Episode Overview:

In this episode of the Staffing Buzz Network, host Bob Pettke welcomes Pankaj Jindal, co-founder of Sense, for a dynamic conversation on the evolution of talent engagement in the staffing industry. Pettke highlights Sense’s groundbreaking role as the first talent engagement platform specifically designed for staffing, and its deep integration with Ultra-Staff EDGE.

Pankaj, a veteran with over 20 years in staffing and recruiting technology, shares the genesis of Sense, born from the desire to democratize high-touch contractor care. He explains how Sense automates repetitive tasks, dramatically improving recruiter productivity, reducing time to fill, and boosting redeployment rates. The discussion reveals how companies, including Bob’s former firm, have leveraged Sense to double in size and reduce reliance on expensive job boards. Pankaj also unveils the often underutilized sales component of Sense, emphasizing its power in client outreach and drip campaigns. The conversation concludes with Pankaj’s insights on current staffing trends, including the industry’s shift towards back-loaded growth, the rise of automation as a necessity, and the rapid adoption of AI to enhance productivity and candidate experience.

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.

[ Music ]

Hello, I’m Bob Pettke, and I wanna welcome everyone back to the Staffing Buzz Network. Can’t believe that we are halfway through the year. But we’re excited to be here. So, for those that have listened in before, welcome back. For those of you joining us for the first time, make sure you’re following us on your favorite podcast platform and just a little bit about the Staffing Buzz Network.

So again, my name is Bob Pettke, and after about 15 years in the staffing industry, I ended up making a change in my career and came to work for Automated Business Designs. We’re a full-service, ATS CRM staffing software platform, and we’ve been doing this collectively for over 40 years.

And being here, one of the things that I had an [00:01:00] opportunity to do was to go back and put together a podcast based on some of the leadership here. And not necessarily, this doesn’t serve as a commercial for our organization, but if anything, it serves as a way to contribute to the staffing community.

And the way that we do that is we have people on, from the industry, high-level people that are making a positive impact. They could be people that you might partner with as a vendor. They could be decision makers. We’ve had people from Washington, we’ve had congressmen on. We’ve had a lot of good folks on here that contribute to the staffing community.

And so we’re real excited about our guest today. In part because this partner of ours has a tremendous integration and relationship. From since we’ve got Pankaj Jindal, if you wanna go ahead and bring Pankaj to the screen, Pankaj. Hey, we’re so glad that you’re here, and we’re so grateful and thankful for this partnership that we’ve shared.

Pankaj Jindal: Bob, thank you so much for [00:02:00] having me. I’ve been looking forward to this chat.

Bob Pettke: Likewise. Absolutely. So before we get started, Pankaj, I wanna take a minute talk about you. I wanna let people know who you are. They might know your name. You might have some people that are listening that are already partners with Sense.

We might have some people that are on the fence with Sense, and we might have some people that might, for the first time, be hearing or be hearing about Sense. Pankaj he’s a staffing industry veteran. He’s a co-founder of Sense. Which is really the first talent engagement platform designed specifically

for the staffing community. Now Pankaj, 20, over 20 years of experience leading staffing and recruiting technologies companies. He’s a foremost leader in the area of talent acquisition, human capital recruiting, productivity, talent deployment and candidate experience. So Pankaj already comes into as a partner in staffing with a lot of that in his backpack, right? He’s got these tools in place. And prior to founding Sense, Pankaj [00:03:00] was the CEO of an organization. He’s president of, if I’m saying that right, Aditi Technologies and Aditi Staffing. Is that right?

Pankaj Jindal: That’s right.

Bob Pettke: Perfect. He comes to us as an industry expert as an industry helper provider, and really providing some solutions that are out here that are available to the staffing community that just really weren’t in place. It’s, I know that I can speak now, the word doesn’t come up in any of your bio, Pankaj, but you’re an entrepreneur, right? You’ve got that entrepreneurial spirit, and you’re always forward-thinking.

Pankaj Jindal: No thank you. You are absolutely right. First of all, I feel old after you said I’m a veteran. But you’re absolutely right. I’m glad you picked up on something when we started, since there wasn’t anything like that in the industry. In fact, the popular joke that I have with a lot of my customers is there is a more software that has been made for the staffing industry in the last five or seven years than in the 20 [00:04:00] years.

Before that, I ran staffing companies for 15 years before I started Sense. And. I don’t think anything really changed. We were all using one ATS that we were all fans of, and that’s it. And no other technology came around and resumes used to come to us via email and sometimes via fax and sometimes, paper resumes that somebody would drop by in the office all the way to the world we have today, which is, dictated by AI and machine learning and a lot of what we will talk about.

But thank you again for having me.

Bob Pettke: Hey, we’re glad you’re here. And I alluded to the relationship that we have, and I’m gonna give a little bit of a, this is your life, this is the life of Sense and a little bit even about us as far as our integration. So we’ve been partnered with you since 2021, and as it turns out from doing some research, we actually started before that when we shared a customer in 2019. And you hit it on the head.

Something that hasn’t been implemented or done before, people may have thought about it in some way, shape, or form, but to [00:05:00] take something that was an idea or a premise and bring it to fruition and bring it to something that’s marketable, sustainable, and making an impact.

Kudos to you and the folks that you’ve worked with along the way at Sense to make that happen. You’re a game changer in the staffing industry. There is no doubt about it. One of the things that I can see as a partner and as somebody who’s been in the industry for a long time is you continue to be on the cutting edge of technology and innovation.

You continue to go to market. Yeah. On an initial concept. Like I said, it hadn’t existed before, but now you’re at this point where you’re offering specific integrations. It’s a purpose-built integration for the staffing community. So hopefully I’ve hit on some of the things that stand out to me, but I want you to tell us, Pankaj, and you alluded to it already, but tell us how did Sense, how did it come into existence?

Pankaj Jindal: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, you touched on a lot of different things. I won’t make this a monologue, but I’ll try and cover [00:06:00] these like one by one. First of all, the genesis of Sense itself, right? There are four of us who started the company together. I’m one of the founders. We’re all very close. We work very closely together.

When we started the company the, I guess the original idea was for 15 years, like I said, I ran staffing companies and every year we won the best place to work for award. This is something that was a huge differentiator. This is something that would help us win RFPs. Customers love that.

Contractors love that. Everybody loved that. How are we doing it, though? We were doing it very manually. We were using actual human beings. We literally had these positions called Employee Relation Executives. Their job was to manage a hundred people at a time. So a hundred contractors out there in the field.

These folks are calling them all the time and saying, Hey, how you doing? Any problems? Can I run you your paycheck? Can I bring you your business cards? Maybe I’ll stop by with donuts one of these days. We’re basically over servicing these people and essentially becoming a best place to [00:07:00] work for now. If you think about it, that’s the kind of thing that can only be done by a company of a certain size and can obviously be done better by companies that are even bigger.

Bob Pettke: Absolutely.

Pankaj Jindal: When we started Sense, our main aim was to democratize this using technology. Have the technology that is available to a multi-billion dollar company, be available to a mom and pop staffing company, which is what, really, our industry is all about. But if you want to be on the cutting edge, if you are the innovative person, if you care about the people that you work with, you should have a technology that lets you do that.

To your first part, that’s how Sense started. The genesis of our company was to automate contractor care, employee care, and take care of this big taboo that nobody likes. Their staffing company. People work with staffing company one time, and then they go over to the other staffing company if they’ll give them a little bit more money.

We wanted to break that [00:08:00] taboo and say, redeployment should be a constant conversation that you have. You should have people that have done multiple assignments with you. You should reward them for having work anniversaries with your company, so on and so forth. So that’s where we started. Now the product has taken a whole life of its own.

I’ll pause here to see if you have a comment, but then I can talk through what the genesis was.

Bob Pettke: No, I want you to, and that’s the thing about staffing, right? There’s a staffing community. I’ve talked about this so many times, and. First of all, it takes a very unique person to just thrive and survive in the actual staffing industry, the day-to-day grind.

Having to find jobs, having to find people, having to put people to work, and being able to have the vehicle, the mechanism to deliver all of that. And to your point, it was very manual for a long time, and we’re starting to see a trend there. But what I really wanted to talk about was prior to being here, I was at one of those staffing companies, and I remember for the first time talking to folks on your [00:09:00] team, and eventually you and I came and sat at the table and we made this thing happen, right? We closed this deal, and we weren’t a billion dollar company.

That’s right.

Bob Pettke: Family-owned business. We had a couple of offices in the Chicagoland area. We were expanding to other markets, and it’s funny because as you being the provider those services and the functionality that you had placated to what we wanted to do next, and it allowed us to expand and grow and not on a big budget either, right?

Pankaj Jindal: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You are the poster child the company that you used to be. With is the example of a poster child. Customer for us. Once you grow beyond a certain size, you want an employee relations person, but you can’t afford a full person.

You want a marketing person, but you can’t afford a full person. You want a redeployment specialist, but you can’t afford a full specialist. Like I said, you’re not a billion-dollar company. How do you have technology come and do this? One of the favorite things that I’ve, maintained over the last 20 years is, a staffing [00:10:00] industry is all about three things.

You have candidates, you’re obviously going to be good at finding candidates or not so good, but that’s one of the key components. You have customers where you get the jobs from, but the companies that will win are the ones that most efficiently connect them to the operational efficiencies. That’s why some companies in our industry have 10, 15% EBITDAs and others have 1%.

We’re all about the guys that play in the middle. We’re essentially saying, how can you triple the productivity of your recruiters? How can you triple the productivity of your sourcers? How can you take busy work away from them? And everything that they’re doing repeatedly or repetitive is now being handled by technology.

That’s absolutely right. The whole intent of the software is to make sure that you can grow your revenue by 20, 30, 40, 50% without having to add more headcount.

Bob Pettke: You know what I found? Pankaj, that was great when we utilized the system, right? And part of it was utilizing it the right way. [00:11:00] We were fortunate we had the right mindset to come on.

You had a good team that helped us through the implementation process. So you, the support and the people, the talented people that you had in place really helped that. Helped our business grow and, we grow over the course of two years, we doubled in size. Pretty close to it. And part of it, I really, I just, I’ll stand by it.

It was due to the functionality of the utilization and the productivity of Sense. And not only was it productive, but it allowed us to do things in three ways. We were quicker. We were faster, we were better. And in doing so, I’m gonna go over to this hand. We were able to spend more time with our candidates, with our clients, and with our prospects and with people that were already on assignment, right?

We were able to spend more time outside of the database, outside in front of the computer, because of this, there’s a term, it’s a set it and forget it technology that’s from like eighties infomercials and things like that. And [00:12:00] that my friend was really what turned me on again, we have this partnership now, I’m with ABD

It’s beautiful. We can talk a little bit about that, but that’s where we were sold as an organization.

Pankaj Jindal: Yeah. And you almost stole the words out of my mouth. We actually measure this every single month, so Sense has over a thousand customers at this point. When we take the cross-section of those thousand customers, the NPS score of those customers is better than the industry.

Industry tends to be 15 to 20 NPS. Sense customers tend to be 50 to 60. It’s more than twice. They have better cost per hire. They have better time to fill. They have better redeployment rates. Basically, every metric that A CEO cares about. They typically tend to have even higher average length of assignment because more people will get redeployed and work with your company, once, twice, three times, so on and so forth, before they leave.

And even if they leave you. You are still being contacted, you’re still being kept in touch, and maybe you did not get [00:13:00] redeployed, but you will get rehired, maybe three months down the line, maybe three years down the line. But it’s this whole hire-to-retire philosophy of keeping in touch with people once you’ve stayed in touch with them.

Bob Pettke: And I think the, like the sleeper side of your system, of the Sense tool, and I think it deserves more attention for people that are already using it. And I’m sure you’re probably promoting it as you go to market and meet with new prospective clients is there’s a sales component that you can use utilizing creating journeys, creating drip campaigns.

Again, some set it and forget a technology. Somebody gets out an email, and it gives them information about, maybe, I have forklift operators. Would you like to learn more? Click on something, contact for more. We would send out a campaign like that on the sales side, and it always generated activity.

So I know that our listeners are really concerned and they really want to hear about recruiting. But let’s not forget, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring it up. There’s that sales component as [00:14:00] well.

Pankaj Jindal: That’s very insightful of you to bring up. We have been talking about this for a year now, that for the first seven years of Sense, every conference that we went to, everybody would come to us and say, How would Sense help us get more candidates?

How would we hire faster? How would we do this? How would we do this? How would we do this? And for the last one year, everybody’s been going. Hey, how can you guys help us get more customers? Everybody, as the economy has turned a little bit now, talks about that, and it puts a chuckle on our face because that is something that was available within Sense from day one.

It’s just not a use case that a lot of people talked about, but today, all of our customers are essentially saying, we have this tool. We are already paying for it. Why don’t use it for sales outreach? A lot of customers today are shifting their spend from any other software that they might have that does drip campaigns, that does marketing and automation, that does things like checking in with your actual hiring managers.

Hey, how’s [00:15:00] John Doe doing for you? On the first day, on the seventh day, on the 30th day, reaching out to John Doe and saying, Hey John, you’ve been here for 30 days. Please keep your eyes and ears open. If anybody else is looking for people, let us know, and we’ll give you a referral. This idea that a salesperson, you’re the chief sales officer.

You went to a conference, you came back with 50 business cards or 50 LinkedIn connections, you throw them into Sense, and now you set up a drip campaign on those 50 people and say, Remember, we went at this conference. Can I set up some time to show you more about what ABD does? All of this, that sometimes people have used a completely different platform, a HubSpot, a lot of these things that don’t integrate with your applicant tracking systems at all.

They’re now using Sense form.

Bob Pettke: Yeah. I’ve heard some companies who might not have a lot of information. They might say something along the lines of, you brought up HubSpot. I think I just said that. But to say, Hey, isn’t Sense just like HubSpot when somebody says that and maybe thinking with AI integrations, what’s your response to that?

Because I’ve heard it [00:16:00] myself, and I’d like to be better equipped as a sponsor of Sense to be able to give that answer. So, what is your response? And I’ll use that moving forward.

Pankaj Jindal: Yeah, no, it’s a great question actually. This is another thing that we used to talk about a lot. I think the staffing industry is very used to having

point solutions. You know you have something that does text messaging. If you wanted to do text messaging, can you go find a tool that only does text messaging? Sure. You can go find a tool that only does NPS scores. You can go find a tool that only sends bulk email. You can go find a tool that lets you build some landing pages.

HubSpot would fall in that category. You could go find a chatbot. You could go find an interview scheduling tool. I can keep going on and on. I’ve only told you half a dozen of these. My point is, at the end of the day, you want all of this to be a single engagement platform, which is what Sense does; there is nothing like Sense in the industry today where you can get all of these in one platform and[00:17:00]

We never force you to use all of them. We never force you to buy all of them. You can still buy à la carte, but you very much know that as your company expands, as your business expands, you don’t have to go out. You don’t have to make multiple different contracts, work with multiple different customer success teams.

You essentially have a system of record, and you have a system of engagement. We’re the system of engagement. HubSpot specifically, they don’t even integrate with ATSs. They’re not purpose-built for staffing. Nobody in HubSpot customer success team is going to be a hub staffing company specialist.

They probably cost 10 times as much as Sense because they charge you for the number of contacts you put in HubSpot. And we know for a fact that most staffing companies, even tiny ones, have millions of candidates; you’re not gonna be able to put millions of candidates in HubSpot. The bill would be just out of reach.

So anyway, we don’t see that much HubSpot. In fact, whenever we see HubSpot, people very quickly realize that they need to move that spend over to Sense. [00:18:00] But our vision has always been to create a system of engagement. The one system that will bidirectionally talk to your ATS, doesn’t matter what your ATS is, doesn’t matter if you change your ATS.

All the information will still stay there. We’ll write it into your new ATS, so on and so forth. That was the vision when we started the company to build the first talent engagement platform. And yeah, it’s been very gratifying that we are. There’s always work to do, but we are close to essentially saying, Hey, here’s this one-stop solution that you should need today.

Bob Pettke: No, and I appreciate that, and that equips me to be able to talk to it ’cause again, as a partner and a sponsor,

Pankaj Jindal: One of the things I would say ABD has been a great partner to us. Just, if I can take a second to tell you guys about yourselves. Okay. Terry and John have been amazing.

We obviously partnered with over 50 different applicant tracking systems, but the amount of engagement and involvement that we’ve seen from your [00:19:00] founders, from your marketing team. The way we’ve done sales enablement for both your team and our team, how quickly we’ve integrated with your applicant tracking system.

It’s one thing to have. an integration. It’s a whole different thing to say we’re fully integrated. All of eight of Sense’s products work with ABD, you can do note write backs, field write backs. The speed at which we have done that essentially puts to shame any other ATS integration that we have. And I will say that to anybody.

We partnered well with several companies, but the speed at which we were able to do that, the openness and the willingness that your founders had to say, let me introduce you to our biggest customers because they need help, has been just absolutely amazing. So this is very much a partnership that we cherish a lot.

Bob Pettke: And we appreciate that. And again, we’re thankful for that. And really, that’s just an example of a couple of smart organizations recognizing the smartness of the other and building upon that. And one of the things that makes this a benefit when we have a chance to talk about it and then [00:20:00] bring in some of your consultants to have further the conversations is because of this integration that we have.

I use the term, I didn’t coin the phrase, but it really has become the closest thing to a bulletproof integration, right? And so if you can present something like that’s, Teflon, Armor strong, you’re in a good space and place to do that.

Pankaj Jindal: Absolutely.

There is. I was just referring to this a second ago. There are integrations, then there are mild integrations, and then there are robust integrations, and ABD is very much, very squarely in the latter category. And the only time that happens is when there is a huge amount of willingness on both sides of the board.

Bob Pettke: Absolutely. I’m gonna change pace a little bit because I wanna talk. We know where you came from. We’ll talk a little bit about where you are, and I apologize. My, my facts might not be right. I might have to be sitting on some old data, but from what I understand, you probably have about 40,000 recruiters that are [00:21:00] utilizing Sense regularly.

Am I right with that number?

Pankaj Jindal: Inching close to a hundred thousand now. We had 75,000 at the beginning of this year. We’re probably somewhere around the 90,000 mark now, but that’s a very good number to track. We have the sort of DAU over MAU ratio. The daily active users over monthly active users are about 90, 95%, which means if you’re a Sense user, you’re logging into the Sense platform pretty much every day, or at least 95% of the people are.

So think of it as a hundred thousand recruiters that log in into Sense every single day to either do text messaging or build a chatbot or ask for referrals, or set up an automation. And Sense, in turn, is now responsible for over 3 million hires.

Every single year in the U.S., over 3 million people in the U.S. that get a job every year, contracting job, full-time job, whatever the case might be, have been touched by Sense. A large percentage of those people have [00:22:00] actually even been reactivated by Sense. What I mean by that is typically in any staffing company, every recruiter has 10, 15, maybe 20 people that are top of mind for them.

They’re submitting those people all the time. They really wanna get these people a job. But as you get through a slice of time, you will find out that three months later or six months later, 95% of your database has not been spoken with.

If you have a million people in your database, it is unlikely that you have talked to more than 50,000 people in six months. Even that is unlikely. So, 950,000, 95% of your database has never heard from your staffing company in the last six months. You’ve forgotten about them, and clearly they’ve forgotten about you.

So those are what we call Wake the Dead campaigns, where you are literally going back to these people every three months, every six months, whatever cadence works for you, and you’re essentially saying, Hey, are you still happy? If we can keep your information, are you still happy if [00:23:00] we say start sending you job alerts on what might be available?

Can you let us know if you’re now gainfully employed and don’t need a job for the next several months? Can you let us know if your period expectations have changed? If your location has changed? Nearly every Sense customer does this now, and the number one side effect of that is you have a refreshed database.

So whenever you’re searching for candidates, you’re searching for candidates way more than just what one recruiter’s brain can keep in mind. But the second side effect is you are dramatically reducing job board spend. The reason people go to job boards is because they don’t trust their database. They think that their database is stale, does not have the right information.

I might as well just pick up a new person online from ZipRecruiter or Indeed, CareerBuilder or whatever your choice is. But if you start believing that you have more information on these million people than any of the databases out there because you have specifically gone out and talked to them and asked them questions that are specific to [00:24:00] your company, you’re going to search here first and you’re gonna spend less money.

My favorite example, and this was not something that is going to last forever, is an actual billion-dollar organization. That is a Sense customer where their CEO very boldly decided to turn off all job board spend, went down from millions of dollars to zero, just to see the impact it has, because at their scale, they feel like they literally have the entire US database in their database.

Everybody who needs a job is in their database, so they’re like, why are we paying millions of dollars to these job boards? Let’s see what happens. And other than the recruiters freaking out, nothing really happened for three months. They actually maintained the same placement volume. They’ve turned the tap back on a little bit, but they’re never going to be spending that kind of money again.

So anyway, yeah, I mean, there is, this is just one use case of automation. I can tell you a hundred of these, but that’s the kind of power that an engagement platform brings to you. [00:25:00]

Bob Pettke: No. And that’s a great story. And it’s funny to see that they turned that off with one of two things happened.

Either they were in a space in place where they were on autopilot, or with the utilization of Sense. They were maybe on a separate autopilot, but also, Sense was picking up any kind of traction that was lost by doing that in the first place. That’s right. Staffing professional before this, right?

You’ve been doing, you’ve been working in this industry, you now have a tool that’s giving back to the staffing world that’s put food on our tables. But like most of us who’ve been doing this for a while, and as a fellow staffing partner, part of what we end up trying to do to the best of our abilities is try to analyze the staffing community.

In part, because you’re connected, you go to these meetings, you’re working with companies that are big and small and in between. What are you seeing, hearing from your partners or perspective clients? What are they seeing in staffing overall? And this might not just be a [00:26:00] Sense thing, but this is me calling on pocket to talk about, maybe you have a crystal ball. What are you hearing or seeing for folks, or what kind of expectations do you think our community has for the rest of this year?

Pankaj Jindal: Yeah, let me give you like two or three different thoughts. Yeah. The first thing that was very common we obviously talk to our customers a lot.

Several of our customers we talk to every single week. And then, of course, at the beginning of this year, we were at the executive forum and had a chance to talk to hundreds of CEOs. Nearly everybody this year was saying that they are projecting growth, but they are backloading that growth to the second half of the year.

Okay, so a lot of people basically were like, Hey, we think Q1 and Q2 are going to stay flat, but Q3 and Q4 is where we’ll see the growth. And then obviously we’ll have to average it out across the entire year, but as we average it out, we will see some growth. That was very good for us to understand.

Yeah. And we’ve seen that in play out because we’ve had several customers in Q1 and Q2 who’ve said, Hey, our job volume has [00:27:00] gone down, our headcount has gone down. We need you to work with us slightly differently, and obviously, we’ve done that. We always do that for our customers. But right now we’re starting to see open job orders go back up.

People having more advertising dollars, people having more spending power than they even had three months ago. So that was a very good insight from a lot of our industry leaders that they were willing to share with us. So I think that was very good. The second thing that’s been obvious is automation is now table stakes.

It’s no longer a luxury. It’s no longer, oh, some companies have this, the story that just gives me goosebumps is we sold to a customer about six months ago. Older gentleman based outta Texas, started the company 47 years ago, has been the CEO of the company for 47 years. And once we sold Sense to this person, they basically told me this is the first piece of software we have bought in 47 years.

Bob Pettke: Wow. Okay.

Pankaj Jindal: Yeah. So [00:28:00] take it as you will, but the point I’m making is, nearly everybody is now going. There are absolutely parts of our industry that are completely repetitive, that are completely mundane, that do not add any value, and they absolutely have to be automated.

We’ve been saying this for years, that if you see a recruiter doing something five times or more, just figure out a way to automate that use, use Sense to create another automation journey. So I think that’s the second thing that we notice a lot. And this obviously. This obviously plays really well because the industry now is partly remote and partly working from home, and partly your people are working from home.

An automated touchpoint is now much easier to manage. And the third big thing, which I’m sure everybody who’s listening here would agree with me, is just how quickly this industry is trying to, or already has, adopted AI. There is. AI everywhere. Obviously, it’s a big buzzword, but I think our industry is the [00:29:00] one where people are using facets of AI immediately.

It’s definitely true for the thousand or so customers that we have because we rolled out several generative AI features within our products, and everybody’s using them. The idea that you can now write a text message and just press a button and say, Hey, make it better, make it lighter, make it more formal, make it shorter, make it longer.

The idea that you can now talk to a customer on the phone for five seconds, and you took this example before, and the customer says, I need a forklift operator. I need 20 of them. And that’s all they tell you. You can just pick forklift operator, put that in a text field, press a button, and voila. You have a job description. You have an automatic resume you can create.

And then some of the things that we have been doing with voice AI, people have been loving that. The idea that you can call a number and talk to somebody who will talk to you in natural language, but is obviously an AI agent, but you can instantly talk to somebody. You’d never [00:30:00] have to wait for a recruiter’s availability.

That is three days from now. I love how the staffing industry always stays at the cutting edge of technology, and partly because every single person who works in the staffing industry is paid for performance. Yes. Every tutor is paid for performance. Every sales guy and account manager is paid for performance.

CEOs are paid for performance. At the risk of being slightly controversial, there are other companies where that are not in the staffing industry where we sell our software to and they’ll buy the software. It’s a big ticket item and have no urgency in implementing the software. But when we sell it to a staffing company, the CEO is calling us three days after the signature and saying, Why isn’t this working?

And we’re like, whoa, ’cause it’ll take four weeks to work. And that’s how our industry is.

Bob Pettke: Ai you know, again, as an ATS system, we’ve got some integrations on our own that we’ve done as well. And obviously, with our partnership, there are things that we’re gonna partner with now. [00:31:00] You mentioned the voice AI.

And I had a chance to talk with one of your colleagues. I got a chance to see how it worked a little bit.

Pankaj Jindal: Oh, you, oh, you did? Okay.

Bob Pettke: A little bit. A little bit. Okay. Probably just enough to just scratch the itch of curiosity that I might have had, because that really goes into the next question that I have for you. Pankaj, what is on the horizon for you? Perhaps things that you don’t have now or that you’re working on? And again, that you’re able to share with the staffing Buzz Network watchers and listeners, the viewers, what are some things that you, that maybe this time next year that might be in place that aren’t there now that can really make a substantial impact on our community?

Pankaj Jindal: No, absolutely. I am more than happy to share. Our roadmap is actually pretty public. We do twice a year. We do twice a year webinars on everything that we are working on because typically our roadmap is just a collection of wishlist items from our customers. Our customers are leading us to. Hey, wish you had this, could you do this?

Could you do [00:32:00] that? And then we basically take all of those ingredients and prioritize them. The number one thing I’m going to say is there is definitely a push where everybody is looking for a more automated experience that puts the candidate experience first and foremost. The things we are trying to solve for are things that you still hear.

56% of the people apply to a company and never hear back, never even hear back to a point to say, Hey, we got your resume. We’ll get back to you in four weeks. That’s how bad behind we are. Nobody would even hear that. When people do look for a job, there is lots of research on the fact that they will look for 12 jobs at the same time.

Bob Pettke: Yeah.

Pankaj Jindal: Because they’re looking for a job. The company that they’re most likely to work with is the company that responds to them first. Because obviously, then you have ways and tactics to take them off the market. More than half of the people, when they apply for a job, they apply after hours, which [00:33:00] means no recruiter getting back to them instantly.

But a chatbot can. Not only can a chatbot get back to them, they can even ask you 15 questions and give you a disposition within seconds to say, we’re going to be interested in talking to you here, set up a time with a recruiter, or we are not going to be interested. Don’t waste your time here. There is lots of data around the fact you can just Google it to find it.

Every meeting in the United States takes 6.7 emails to set up: Hey Bob, can you meet on Tuesday? Hey, can you do Tuesday? How about Wednesday? All right, let’s do 3:00 PM on Wednesday. Oh, sorry. Can you do 3:00 PM? This is what our lives are. But if everybody had a scheduler that said, You pick the time that works the best for you, you are very likely to show up.

And this meeting has already been set up within seconds, works the best within our healthcare space where people don’t work nine to five. Anyway. Where am I going with this? Where I’m going with this is, we are still pretty fixated on the idea that we should be making positive [00:34:00] changes to the metrics that A CEO cares about.

What is my cost per hire? What is my time to hire? What is my redeployment rate? How many people are we now able to place by using the same number of recruiters? To do that, we’ve made more and more of the Sense experience seamless. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times. We have eight different products, but if you’re using Sense, you’re never going to find out that you went from first to the second, to the third, to the fourth.

It’s simply just a seamless process that is going to move a candidate as fast as possible through the recruiting process. So that’s where we are headed. Now, there are tons of bells and whistles. Voice AI is a big bell and whistle. It has so many use cases. People want to do reference checks well, great.

Now the voice AI can call the seven different phone numbers you tell us. Keep calling them as often as you like. Have a conversation. It’s a set question you’re asking. Transcript, all of that, write it back into your ATS [00:35:00] happens magically while you might be sleeping. The voice say, I can do this conversation with one of your references at 7:00 PM while you were sleeping.

That’s when they wanted to talk. It’s after hours. When you wake up tomorrow morning, you have the reference done. You can do NPS surveys. That way, you can do screening that way. You talked about a forklift operator. I can’t tell you the number of companies that we have today where they try and hire those people within 30 seconds.

They’re essentially going, Are you authorized to work in the U.S.? Have you been convicted of a felony? Do you have a driver’s license? Will you work for exactly $22 and 45 cents? Can you lift 50 pounds? Can you stand on your feet for eight hours a day? Will you be willing to start on July 3rd? Yes?

You have the job. Or if you go to our website, our mission statement has always been finding the right job for the right candidate within minutes. And I think we’re now going to a world where we are gonna try and do that within seconds. If we can influence not 3 million but [00:36:00] 20 million people that get hired in the US every single year via Sense and all of them give us two thumbs up on the actual experience that they had, that would basically mean we are successful in our mission, but it’ll also mean all of our ATS partners, all of our staffing customers, are elevating themselves to a start, to a position where people think of them as career coaches and not just another place to go to, which is commoditized.

Bob Pettke: Pankaj, it’s a lot of great information, and again, we’re a believer, we’re a partner, we’re a sponsor. We’re gonna make sure that we include contact information or your website in the comments below. I believe you guys are always attending the shows.

You know what, how, where are we gonna see people in person this year?

Pankaj Jindal: Everywhere. Sense is going to be at every single conference. We love the idea that for the first five years that the company was around, we used to go to these conferences to meet [00:37:00] prospective customers. And for the last few years, we’ve been going to them to meet

actual customers, like this is the one place where we can go and meet 200 customers at the same time, which no amount of flying around in the country can accomplish. So, where we will be at ASA, we will be at SIA, we will be at various ATS-specific conferences, if they have any.

We very much want to hear from our customers. We very much want to hear your problem statements. If you’re not even a customer, but you have something unique going on, we wanna know how to solve for. Outside of that, we are pretty easy to find. Feel free to reach out directly to me. We have an entire partnerships team, a marketing team.

We’re very easy to find. Reach out to us, and we’d love to chat.

Bob Pettke: Yeah, like I said, we’ll include that information below. Heck, people can reach out to me and I’ll connect them with you as well, my friend. I’d be glad to do that. Absolutely. Pankaj Jindal from Sense, thank you for being here. This has been great, and we look forward to seeing you at the shows and talking again soon.

Pankaj Jindal: Thank [00:38:00] you Bob. Thanks for having me. This is lovely. Thank you.

Bob Pettke: You bet. Thanks. Alright. Staffing Buzz Network listeners. That was Pankaj Jindal from Sense, one of the founders there. And again, taking staffing to a new level at, with the utilization of AI, and I’ve had some people ask me, they’re like, Bob, do you think AI is going to eliminate jobs and staffing? And I had Joanie Bily on a few weeks back, and we talked about this as well. One of the things that we’re seeing is it really isn’t going to do that. You’re gonna be able to be more efficient, you’re gonna be able to spend more time.

Like when Pankaj and I were talking earlier in front of your candidates, in front of your clients, in front of your prospects and doing, maybe even sales as well because there’s so many tools and we talked a little about utilizing Sense not only to take care of the traffic flow of people in, and constant communication from the application process all the way down through somebody who’s been on an assignment for a long period of time. But you can also use this to sell. [00:39:00] So a lot of good information there.

We’re thankful to Pankaj and the team at Sense for having us as a partner and for being on here today. So with that said, I just wanna remind everybody if you’re listening for the first time. Put us on your favorites. If you’re watching us on YouTube, put us on your favorites.

And if you’ve got questions about automated business designs, our ATS CRM one database solution to help really be the backbone of how your operation works, reach out to me. My information’s gonna be on the outro page. If you wanna talk about Sense and learn about how we integrate with Sense,

Reach out to me, reach out to the folks at Sense, we’re gonna include their contact information as well. So with that said, thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you, everybody, for watching. Until next time, my name is Bob Pettke, and we will see you again here on the Staffing Buzz Network.

Thanks [00:40:00], everybody.