak of the pyramid,

Those are your salespeople and recruiters, and everything below that supports their success. So to bring it full circle, the best investment you can make: Know who you are and what you [00:24:00] stand for. Know how you want to talk to the world, and then put it into your website and support your team so they can be successful.

Bob Pettke: No, that’s a great message, and it’s on point, and we’ll have to talk offline about this Gideon’s cookie. I do spend some time in central Florida, so that’s probably a place I’ll have to check out. But again, to your point, they developed something that it was the product, and they built the rest of it around that.

And yeah. Perfect.

David Searn: And the owner of the restaurant or the shop spent 15 years coming up with the cookie recipe. To get just what he wanted.

And so if you think about how staffing companies or start, how many staffing company owners have spent years thinking about how they’re engineering their service delivery process, engineering the candidate or client experience to be really different than what the industry provides as a whole.

And I would argue it’s almost none.

Bob Pettke: We often say around our office, we’re either gonna do it right or we’re just not gonna do it at all. So 15 [00:25:00] years in the making sounds like it took him a minute to get there and recognize that he did it right. For sure. We’re gonna talk about it.

We mentioned it earlier. AI it’s here. It was really came up big last year. I think we’re gonna see a lot more of that again, in 2025. I think there are some folks that are concerned how that’s gonna impact their job. Is it gonna replace their job? So there’s a whole different story, and that’s a whole different topic, but maybe somewhat related, let’s talk about how AI marketing, let’s be specific, right? How is AI marketing how is that impacting the staffing industry?

David Searn: I got a wake-up call probably with the same time everybody did. It was November of 2022, and all of a sudden, this thing called ChatGPT showed up, and we went, What’s that?

I’ve heard of AI before, but what’s the, wait a minute, this thing, it can write, it can, it’s like it’s reading my mind. And all of a sudden, we started to play with it and said, Wow, this is amazing. And then about six months later, I think it was May of that year, Sam [00:26:00] Altman, who, if you don’t know, who was the CEO of OpenAI, founder of or maker of ChatGPT.

Sam said within five years, 95% of what marketers do will be replaced by AI. And I went, uhoh. 5% won’t be replaced, but 95 percent’s a lot. And in staffing and recruiting and in the marketing staffing recruiter, we’re seeing incredible things that can be done with AI. And there’s the obvious use cases.

Yes. I can write emails, I can write blogs, I can write just about anything. We’re getting to the point I can create images, I can create video. I don’t think, at least what I’m seeing is most people are using AI the right way to what it can really unlock the power of it. Okay, so AI can help you think? Yeah.

A lot of people I know will have conversations with AI. Literally, they’ll put in their AirPods and they’ll go for a walk and they’ll [00:27:00] talk to Chad GPT about problems they’re having. I follow a guy named Christopher Penn from a company called Trust Insights. And one of the things Chris says is, the more you communicate with an AI platform, whichever platform you’re using, the better the output you’re going to get.

So the richer your conversation. So what does it mean for staffing and recruiting, and marketing? If I’m gonna connect with my buyer, AI can help me understand that buyer, so I can be developing my ideal client profiles with AI much more accurately than trying to go with what’s in my brain, or even Googling myself, because AI’s got basically everything ever written.

It’s already cataloged. So now I can know who I’m targeting at a deeper level, so I can get information that’s more accurate, it can help me understand their problems. It can help me. Maybe I’m a rookie salesperson. I understand what my company does in staffing, but I don’t know that drill bit analogy.

What’s, how is staffing gonna be used by this manufacturing company to [00:28:00] drive results? AI can help you figure that out. It can give you that information, or you can turn it around and ask the AI, Hey, quiz me on this. Ask me questions. Try to stump me, and it will keep asking you questions. I’ve used AI to test marketing strategies.

I’ll do one myself. I’ve got lots of experience. It’s supposed to be what I know about, but then I’m using the newest models from OpenAI, the reasoning models with a different style of prompting, ’cause reasoning models use different prompting than the earlier LMS to say, walk me through how you would design a marketing strategy for this situation.

And I give it a very specific situation. Sometimes I actually give it frameworks I want to follow. Like, I’m a big fan of Seth Godin and Dan Kennedy and Alex Hormozi, who are marketers if you don’t know them, and I’m like, I want you to incorporate their best practices into this marketing strategy. And AI can do that for me.

And I may not use everything that’s in there. So if I’m in staffing and recruiting, I’m [00:29:00] gonna need to use AI to develop much richer, more on-target emails, Content marketing, sales, support materials. One of the things I’m really intrigued by, but I can’t say that I’ve unlocked the secret yet, or even that our whole team has, is personalization.

How do I personalize that at scale when I’ve got 200 prospects I’m going after, and I need to know all about every business, and I can have my AI give me that research and say, here’s my email that works all the time. Help me rewrite it for this specific company based on what they do. The impact it’s having is it’s just changing the game.

If you’re, if you’re not an expert in marketing and staffing, AI can help you radically improve your skills. And there’s been an adage, a lot of people have said, that AI is a field level or it helps junior level employees perform like mid-level employees, but for seniors, it doesn’t really change them that much.

I just read some research last week, said actually, they’re finding some of the opposite is true because AI works when you ask questions, and [00:30:00] they said the senior-level people ask better questions because they know what to ask about. So they tend to get the most robust, most effective, most impactful results from AI.

So that’s what I’d say was no matter what your role is, if you do marketing in your company or you’re in sales or you’re in recruiting, start talking with these AI agents, and you may not have the AI do anything for you other than listen and give you feedback. But it is just a game-changer to get that third-party perspective.

We’re doing some situations where we may have an issue in a meeting that maybe something happened with a client that we have to address. We will feed in all the conversations the scripts, the recordings from our meetings, and ask the AI to analyze what their, what the AI’s interpretation of the situation is and how we should have handled it differently.

It. It’s amazing. But it’ll give us back. We got one yesterday, and it just it said, You need to do this, and it said if you don’t hear something in two weeks, you need to elevate this to leadership. That wasn’t a policy we had.

But the AI came up with a [00:31:00] policy change we should have in our business.

That was brilliant, just by analyzing the data that we fed it and us asking good questions.

Bob Pettke: I’m noticing as we’re talking today, I keep going back in time, right? Like I got on the, we got the DeLorean. 10 years ago. Could you imagine a world, these are things that we never even thought of? And that usually is, the future is often predicated on things that are gonna happen that we don’t even know of.

And unless you have a crystal ball, I don’t, something’s gonna come out here soon that. It’s just gonna blow us away again, or if we reach the pinnacle, I don’t know. But I’m gonna hold on tight and see. Any thoughts on that at all?

David Searn: It’s funny, I don’t remember who said it.

There was a, it was in the early 19 hundreds, and some politician, I remember reading the quote, said that everything that can be invented has already been invented. Yeah, and I feel the same way. It’s we don’t know what we don’t know, and the only thing we can do is I’m a member of a group called Entrepreneurs Organization, and one of the things they coach you to do is when you go into [00:32:00] a meeting or you go into a, like a workshop and there’s a speaker they call it having a shoshin mindset, which means a beginner’s mindset.

So no matter how much of an expert you are, go in thinking I have something to learn. And I think more than ever, we need to approach every single day with that same shoshin mindset. What can I learn today? Because AI can know all the facts, it can know all the history. It’s gonna know more than that. You and I can cram into our brains, but we can go in with that beginner’s mindset to say, What could I do with this?

How does this impact my clients? How does it impact my candidates? How can I do something that’s different than the competition? And that connecting the dots by learning and applying the concepts. I dunno, maybe AI will get there. Maybe we’ll get to the artificial general intelligence, and then who knows what we’ll do?

Sit on the beach and drink pina coladas, let the AI do all our work. But until that time, there’s so much opportunity, as [00:33:00] long as you’re willing to constantly be learning and adapting.

Bob Pettke: That brings us to a point, David, where April 23rd and 24th, we’ve got the Midwest Staffing Conference. You’re going to be giving a presentation.

Are you gonna show Shin us there while you’re there?

David Searn: I will be going in with that mindset, watching others, and I’m actually doing a leadership session that is around AI. I’m not an AI expert, but we’ve spent so much time working on the integration of AI into our business over the last two years.

I’m gonna be talking about some of the things we’ve learned, what worked. What didn’t work? Where did we see the real productivity gains, and where did we think we’d see productivity gains that we didn’t? So we’ll be talking about how to get that AI adoption and integration, whatever tools you choose to use in your organization.

We’ll be brainstorming as a group, ways to get better results.

Bob Pettke: No, and it’s a great topic, and timing is good. And, I was gonna ask you, why should people come [00:34:00] listen to you? You just said it right there. It’s going to, you’re gonna be able to, and again, I would recommend other folks come with that show.

Is it shoshin mindset?

David Searn: Shoshin.

Bob Pettke: Oh, I hope you use that when you’re there. We’re excited to see you there. Any parting words before we let you run?

David Searn: No, I’ll plug the conference as well because I get the opportunity to go to a lot of staffing conferences. I get, I’ll be going to the executive forum, which one of the biggest shows in a few weeks.

I get to go to Staffing World. I get to a lot of the regional ones, and I will say all of the regional events, the Midwest Staffing Conference is definitely the strongest. It’s the biggest attended great speakers. It’s a two-day event. If you are anywhere in Illinois or Wisconsin, or Indiana, maybe stretching over to Iowa, it absolutely makes sense

to make some time to get there because you’re gonna hear from some really smart people. And even if some of the things are topics you may have heard before, that opportunity to step outta your office, the phone’s not ringing, you’re not spending all day answering email [00:35:00], and listen to somebody talk about something you have familiarity with will trigger ideas that can change your business.

My parting thought is book your ticket, get there, and I look forward to seeing everybody in Chicago in a couple months.

Bob Pettke: David, we will be there. I look forward to spending some time with you in person. Thank you for being on the Staffing Buzz Network, and yeah, until then, my friend, just keep doing what you’re doing, and I think we’ll see you before then.

And we’ll be at the conference for the staffing industry in that’s March, right? March.

David Searn: So it’s in March in Miami.

Bob Pettke: We’ll look forward to seeing you again soon.

David Searn: Thank you so much, Bob.

Bob Pettke: Thanks. David Searns. Wow, what a tremendous guy with a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge, and just bringing it and telling it like it is. We live in that world right now where it’s we’re on the cusp of some things that we just don’t know what we don’t know.

And so make sure that you go and register for the Midwest Staffing Conference. And remember, you can go [00:36:00] and you can go to a website, you can search on Midwest Staffing Conference. You can email at info@issaworks.com. I’ll say it again, info@issaworks.com, and that’s our second guest that we’ve had now, two consecutive weeks.

We’ve got another critical, good positive enforcement, an enforcer in the staffing industry. That’ll be on with us next week. Don’t waste your time. Make sure you sign up and get there. Just remember us as well.

We’ll be there front and center as well. We’ll be there in the partnership area and we look forward to seeing you and, with that said, make sure if you’re not doing so already, make sure you subscribe to the Staffing Buzz Network ’cause we’ve got a lot of folks like David on and we’re trying to make sure that we build a network together of people that can really move the staffing industry in the direction so that we can all fill more jobs and be more profitable as, as profitable as we can be.[00:37:00]

And again, also remember if you wanna know anything about our software, you could reach out to me, and so we can set up a demo for you as well. And that’s our Ultra-Staff EDGE software, the full front office, back office solution. With that said, make sure you register April 23rd, 24th. Until next time, we’ll see you again here on the Staffing Buzz Network.

Thanks.