Transcript
Speaker: AI is everywhere right now. It's not going away. And if you're running a staffing company, there's a pretty good chance you've had this thought at least once. Am I already behind? Every day there's a new tool, a new model, a new agent, a new quote unquote game changer.
Speaker: And by the time we finish recording this episode, there'll probably be three more. So what should we actually be paying attention to? What tools are worth using? What do we train our teams? How do we make sure somebody isn't casually uploading half the ATS into ChatGPT?
Speaker: Today, we're going to break it all down with someone who lives and breathes this stuff and well known for her AI expertise in the staffing industry, especially. The goal today is simple, make AI a little less overwhelming, a lot more practical and give staffing agencies a clearer idea of where to start.
Speaker: Welcome to Staffing Made Simple, a podcast series powered by Simple VMS.
Speaker: Welcome back to Staffing Made Simple, brought to you by SimpleVMS, the agency preferred vendor management system. We bring the VMS without the BS.
Speaker: I'm excited today because AI, it's really become prominent. We're actually using it. where I remember when we were just talking about it. But every time you turn around, there's a new tool. Somebody's telling you that this is the thing you have to use now.
Speaker: And I think a lot of staffing companies and contingent workforce leaders probably there have a mix of excitement and also fear, thinking about, all right, how are we supposed to keep up with all this?
Speaker: So that's what we're going to get into today. What we should actually be paying attention to, what tools are worth knowing, how do you get people using this stuff? Adoption is so important.
Speaker: And how do you make sure they're using it the right way? Hopefully we can cut through some of this noise, make all this a little easier to rack your head around. And as always, I'm joined by my homie and friend, Casey Wagonfield.
Speaker: Oh, thanks, Rob. As many jabs as I've taken introducing you. I appreciate the kindness. But yeah, I'm excited about this one because we've known Lauren for a while. And when we started talking about doing an episode around AI, she was the first person that came to mind. For anybody who doesn't know Lauren, she's the founder and CEO of Leap Advisory Partners and has spent close to 30 years in and around staffing, recruiting technology, operations, and really helping companies figure out how to make technology actually work for their business.
Speaker: Over the last several years, she's also become one of the biggest voices in staffing when it comes to ai She speaks all over the industry events like Staffing World and TechServe and SIA Exec Forum and Aviancé Connect and plenty of others.
Speaker: She's the author of The Real Girls Roadmap to Mastering ai co-author of Together We Rise. She's been recognized as a top staffing industry influencer and one of LinkedIn's aspiring women.
Speaker: She's also an ASA Care Award recipient. She's got plenty of accolades, but what we really liked about Lauren is she's actually in the weeds with staffing companies doing this stuff. She sees what's working, what isn't, where companies are getting overwhelmed and probably where we're wasting too much of our time and chasing the next shiny thing.
Speaker: Lauren, we've known each other for a while, so I'm glad you finally got to make it here on Staffing Made Simple. You're making me sound really cool. So I'm excited to talk to myself, I guess. No, I'm really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I just appreciate the invitation.
Speaker: For sure. And I think a lot of people probably in the staffing industry, especially probably know who you are when it comes to AI. And if you don't make sure you're following her. I just did some of your masterclasses that you've done over the past several weeks. And those were super cool, but definitely start following Lauren.
Speaker: Just kind of get us kicked off here, Lauren. We asked you what you're hearing in the industry because you work with agencies daily and show them how to keep up with AI and how to use it. And you mentioned one of the things that you're seeing right now is companies are staying ahead or even just keeping up is one of the big challenges with AI right now.
Speaker: I guess my question is what does keeping up realistically look like for a staffing agency? That's a really good question. I think one of the things that people approach me with, whether they've heard me speak for the first time or attending one of my trainings is I already feel like I'm too far behind.
Speaker: Whether they're a business owner or an executive attending one of my sessions, or a frontline recruiter or salesperson, it's just this fear that they're already behind. And i try and alleviate that fear because only 5% of the global user population is paying for very AI tools. So you're not behind, you're right where you should be. I've traveled the country now for four years trying to convince people that AI is here and it's real.
Speaker: And i finally feel like people are starting to listen. This is not one of those things where you can sit this one out. It's not optional. As a matter of fact, the first question I ask in one of my opening keynotes is, Who here knows how to use the internet? And inevitably, everybody raises their hand and that's how many people need to know how to use AI, or at least know what AI is capable of.
Speaker: have a really hard time understanding a C-level individual that doesn't know what the capabilities are being able to set the vision for an organization. And so I think it's one of those things where you just can't sit this one out. and keeping up doesn't mean that you have Chachapiti, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. It doesn't mean that you have all the tools. It means you know how to use a tool properly.
Speaker: And my three things are policy, education, and enablement in that order. And even a personal policy. So if you're just an end user, you need to have a personal safety policy. How are you going to keep yourself and your family safe? Leveraging these tools, whether it's an AI safe word or what have you, whether you're a business or an individual user, policy, education, enablement.
Speaker: That's crazy. 5%. I think you're far behind and you're not. And really, I very rarely go to Google anymore when I can just ask ChatGPT, right? Like that seems to be where people are going anyways. And I was bummed this year at Avionte Connect not being able to see your session because I saw it in 2025 and I wanted to check it out this year and we had something else going on.
Speaker: But I was curious because talk about how things change, right? Tomorrow is going to be even different. What was your vibe going in as far as from year to year, from when you spoke in 2020 to 25 to 26?
Speaker: Do you think attitudes around AI have changed in staffing? There's a lot more curiosity, which I really appreciate, right? The curious mind is the educated mind. And so I really, really appreciate those that are curious about what the capabilities are, curious about, is it safe? Curious about, is it going to kill the planet? Like, let's have those discussions. The more we can have those discussions,
Speaker: the more we can alleviate whatever fear or hesitation might be there, and then get started in educating you on how to leverage these tools. So I am starting to see change this year.
Speaker: i spent this whole year from February until we launched the very, very first Real AI Agency class in July. We spent that entire time testing content, testing pricing, testing length of content, testing what would work. And we finally hit the sweet spot and we have 53 students in our first class. We had 200 people in our class yesterday and we continue to build the real AI agency student population. And that makes me excited because it shows me that people are A, willing to invest in themselves, B, willing to invest in their talent or their employees, and then C, they're curious. And that makes me happy.
Speaker: So Lauren, how do you tell people to differentiate what actually matters with AI and what's the shiny new toy that everybody's talking about? I am a prolific Twitterer or Xer just from a scrolling perspective. I even have an agent, my doom scrolling agent that makes my doom scrolling productive.
Speaker: And there's so much content out there about AI being the easy button and it solving all the worldly problems. And yes, it will help cure disease and it will help speed up energy efficiency and it will help do amazing things. I'm definitely an AI optimist.
Speaker: But there is work that goes into making it work properly. And so this idea that I can just go in and Chachapeteen is going to go sell for my business is just absurd.
Speaker: It takes a lot of work to get an agent to work properly, but it's worth it from a time-saving perspective when you invest the right time. So this is misnomer that I can go in and it solves all my problems, you have to invest the time.
Speaker: You think most agencies are behind right now when it comes to AI or does it just feel that way? No, yeah they are absolutely ba behind. Absolutely behind. And you've got some pretty jarring statistics out there, like 92% of agencies are implementing AI, but only about 5% of them are seeing the value.
Speaker: But the value when it's seen is three x output, 3x improvement. And so we know when it hits that it does really well. But I just think that people are doing AI for the sake of doing AI. And I've said this for four years.
Speaker: What problem are you trying to solve for? And if you don't have that first, then don't start. Understand what you're trying to solve for. And even I have to sit down and ask myself, okay,
Speaker: slow down. What problem are you trying to solve? And then how are we going to work backwards to build an agent that will help me solve that problem ongoingly? Are there any AI developments that staffing leaders should be paying attention to right now specifically?
Speaker: Oh my goodness. I mean, i think the energy conversation, I have that one all the time is like, we're killing the planet. Okay. 300 chats with chat GPT is equivalent to one hour on Netflix.
Speaker: And then you see in Denmark, the heat from the data center is powering 9,000 homes. There's good that we can do with these things. And so there are all of these little misnomers that sort of drive me crazy.
Speaker: Everybody talks about all the negatives and all the staffing agencies I'm talking to right now have a data center plan. How are they going to go get business from data centers? So that means people are working and jobs are being created.
Speaker: It's not all negatives. And when you talk to somebody who really knows what they're talking about, and they talk about how much more efficient they're getting, because it's not going anywhere. They need to just make it more efficient. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Shiny object syndrome, though, is real. We have to pay attention to that. i see overspending happening all the time. And that's when we go into it with shiny object buying syndrome. I have to do AI just for the sake of doing AI rather than what problem am I trying to solve for.
Speaker: Are you trying to solve for faster submittals? Are you trying to solve for faster sales cycle? Are you trying to capture more eyes? What is it that you're trying to do? And then we solve that problem by applying the right AI.
Speaker: But again, this misnomer, it's an easy button. like There's a lot of misunderstandings about AI. But here's the one thing that I will say. We do have to be cautious because AI has allowed the bad actors to be badder actors, faster, badder actors.
Speaker: And so we do have to be very cautious about that as well. And we had a client whose email was intercepted and they were sending payments to the wrong place. You heard about the $25 million dollars financial transfer because they were talking to deep fakes via Zoom.
Speaker: So the fraud is a $39 billion dollars industry thanks to ai And so do we have to be curious? Yes. Do we have to be cautious? Also, yes. Yeah, I think people out there on the internet who don't know what's going on can easily be duped.
Speaker: You mentioned in the beginning, ChatGPT, Claw, Gemini, Copilot. What is each one good at and which one should use for what? Like, how do people know which one shines or what activity? I think we're at a point now where it's like pick one because we have to think about this as well. And this is a big focus in my real AI agency is I want you to own your output.
Speaker: And so help them build a personal operating system. So regardless of whether or not they're on Claude or TGPT or Gemini or wherever, their operating system they own, that's on their terminal.
Speaker: And then whatever AI you choose to inform your operating system, that's your accelerator. And so there are two systems that we use at my firm. I train on ChatGPT, I train on Gemini, Claude, and then Copilot. Those are the primary tools that I train on.
Speaker: I think Copilot gets a bad rap. It's a perfectly capable tool. It's a little messy from a UI perspective, but it gets a really bad rap. So we use Claude and we use Abacus. We've loved Abby for three years. She's like an FTE here now.
Speaker: And you can experiment with all of the LLMs on Abacus. So that just allows us to be a good R&D firm and a good teaching firm. So that's why we use Abacus. And then Claude is one of the most popular and one of the most, I think...
Speaker: responsible. They're having you log out now frequently. i don't know if you've noticed that or not, if you're cloud user, but that's for safety. So I think they're taking that really seriously. But then ChatGT comes in hot with CodexSoul and you're like, who So they're all doing something pretty cool. Perplexity always been great for research.
Speaker: Gemini is the one I get probably the most frustrated with because Notebook LM is amazing, but the whole kind of experience is a little disconnected. That's what I think everybody loves about Claude is it is very intuitive for a practical everyday user, as is ChatGPT.
Speaker: But no matter what you do, pick one. Don't have all of your stuff everywhere. That just is a recipe for disaster. Yeah, I'm a big ChatGPT and Claw guy. And mostly just because that's what I have, right? We use Claw through SimpleBMS and then I've had a ChatGPT license for years. And it's kind of scary at how much ChatGPT probably knows about me at this point. Isn't it?
Speaker: You see all the images I've put Rob in with ChatGPT. There are so many fun things that you can do. And that's the other thing is people take themselves really seriously. have it Write a rap song. i Have a little bit of fun with it. I mean, there's a Disney character out there of me.
Speaker: So it's like I said, have fun. Don't be so serious. Any other ones you're seeing more and more people talk about that people don't see every day, like the Chachaputis or the Clones that people should keep on their radar?
Speaker: So I'm a huge Grok lover. He's got a wicked sense of humor. So I am right now experimenting with Grok bots. I've got three of them running right now and they're pretty awesome. So I don't think a lot of people talk about Grok, but I'm a huge Grok lover and he and i argue a lot, but he is so fun. And the bots are actually really, really intuitive.
Speaker: And Whisperflow, I use Whisperflow all the time. I don't think that's a tool that a lot of people use. And I think it's amazing. It's not an AI, it's just a speech tool. But there are some really amazing tools out there that can help you.
Speaker: I'll use Whisperflow and I'm like, hey, while I'm working on this terminal, can you work on this? And I'm saying all of this out loud. and running agents or running a task and I'm having one research over here. i just find myself so much more efficient, whether it's building curriculum or doing research for a keynote or what have you.
Speaker: Look at all these things we've been able to do from a brand perspective. There's no way that we would be able to do that without the 30 agents that work for my firm. You just mentioned all these tools that I've never heard of.
Speaker: ah Now I want to go out and research them all, but I'm sure that's problematic for people at times. How should they determine what they already have is going to do what they need before they go out and buy or spend money on something else?
Speaker: Start with Claude or ChatGPT. Those are two foundationally really good structural tools. But then here's the other thing I say to business owners. I think it's 80% of small businesses are Microsoft shops.
Speaker: Give CoPilot a shot. You're more than likely paying for it if you've got a premium license. you're already paying for it, give it a shot. It is a perfectly capable tool for an everyday user.
Speaker: And even the Copilot Studio, there's some pretty awesome things that the studio is doing right now, like workflows that again, an everyday user can do in studio that are just not getting the credit that they deserve. So if you are a Microsoft shop,
Speaker: Why open your PII up to another tool? Why not use what's already under your closed umbrella? And so think about what you already have, what you already pay for, and see, are there things in what I already have that either I could upgrade really easily and keep my environment safe and not expose it to another tool?
Speaker: Or do I want to make the deliberate decision to connect Claude? We've made that very deliberate decision. We have a million safeguards in place. But again, it comes down to pick one, stop having your stuff everywhere.
Speaker: And then at Albionte Connect, in your session, you talked about how AI is the agency multiplier that caught everybody's attention. What does that mean in practical terms for a staffing agency?
Speaker: So I showed them what my org chart looks like. And so my org chart is 10 human beings. And then each of them have a number of agents that work under them. I have 11.
Speaker: And so what I'm trying to show them is that that is what the future What I'm trying to them but your salespeople with multiple agents reporting to them and taking on different tasks so that they can do more now you need to start looking at your kpis are you adjusting kpis for the additional efficiency what i'm trying to impress upon them is this is absolutely A multiplier where you can do more with the same.
Speaker: We no longer have to subscribe to more payroll equals more people. We can do more payroll with a little bit more technology resources. Well, and in that same vein, you talked about the 24-7 office in that presentation. What's that look like day to day?
Speaker: So we've taken it an extra step to really look at what is the agency bringing to the organization. So I've turned off a few agents, turned on some new ones when they're not bringing enough ah ROI. So my firm's been able to save $177,000 annually in headcount by having agents. do it at a fraction of the cost. And so we have four shifts. We have the prep shift, so agents that help prepare us for a day, whether it's with meeting notes or assets that we need to deliver or whatever that is.
Speaker: Then we have our parallel team, So the agents that work in parallel with us throughout the day, whether they're quickly summarizing calls and getting those out to customers or doing work that needs to be done.
Speaker: Yesterday, i had a big training. So I had my agent go in and check all the skills that I had written before we sent them out. And then we have the end of day shift or the EOD team that helps us summarize our day. So we have an agent that takes all of our green calls that gives me a summary, then hands out those summaries to our people to make sure have we done everything that we're supposed to do for the day?
Speaker: What's on the deliverables that we haven't delivered? What have I not followed up on from a sales perspective? And then we have what we call the night shift or the night team. And those are the agents that work while we're sleeping.
Speaker: And so I want you to think about it like a person. If you can write a job description, you can write an agent. And if you have clarity of problem you're trying to solve for, clarity of purpose, and you can write a job description, you are going to be really dangerous.
Speaker: And then when you add automation to that, now you have autonomy. Now you've got an ecosystem that you can scale with. A couple of things I wanted to come back to too real quick, and this may go with how you're doing things too. When you say you work with companies under their own operating system.
Speaker: And I think there's a lot of people that just get hit by the tokens and amount of money they're spending. Isn't it much cheaper to operate that way when you're housing everything in your own internally versus out in the cloud?
Speaker: Yeah, so a couple things. One, having an operating system will help you save money. Two, doing everything in markdown files will help you save tokens. Three, putting some organizational settings. So I have some organizational settings that help me with token expenditure. One is slowing me down. I type faster than I think sometimes.
Speaker: And so I have a hard and fast rule with Claude and with Abby that you ask me two clarifying questions. It drives me insane. but it slows me down.
Speaker: So I have some organizational rules just because I know myself and it's never supposed to produce anything until I've approved the outline or my team's approved the outline. So then you don't waste token expenditure going back and forth on a PDF or the Excel spreadsheet, right?
Speaker: So there are techniques, there best practices that you can implement to reduce token expenditure. And those are just a couple off the top of my head. i think that we don't talk about token expenditure enough, but still,
Speaker: Even if I'm spending $1,200 a month on tokens, which I think that was the maximum before we figured out how to reduce expenditure and we had a token auditor skill, that was the max I've ever paid. And that was at the height, I think we were running like 40 some odd agents.
Speaker: experimenting and then we'll pair it back down to the ones that really work. Now we have 34 working in beta and so we've got 38 running right now but my average Claude bill is probably like 380 to 500 so think about that.
Speaker: Nothing compared to the return on my investment. Right. And that goes into once you have all those things is getting your team trained on them, actually using it I know that was another topic you mentioned.
Speaker: So let's say an agency says, all right, we're doing this. We want our people using AI. Where does that training actually start? Well, starts with policy. You need to give your people guardrails. They need to know what they can and cannot do. They need to know what they can and cannot put in these tools. Right now, i've had a couple inquiries from firms who want to hire us to come in and do our connected agency, which is our co-pilot training. And right now, all of their recruiters are using private chat GPT and some Claude. It's kind of wild, wild west out there.
Speaker: not realizing that we're exposing candidate data we're potentially exposing client data. but It's just really easy to upload RFP into these tools. So first and foremost, you give them guardrails of what they are to do and not to do. Then you enable them with a proper tool that is in a closed source system.
Speaker: And then we educate them on how to use them properly, whether it's really helping them understand the really good elements of a prompt Because whether you're writing a skill or writing an agent, it does still start with the prompt, the role that you want the agent to be, the context of the situation and the job description, and then the desired outcome. And then there are a few other things that we've discovered that get really good agent output and that your things to do list and the things you absolutely cannot do list should be roughly the same in length.
Speaker: And then alternative scenarios. So if this happens, then do this. Give it examples of... if this output breaks or if this doesn't give you the right number, do X, y or Z. And so teaching them the fundamentals and the foundations of writing a good prompt and then writing a good skill and then compound that writing a good agent. When you start with those steps and then you have a good operating system, companies need to build their brain, making sure that your operating system is in there, your mission, vision, and values. What's most important in your communication? What do you want the brand voice to sound like? What does the brand look like? So that everything coming out of your operating system that you're sharing with your team looks the same.
Speaker: And it doesn't look like AI slop, which I see a lot of that crap out there. And so having a good operating system, I can't stress this enough, that's what you need to do for the business. And then teaching foundations is what you need to do for your people.
Speaker: So that kind of goes straight into the next point. What do the companies that get adoption right do differently from the ones that just roll something out and then six months later, nobody's using it?
Speaker: Repetition. AI is moving so quickly. I have a free session every week. I have my paid sessions every month. i have my VAP sessions every month. And I am having to research all of the time because it's moving so quickly.
Speaker: Every week we cover news. Every week Gemini is doing something different. Claude's doing something. I mean, Claude, the record a skill. If you haven't played with record a skill, you're absolutely missing out.
Speaker: It's been rolled out to Mac and then to Windows. They're doing amazing things and it's moving really fast. So this idea that you can come in and do one training and be like, okay, bye, is just, it's unrealistic.
Speaker: And that's why we created a subscription model. We'll help you stay on top of the trends. We'll help people stay educated because I don't think that's going away. And so we just want to help firms try and stay above water.
Speaker: And so the only way I could think to do that was we'll subscribe and we'll help keep you updated. think you made a good point when you're talking about prompts too. That's so important now because if you don't prompt it the right way, it's just going to decide on its own what it thinks you want.
Speaker: And I think people get overwhelmed when they hear AI. You don't have to know how to write code to use ChatGPT and Cloud. It does all of the work for you if you're writing good prompts. If you're doing research on a company, you need some relevant information on them. but If you want to do prospecting, you're crazy to go out and pay for a list of companies when you can go into Cloud and have it generate an Excel file for you. We have a prompt that I use. It's 10 pages long on WordDoc.
Speaker: It's a deep research prompt. You plug it into Claude and it outputs an Excel file with 26 rows of data on how many agencies they use, how many temps they use, what their buying signals are, all of these things.
Speaker: we were able to use that and verified 8,000 staffing users, meaning Claude went out and found, I know this company uses staffing because I found a Department of the Labor article. I know this one because I found an article on a lawsuit. This one was posted through an ATS.
Speaker: Do you just know how to use it? It's super powerful and what it can share for you. Well, and you can supercharge that, plug it into Appify, and it can go scrape additional sources. So you can take something as simple as a 10-page prompt and get this amazing output and then go and fine-tune it with a Claude connector.
Speaker: So yes, you get these amazing outputs and then AI takes it one step further and gives you something else. So, and that's why I say it like, it's just moving so fast and you can take everything to the next step, like the next month, they one up themselves. It's just remarkable.
Speaker: And one thing I noticed about when we were building those lists is you have to do it in small portions. Because if I went and said, just give me 8,000, it would have filled so much BS in there. like You have to not overwhelm it to where it's like, well, I'm just going to put stuff that in here to satisfy the user.
Speaker: Well, and you're going to use a million tokens. Tell it to give it you back in 25 or 50 measured chunks so that you can validate. And then in that prompt, you can put a self-improvement prompt. So combining these things that are out there, we do a thing called repo shopping all the time. So we'll go to GitHub and go look at some of the most popular repositories that have these big, massive skills. Like NVIDIA's got a GitHub.
Speaker: And they have a skill called Skill Spectre. And it will inspect every skill to make sure that there's nothing nefarious or malicious in it. And so there's just so much good content out there. But again, you can just one-up yourself every day. It's amazing. This idea of continual self-improvement is now the reality and the world that we live in every day. It's amazing.
Speaker: And that moves into the whole safety and security portion of this. It's really important. Why is that becoming such a big conversation? I think we know why, but as more staffing agencies are starting to use AI.
Speaker: Gosh, there's this new movie called Runner on Amazon right now. And of course, had Gal Gadot, who I have a girl crush on, so I just had to watch it. And there's an AI voice of her son who's been kidnapped, and it's this big thing.
Speaker: But those things are actually happening. A woman in Florida paid $15,000 because some sort of ransom exchange because she heard her daughter's voice that sounded so real. These things are actually happening, and it's happening everywhere.
Speaker: i had my ex broken into And I had my Meta account broken into. And not only did they break into my Meta account and spend $7,000, which i got back fine, but on the backend, they had set up a rule that if I deleted any of the ads or paused any of the ads, that in 30 minutes,
Speaker: They'd set up an automation to reactivate those ads and spend more money. So it was this perpetual cycle where I'm going in there and doing exactly what human nature tells me to do shut down the ad. And am I going back 30 minutes later and looking? I think I've shut it down. So these guys are smart and they're not putting their smarts towards good things.
Speaker: They're putting their smarts toward bad things. And so we just have to think like a criminal, plan for the worst, hope for the best, and just know that there are bad actors out there. There are ways to protect yourselves. Two-factor authentication.
Speaker: i had one user on an old page that didn't have two-factor authentication, and that's how they got it. something small like that. An old expired user, their Facebook account was kind of dormant. That's a perfect entry point for somebody.
Speaker: They happen to be an administrator and they follow the bouncing ball. And so always have your two-factor authentication. I use the Authenticator app for everything.
Speaker: You see a QR code and it's asking you to set up your passkey, do it. That is going to help you. And then there are some really good best practices out there, particularly for AI. And Claude's doing some things just naturally by logging you out after a certain duration of time to limit your exposure. So... I think that tools are getting smart fast, but they've had agent breaks. You heard about the whole hugging face. And so there's all sorts of nefarious stuff going on out there. And we just have to be prepared and knowledgeable about what's happening.
Speaker: Dang it. Now I have to figure out what passkey is. On an individual level, what do you think employees are putting into AI that they shouldn't be? Literally this week was talking to two clients who their recruiters have free chat GPT and free Claude and they're putting resumes in and they're putting client information in And I'm like, oh, my dear God.
Speaker: So this is happening. And especially and this is why we're so focused on the small and midsize firm, because I feel like they're the most vulnerable. And it can be the most financially debilitating for them. And so I just want to help protect them.
Speaker: The other thing that happens, your IT department comes in with some hard and fast rule about no AI. and We're not doing co-pilot. We're not doing. They will do it. They will just do it on their own. And I see that all the time while I'm using my own because they said I couldn't, but it's a paid thing. So don't worry.
Speaker: But all of that information, once again, we experienced this with ZipRecruiter and Indeed. Remember when ZipRecruiter and Indeed were out there selling individual accounts to your recruiters and your salespeople?
Speaker: And so your recruiters and your salespeople were like, well, if you want to buy it, I will. And then they just exp expensed it. And we were like, what is this? It's all right. It's under a hundred dollars. We've been through this.
Speaker: Your recruiters and your salespeople, they are persistent and they are in this industry for a reason. They will figure out a way if you're not going to let them. And so I think this idea of some IT department coming in and saying, we're just not doing it. Well, I'm sorry.
Speaker: Now you're going to have to clean that up And I think lastly too, there's something to be said about the AEO, right? It was always SEO back in the day. How do I show up on Google? And that's something that you should reach out to Lauren. I know she has like a skill that evaluates your AEO and how how well it works. And that's how I search the internet now. Why would I go search eight different pages and three pop-up ads when I can just have ChatGPT curate my search for me with the best options? Yeah, your AEO, GEO, SEO.
Speaker: I mean, we have a skill right now and that will come in and sweep your site and give you feedback. But for example, if you don't have a good FAQ page that's candidate focused and client focused, you are missing out on AEO and GEO opportunities because think about how we search in AI, right? We're asking very simple questions like, does Kelly's Services have a holiday policy?
Speaker: Well, unless you have an FAQ page, how are we going to find that information? and We may get secondhand information from like a subreddit page or something like that, but that's not going to come up in a chat GPT search. But we have to think like the seeker. Years ago, the number one job search on Google was the word job.
Speaker: There's not a lot of thought that goes into this. And when we're thinking a question, we just ask the question. So do some surveys of your people. Have a good FAQ page. That will help immediately improve your SEO, GEO, and AEO.
Speaker: But there are small things like that that'll make a difference. We have a blog page, entirely autonomous. It took me an entire year to build it, but it's all AEO SEO, GEO optimized and has made an amazing difference in traffic. So I've had argument after argument about whether or not your website as a staffing agency can be revenue generating. 100% we are in the time and space where it can be.
Speaker: You just got to do it right. You got to be educated. For sure. Well, we can't thank you enough for coming on, Lauren, and spending some time with us. Before we end it, though, tell people where they can find out about you and about Leap Advisory.
Speaker: Well, come join me for the Real AI Agency. We opened up a second class at the end of September. So you can go to leapadvisorypartners.com and find out all about the Real AI Agency.
Speaker: I'm doing a six-part series with ASA. So I am trying my bestest to to get the content out there. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm the goat leader. Used to have a little goat next to my name because I've got goats on my farm, not because I'm the greatest of all time.
Speaker: But yes, you can find me on the Real AI Agency on Instagram. You can find me on LinkedIn and then you can find me at leapadvisorypartners.com. Well, Lauren, thank you so much. Your passion for AI and what you do really comes through it it really seems accessible coming from you. So that's going to resonate with a ton of people. And I'm sure you see that in your day to day. I think people listening will have got a lot out of this and they might feel a little less overwhelmed by all this.
Speaker: There's obviously a ton of things changing really fast. And I think the biggest thing is just start somewhere, make things that make sense for your business and don't feel like you have to chase every new thing coming out there.
Speaker: And thank you to everybody who's listening. Thanks for checking out another episode of Staffing Made Simple. If you liked this one, please share, like, subscribe, all that good stuff. It really helps us out and we will catch you on the next one.
Speaker: This has been an episode of Staffing Made Simple powered by SimpleVMS. the vendor-friendly VMS.
