Webinar Replay: Recruitment Predictions for 2025

Excellent. Excellent. I think that’s a started. I could be wrong, but I think it will be. So whilst everyone piles in I’m really looking forward to this one, guys. I think this will be I think this will be a really exciting. I’m going to see afternoon, but Sean, it’s morning time for you, right?

 

What time is it? Almost 11 o’clock. Almost the afternoon here. Almost the afternoon. Okay, sweet. So you’ve got what, an hour to lunch, something like that, and then in the afternoon. And we’ve got about an hour till dinner time, right? Exactly. There we go. We’re covering all time zones.

 

We’re covering all time zones, which is excellent. We’re just letting everyone pile in just now. Normally at the start, it takes a minute or so for everyone to come in. I’m really excited for this one. And I think the reason why I’m so excited for it is not only am I joined by. Two incredible people in Ben and Sean, who I’m sure I’ll give in a minute the chance to introduce themself,  but the format for this session is going to be fairly different to maybe some of the other webinars that you’ve attended through a 2024.

 

We’re not going to be using slides for this session. It’s really going to be like a live kind of fireside chat where I’m going to be speaking a lot less than normal. And I’m going to be hearing a lot more from people like Ben and Sean, who have a lot more expertise in this area and have a lot of value to add. 

 

So we’ll let everyone kind of pile in and then we’ll, and then we’ll get started. For those of you that don’t know, my name is Dougie Loan. I’m the CRO at Sourcewhale. We are the business development and candidate sourcing platform for recruiters. And we work with thousands of recruitment businesses across the UK, US, Europe and beyond.

 

And I’m joined today by Ben Carter from Bullhorn. So Ben, I’ll start by letting you introduce yourself. Cool, no worries. If I knew it’d be a fireside chat, I think Sean’s, Sean looks pretty prepared for it sitting in front of that fireplace as well, but I’ll stay. I could have sat downstairs myself. Yeah, cheers Dougie.

 

Hi everybody, I’m Ben Carter, Senior Director for Automation and AI at Ballhorn. Sounds like a really fancy job title. Basically, my job is to sit somewhere between the Sal’s org and the rest of the board. business at Bullhorn and I spend most of my days speaking to prospects, speaking to customers, speaking to old colleagues.

 

I’ve been in the industry 22 years now and I just identify the best opportunity that we have to go build the best software bit really. So yeah, my voice pretty much at this time of the day, every day is pretty croaky because I’ve been doing a lot of talking throughout the day, but really looking forward to this chat.

 

I think it’s going to be exciting.  Thanks, Ben. I appreciate it. And and also joined by Sean Gilligan who sits on the board at Tech Serve, and you’ve had an interesting career in the staffing industry, Sean, so I’ll let you do a bit of an intro on yourself. I have, yeah, thanks, Dougie. So I, as Dougie said, I’ve been in tech staffing my whole career.

 

I started with Harvey Nash for 12 and a half years, and I did. I think every role there is to do in staffing from recruiting all the way up. When I left, I was running North America for our tech staffing division. And then I spent about a year and a half at signature consultants after they were acquired by another company.

 

As you mentioned, I’ve been on the tech serve board since  2018. And right now I spend most of my time consulting with and just talking to staffing businesses and then suppliers to the staffing industry. And I’ve always had a passion for. Kind of the way the tech fits into that world. So I’m excited to be here.

 

Awesome. Thanks both. Thank you. So my hope is over the next kind of 30 minutes or so, we’re going to share some insights and also some pretty bold predictions for how AI is going to play out in 2025 and the staffing industry. We’re hoping to have some time at the end for questions, so feel free to pop them into the Q& A section throughout.

 

More than happy to answer anything on the fly for you guys. And this obviously culminates as well and brings together learning live series all focused around AI throughout which we’ve been running, sorry, for the last kind of six weeks. So I wanted to start with prediction number one, and I think I’ll come to you on this one first, Sean.

 

It leads on nicely from our last episode that we did, which was all around clean data and the prediction that when we did our prep work here, I think the big prediction that came out here was that we predicted 2025 is going to be the year that everyone doubles down on data health because it’s so important and so key to leveraging AI and automation in the right way.

 

But Sean, I just wanted to get your take on it because it’s one thing to see that. It’s another thing to actually culturally tackle that as a staffer in a recruiting business. So keen to hear your thoughts from both sides of the fence in terms of how you think folks can go about making that yeah, I think from a data standpoint, there’s a lot of staffing companies that are really proud to say how many people are in their database.

 

And that’s not really all that relevant if the data is, just incorrect or half filled out. I think what we’re going to start to see is a much more of a focus on, honestly, archiving some of your old data. People you haven’t spoken to in years and years, don’t be afraid to just pull them out of the data.

 

Don’t have them  be just another person that come up in the searches the recruiters are doing. Get them out of the way and then figure out how to very standardize and create a structure around it. naming conventions of the people you’re talking to. It’s almost like as recruiters, as individual recruiters, we take really great pride in having very clean and concise tear sheets.

 

I know these are the people I’m going to reach out to on a regular basis. But then for the whole of our database, we don’t care. We just throw whatever crap we want to into there and people need to start taking some more pride in the entire database as their universal pair sheets within an organization and just a better focus on ensuring the data that goes in there is correct and structured.

 

And then the last thing is just getting rid of duplicates. There are so many duplicates inside of most of our systems. So ensuring we can use some products that are out there just to get rid of some of the duplicates that are in there, it’ll then just make the AI. That much more efficient as it’s doing our searches for us  100%.

 

I think the point you made did around like our individual tier sheets are pretty on point, but anything outside of that is not my problem. And then we move off to it. I think though, if what you’re saying is that the database and our minds is going to become smaller, if you like, or more relevant than maybe the fact that the database is more relevant to me as an individual  or the wider database is more relevant to me as an individual means maybe more likely to take more care with it.

 

I don’t know. Yeah, I think it’d be better off to be able to say I’ve contact and spoke to, touched. 90 percent of my, the database in the last 30 days, as opposed to, Oh, I have X million people in here that I could access if I wanted to. That’s nobody gets paid for how big the database is. It doesn’t make any sense at this point.

 

A hundred percent. And Ben, I’m sure you’ve got some thoughts on that, right? If we’re talking about databases, contacting people, this is right in your wheelhouse thoughts on that and how do people even get started? Cause we’re talking about cleaning our database but how do we even start a journey like that? 

 

I’m going to loop back to something Sean said there about don’t be afraid to archive out the dead data at the bottom of your database because you think about for us, Dougie, in Europe, GDPR forced us to do that, right? So I feel like European businesses are probably a little bit more ahead of the curve there where it’s, they got forced to clear out the stuff, the candidates they weren’t engaged with, etc.

 

And I feel There’s a good opportunity for America to North America to really follow that best practice. And I know there’s more laws coming down the pipe, et cetera, when it comes to that stuff. But I feel like there’s best practices that can be learned there from European counterparts when it comes to keeping that data clean. 

 

You’re right. Millions of people in a database doesn’t mean anything anymore, right? Since LinkedIn came along, the whole value of your database can disappear overnight. And the fact that LinkedIn has got hundreds of millions of candidates in it, and you can go search against that all the time, doesn’t mean that you have hundreds of millions of candidates available to you as a firm either.

 

So  yeah, totally. It’s not about the size of the database. It’s about the quality of the database that we find. And when you think about the direction we’re going to go in 2025, we’ve really seen it. A journey that our customers have gone on over the years where it’s let’s digitize everything.

 

Let’s get everything into a single source of truth. Let’s get everything on the cloud. Let’s use deep analytics to be able to really understand the quality of the data. So it’s not just about getting feedback from the sales floor, from the front lines of the recruiters as what’s working, what’s not, let’s take control of this and use kind of deep analytics to be able to understand that.

 

Then while we really surge of automation come  And people wanting to really automate a lot of activity and outreach, especially and that sits in your wheelhouse as well. Do you write in terms of outreach and using tools for that? And it’s really about making sure you’ve got the most up to date information to segment and talent pull out that database, whether that’s tear sheets, hot lists, whether it’s just doing natural segmentation with skilling or statuses, etc.

 

It’s just about defining the right target audiences to be able to then drive those kind of outreaches. And if you think about. Probably the most common use case for AI at the moment. And what we’ll probably see a lot more use in 2025 is around matching.  And AI can only match based on the quality of the data.

 

So the real focus there is about making sure that candidates data that may be out of date, how do we get that refreshed? And we’re really seeing a new surge in marketplace partners, especially with Bullhorn now around being able to feed in new data about people. And just seeding all that data in to make people more discoverable, but also utilizing automation to be able to say, Hey, candidate, while you’re giving us answers around your GDPR preferences, why don’t you give us a new availability date and skill yourself and provide a new job title that you currently have.

 

And even better still give us a new CV and we’ll auto parse it coming into that kind of stuff. So I really feel like there’s automation has really unlocked the capability for people to clean the data you already have. I feel like automation AI as a combo is probably going to give you the ability to do that even more without engagement from the candidate. 

 

That’s things like looking at a CV and determining what the latest job title is and then using automation to go and update that field, that kind of stuff. But then I also feel like  really when it comes to the future of this stuff is getting those feeds in of external new data where whether you’re searching external sources to get it and pulling it in or whether you’ve got companies feeding that data in is definitely going to be the way forward. 

 

Yeah, it’s bang on man. It’s really exciting, right? Because to your point there’s, we can leverage things like automation to take information that we’re gaining from individuals and put it in. There’s the source of maybe if I’m having interviews with someone and how AI can then take that contextualize it and update the kind of database to do it.

 

But then there’s this third source which we don’t normally have access to, or haven’t had access to up until recently, which is that they can have the marketplace information that’s out there. And like you said, there’s a lot of Billhorn marketplace partners that are doubling down on that type of approach as well.

 

Yeah. Sorry, Doug, I’ll just add one more thing there. So if you think about the kind of direction where AI really adds value, let’s think about the amount of conversations that’s happened with candidates. And those notes or those telephone conversation transcripts are inside your database. They’re getting synced in as notes.

 

That’s great. But people don’t search notes when they’re looking for candidates. They search candidates, right? And structured data. So AI can really assist there by reading those transcripts, reading those notes, reading those conversations, and being able to interpret what the structured data should be, and then just pull it out and store it in the right place.

 

So I feel like that’s going to be a huge benefit in 2025. Where  I think AI is gonna play a huge part in cleansing your database It’s not necessarily you need a clean database in order to get ready for AI It’s going to be a bit of a chicken and egg situation with that  And that’s the thing. It’s happening now, right?

 

It’s 2025 is only like one month away, so this is not. We’re not talking about something that comes in two or three years time. It’s something that’s coming in a month, and that takes me nice going to production number two, and this is the one that really excites me, right? Because I feel like we could do a whole webinar just on this as well, which is around going agentic.

 

So We’re talking about AI and automation here, Ben, as the way that you described it, completing 100 percent of a task, not just automate, augmenting, sorry, the human being itself. So I know you guys are working on a ton of this stuff at Bullhorn. So just talk to me a little bit more about that. What does it mean?

 

What impacts that’s going to have for people? Yeah, biggest buzzword you’re going to hear, not even of 2025, but as of three months ago, going into next year, is the word agentic, or agents. We’ve seen it with Salesforce, they’ve released AgentForce now, which means you can go build out a lot of these workflows.

 

Even the likes of Microsoft, it looks like they’re renamed Copilot, and they’re moving towards Agent, as being the name of it, that kind of thing. It’s definitely the third wave of AI, as we’re seeing it now.  First wave of AI being prediction, second wave of AI being assistants or co pilots, and the third one now is how do we package all this together and actually just completely remove a task from somebody and just let the system do it on behalf of a human, but in a human way, if that makes sense, rather than just being like fixed workflows.

 

So  I don’t think, the goal is to get to 100 percent replacement of tasks. That’s definitely the goal of AI, but I feel like it will take time and trust for you to want to do it 100 percent of the task. And I feel like we’ll probably still have some human touching there, especially in 2025. But for me, agents is really going to be focused around how can I take something that AI can replace a task for me from?

 

So that could be generating content or screening questions or an outreach email, or it could be identifying which candidates match a job. Or it could be anything else that you can think of, where we’re utilizing AI tools to do that. And how can we wrap that automation layer around it? And what does that mean?

 

It means defining steps, defining logic, defining the right triggers that starts this process and stops this process. And then. Use AI through that workflow. I’ll give you, so I’ll give you an example. Let’s imagine we bring a job lead into Bullhorn. Now, normally when you bring a job lead into Bullhorn, if it’s a customer, you don’t have a great relationship with, or it’s a prospect you may have never spoken to, the next step there is going to be, let’s take some of our best profiles that we’ve got, let’s anonymize them and let’s spec them out as we say in the UK, let’s spec our CVs out as a selling tool in order to see if we can get a bite on the hook.

 

And then speak to that prospect to convert that into a job that maybe we officially start working, and then we can go through the recruiting process. So what if that job hits Ballhorn, and now Ballhorn identifies the right matching candidates that are already in there? We use generative AI to anonymize their CVs.

 

So we take their current resume or CV that’s on file, and we generate an anonymized version so it looks more like a profile. Then we identify the right people to outreach to based on it may be a company you’ve placed within the past and say in the last 12, 24 months, then we can just identify the person you did the placement with the last time.

 

But if not, let’s just look at all the job titles of the contacts you got there and identify who the right people are to pitch to. And then surface those people to you. And then we’ll generate the right outreach email addressed to the right person. We’ve context of who they are and what their job is.

 

Then also context of the lead we’re working based on probably a job ad that we’ve scraped from their website or something like that, or from a job board, but all being in context, we then attach the right spec CVS to it, and then we’ll probably be presented with this perfectly crafted email, ready to be sent to, we’ve got the right people in the two field.

 

We’ve got the right attachments in there.  The last piece that gets us to a hundred percent is when we fully trust it, that we press the send button. So we might get 99. 5 percent of the way there. And the human just wants to put their eyes over it before we hit send. But think of all that time we’ve saved sifting through Ballhorn, finding contacts, formatting CVs is the bane of every recruiter’s life.

 

We know that’s an absolute given and there’s technology being involved already when it comes to AI around speeding up that process. So being able to do that kind of stuff, then you get writer’s block because you don’t know how to outreach to the right people. And it takes you three or four attempts to write an email.

 

So just having that sped up completely. A three, four, five, six minute task, or even a 60 minute task now turns into a one minute task. You’re presented with the output and you just hit a button and hit send when you’re ready. That’s where I think agentic  actions or agentic automation is really going to boost the industry in 2025.

 

That’s one example of like thousands I’ve already heard now, by the way. Yeah, it’s mad, right? Because at the end of the day,  I don’t, maybe we’re not far away from a world where as a recruiter or staffing professional or sales rep within a staffing org that we’re going to be sitting there and, maybe half of our day is actually approving or adjusting kind of actions that are presented to us.

 

Sean from your perspective, like  I think, Ben’s chosen a, a good example there to give there,  but there is still that element at the end where someone’s got to put their eyes and press the button, Do you, is there anything that’s top of mind for you where you think actually we could go full  agent on in 2025?

 

Or do you think we’re always going to have that like little lack of trust on it throughout the year? I think it probably depends on the skill set and the type of role we’re working on. I think  it takes a really high level of trust to completely rely on a tool. And the technology to send a candidate to a client without you talking to them,  because then at some point it’s almost what’s this, what’s the recruiter or the salesperson doing?

 

The sta the client wants to be able to talk to Ben or to Sean and say, tell me about this person that you spoke to who, tell me about their, the soft skills type of thing. Yeah, so there are definitely certain roles where soft skills would be less important, where you can just rely on the tool to send it over. 

 

But for sure there is, and Ben went into this, I think there’s a much better level of trust. From the recruiting side that the database is actually delivering to me the results that i’m looking for there always used to be the sense of like People are in the database and I just can’t find them and I don’t believe in the search tools And i’ve got to just get better at writing boolean searches.

 

That’s not a thing anymore I think there’s a very heavy reliance on the technology that’s out There is getting the right candidates on my screen Now I need to get a hold of them and then the next steps the other thing I think is happening from The tech perspective is just a better qualification process of these candidates before we even speak to them I think as another example candidates are much more willing now to Talk to an agent to tell them their skill sets to tell them what are they really strong in and what they’re not strong in If they know it’s going to speed up the process And just the idea of them being able to update their profiles and their records in our database is an incredible thought of not having to spend someone’s time updating that our consultants are doing it for us.

 

They’re putting their resume in there for us. So the idea of being able to trust the tech is there. I think that point is there. I think It’s going to take a very unique circumstance for a salesperson to say I’m going to Blindly send a candidate over to a client. You’ve got to have a high level of trust, but for certain roles I think it’s already happening.

 

We’ve seen in certain, maybe lower level skill sets. It’s for sure occurring already, which is it’s mind blowing.  Yes, it’s mad you’re standing around. You’re right in what you’re saying, like the trade off for the candidate and that situation where they’re speaking to an agent and not necessarily another human being is exactly that is, is ease of execution.

 

I remember in my first role as a recruiter 12 years ago, we were targeted on how many candidate registrations that we were doing on a weekly basis. How many people have you met and shook hands with face to face? And, sometimes these people were coming into the office to To just update their details with is really more than anything.

 

We were honest with them. Hey, there’s not a live opportunity, but it’d be great to meet with you so that I can better represent you moving forward. It sounds like actually maybe as a candidate, you want to be understanding how you better represent yourself from a digital footprint standpoint now moving forward so that AI search and match can actually identify you in the right way and then present you and maybe that’s where candidates are going to spend their time moving forward.

 

It’s not necessarily going to be, going around all the staffing firms in the street and, updating their details, but maybe it’s not being like that for a long time. And I’m just loving in the mindset of old. But talking about KPIs it’s that nice segue there.

 

I could be a radio presenter talking about KPIs, production number three, it’s all about KPIs being re imagined. And I think for the first time ever. We’re talking about are the KPIs that we’ve always had and that have stood the test of time now going to change moving into next year, are we going to put certain KPIs up or some going to come down?

 

Are we going to remove some of them completely? Ben, I’ll come to you on this one first. Again, like, where’s your head at with us? Because I know you guys see a lot of that day to day. Yeah I feel like there’s so much automation AI in play that there’s so much, there’s gonna be so much more spare time on everyone’s hands.

 

That’s me where I feel like  we’re weird crossover kind of place at the moment where all people have been automating for the last few years. They’ve definitely seen efficiency gains. I’ve definitely seen more time on people’s hands. AI means that’s probably going to get turbocharged even more with agents, etc.

 

And the mindset right now is look, we’re It’s great. We see ROI on the, on these technologies, but what we’re not seeing is a lot of outcomes being increased. So yes, we’re definitely seeing more candidates submitted to to, to jobs, et cetera. But those more candidates are converting to more placements for whatever reason.

 

And it’s not across the board. We’re seeing huge success where some people have doubled their business by introducing automation and the larger companies, the bigger ships as such, and probably Not seeing that conversion because you don’t, it’s not linear, right? You don’t, just because one, a 20 user business doubles and does twice the amount of placements doesn’t mean a 2000 user organization is going to also double their amount of placements you’ve got, et cetera.

 

And I feel like there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of focus needs to be put on KPIs, mainly because a lot of the companies I speak to, they still set KPIs to their recruiters and their consultants, like it’s 2015.  Way before this technology existed and you think of that golden kind of ratio as to why you set targets What is it?

 

It’s contacts outreach to jobs added cv sent to jobs or specs to jobs convert those into interviews convert those into offers convert those into deals and there’s a golden ratio if you put X number of the first one in you’ll get to a placement at the other end That’s perfect. And that’s absolutely fine.

 

And that should always be there, but that should now be the guiding light of just what everyone’s activity is with the free time. How much have you increased the top of that ratio up? Have you now doubled the amount of input that needs to go in at one area? Are you dedicating more time to a day as a consultant or as a recruiter to spend more time focusing on the human element of what the new world is that you live in to that be and that could be Rather than speaking of 20 contacts or adding 20 contacts Your target now is you need to go find 40 contacts because you’ve got twice the amount of time to do it in Maybe it’s actually and you said this dougie.

 

Maybe the kpis go away completely Maybe now rather than thinking of input KPIs, we think of the outcomes and the output of the KPIs. And we, yes, placement is an output, but that’s still an input in terms of you still count how many deals you put on. So let’s start thinking about new, smarter ways that you can do this.

 

And let’s think about all the engagement that’s happening out there. So let’s think about actionable KPIs, or actionable insights as we call it. So it’s not just about how many BD calls you make now, it’s about the quality of the BD calls and who those BD calls are with. So being able to track and analyse things like maybe you should be doing BD calls with customers that you’ve done a deal in the last 12 months, but you’ve not spoken to in the last 30 days, 45 days, 60 days, that kind of thing.

 

So it’s keeping it fresh because what a lot of these data feed services that we were just talking about are uncovering is a lot of our customers find jobs that their customers are advertising for that they’re not aware of.  So how do you solve that? You speak to your customers more speak to your prospects more, find out what else they’re hiring for.

 

How do you expand your business by expanding into your clients as well. So there’s lots of opportunities there just to rethink KPIs in that way. I would definitely start with just the sheer volume of actions. And then go from there as to what that should be increased to  definitely revisit your KPIs as a business and definitely think about them versus what it was when you had a more standardized tech stack of you had a standalone ATS and you’re probably using LinkedIn and a couple of job boards and things like that and start and really start to understand is that still the right KPI for me as a business today? 

 

It’s a really good point, man. I think like the part, the point that you made there around some things will change. Some things go up. I actually think like for me,  if I’m looking at it,  how many times are we meeting with people face to face? That’s a big one for me. If I’m giving you more time back in your calendar and Sean, I’m talking from a very UK centric piece here.

 

You may see even in the U. S. There should be, people should be getting, on planes more often and traveling and sitting down with people and shaking hands. But yeah. I think from my perspective, if I’m running a staffing org right now and I’m giving my time, my team kind of 30 percent of their time back in their day and because of things like agents, not only are they getting their time back, but there’s also more pipeline coming, more conversations being generated through outreach automation and AI agents and everything on that side, then really the part that I can add the most value as when I’m out there shaking hands with people and  having more conversations.

 

To Ben’s point, though, as well, And it’s something we even struggle with our own CRM system is we can see the volume of activity that’s being done. We can measure the quality of it based on conversion ratios, so outreach to meeting ratios and everything else.  It’s really difficult for us to actually look at the balance and the the cadence of communication and contact with our existing customers or people that we’ve spoken to in the past.

 

Once you start getting like a three or four layers deep into that data, that’s where it starts to get quite messy. And we use like an industry leading CRM, and for the sales space in that sense, and even then it can be quite difficult. I’d love a point where if in 2025, I could simply just ask the question or it already predicts that and pushes that information to me.

 

It’d be awesome. But Sean, from your perspective if KPIs are going to change, firstly, do you think KPIs are going to change? And then secondly, if you do, like how do you actually manage that inside the staff and argue you’ve been a president of a staff and org, how do you take a business that’s been used to working one way now work something differently and how they’re measured is now changing as well. 

 

Yeah. The easy answer is yes they’re going to change because they have to write companies. Aren’t going to say, all right, we’re going to invest in all these new technologies and spend this money and still expect the same from the recruiter.  The real world examples that I’m seeing as I talk to companies is over the last, let’s say 12 months, they’ve made cuts in recruiting or in sales because business has been down.

 

And as things are picking back up,  people are more focused on hiring sales right now because they’re, I think they want to identify more recs. On the recruiting side, what they’re finding is they don’t need as many recruiters as they used to have because their recruiters are just more efficient. And basically.

 

It’s almost like the standards you used to have on what is good look like and what is great look like That’s abolished right recruiters are While you might need less of them at your organization The best ones are going to start making more money because their weekly spreads that they used to be able to max out at Are going to go up by 10 20 30 because they’re going to be more efficient.

 

So as a recruiter there’s good and bad to it, if you’re not great You’re going to have a hard time succeeding, but if you’re a really good recruiter that is very Strong and using the tech side of it. You’re going to be better than you ever were from a production standpoint. So Yes, the kpi is going to change.

 

I think we’re right now in the process of figuring out What is that going to look like right and you’ve got to measure your best recruiters over the next six, 12 months, what does their output look like? And then work backwards to say, all right, how many new contacts was that? Then it wasn’t used, Ben said it used to be 20.

 

Now it’s 40 or is it a hundred, right? What’s it going to look like? So recruiters, I think are going to be more they’re going to hit numbers than they never were before because of the tools and it’s going to allow staffing companies as a whole to change that ratio of recruiting to sales, where it used to be like old school used to be two recruiters for every one salesperson that, that ratio, I think is going to change. 

 

And on top of that,  one other point here is I think that the usage of offshore sourcing and recruiting is going to get pulled back a little bit because that was the, how are we going to figure out how to compete where we’re going to reduce costs by going more offshore with our recruiting, at least part of the recruiting power.

 

That’s going to get pulled back a little bit. I think the technology is going to supplement replace some of the offshore and lower cost version of that. And then the onshore recruiter is going to be able to be much more successful without having that other resource to help them It’s going to be a tool of technology instead of an offshore sourcer or recruiter So the good news is recruiters are going to make more money than ever based on these tools  Because of the levels of efficiency  Love that man.

 

That’s a really nice insight as well, especially around that onshore offshore piece. Probably a part that I hadn’t actually considered. If I’m being honest with you and typically offshoring has been used by, medium to larger size organizations, as a way to drive efficiencies.

 

But I think when we caught up as a three, one of the things that we discussed was, as 2025, the rise of startups, we’re going to start seeing more people get out there and starting up on their own because. Do you have the ability to take this technology and implement it maybe quicker and faster than some of the larger organizations?

 

Maybe as a an individual, I may be frustrated because I’m like, Hey, I can see that these tools being used by competitors and smaller orgs and I’m not getting access to it. So yeah, Sean, I think this was one that you’d shared. So just can you get like an understanding of like, where’s your head at with this?

 

Like, how do you see that one playing out?  Yeah, big companies tend to take a lot of time to make changes and implement a new tech and they’ve got money So sometimes they just throw people at a problem instead of trying to implement a technology So the smaller ones that don’t have the money to create these massive training programs or to overhire  with the assumption That some people are going to follow through They need to know that the people that they’re hiring are going to be the right one.

 

So they can be much more nimble on what tech are we going to look at? What type of, I will consider every demo you can, right? And as a smaller firm, yes, you’ve got to balance your time of actually running your business, but looking at tech at the same time. But it’s the smaller companies that can have the capability to quickly implement and say, no, this one actually didn’t work.

 

Let’s go to something different. We’re a bigger company. There’s just too much red tape. There’s too many signatures that are required to be able to get something like that done. And I think as the smaller companies evolve and grow,  this is actually important for them as they think about one day, I want to be able to sell your, the multiple of your firm is going to go up if you can show how structured and how efficient your business is and what your tech stack looks like.

 

So it’s just so much easier for a small firm to say, let me try this. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll change it as opposed to a big firm where you’re getting an entire, a thousand person recruiting organization to completely shift the way they work. It’s just much harder at the larger size. It’s a really good point.

 

And do you think that the macro, like a change in macro environment, where there’s a little bit more confidence in the economy and things is going to give people more confidence as an individual to say, Hey, I’m going to take, myself and a couple of my buddies and we’re going to go and we’re going to go and do this thing ourselves here.

 

We’ve maybe been kind of we already see it that so many people think I can go do this on my own. Why am I going to give money to another company? Used to just be, I need a, laptop and a LinkedIn recruiter account and I can go, and now you’ve got a couple more tools that can make it so much easier for you to do your job that, yeah, I think there’s going to be a reliance on, we can make this work with the right couple of tools and compete with larger firms in a way that they weren’t able to before.

 

Nice. And Ben, coming to you on that one, because in a way,  what is a downside to a bigger firm is also something that helps protect them, right? Because as a larger firm, like Sean said, it can take longer to implement things, but some of these technologies can also be really costly. And if I implement them in my organization and I have people who are working in a certain way over time, it becomes difficult for them to  They leave and set up on their own because they don’t have the budget to secure that type of tech.

 

I’m thinking 2027, 2028 here, right? And they can have the long term play. I don’t know what you’re seeing. I know you work with a lot of mid market enterprise organizations and what you’re seeing in that space. Yeah, it’s a tough one for them, right? For the bigger orgs, because people can just spin off and just be so agile in the way that they set up their own tech stacks.

 

I don’t feel as if it’s a pain though. What I’m really seeing in the enterprise and the mid market space is people are taking their time, they’re reviewing technology, they’re not jumping on the first thing that gets advertised to them on a email campaign, that kind of thing. And,  What they’re actually doing is they’re looking at this a lot more strategically than just plugging in a single piece of technology.

 

And it’s more around how can, what else, what other benefits does bringing this into our tech stack also enable us to go do maybe elsewhere in our tech stack by connecting all these dots together? So for me I feel like if I was,  So let’s go back eight years, a global IT leader for a, for an enterprise firm, I would be looking at this more in a way of how can we do something that’s unique and is unique only to us and we’re not just going to use the same technology that, that the five user startup around the corner that the X top bill has gone and set up last year and they’re competing with us again now because they’re out of their non compete clause and stuff like that.

 

For me, it’s more around how can we make things and deeper integrate them into the entire journey or the entire experience. So I would be looking at things like AI from a  candidate experience perspective. How can we tie in anything we’re doing with AI and use it externally as well to improve those services?

 

I wouldn’t necessarily be utilizing just services of current vendors as well. I’d look to potentially go and build some of my own stuff. Not everything you can go build on your own. We know that, right? Not everyone can go build an ATS. So you need to be quite, you need to be quite solution driven and quite expert and have a lot of expertise in that kind of thing.

 

But there’s other things out there where there’s going to be vendors that aren’t even solving for that, or don’t think of the wider capability. A lot of these techs that people sign up to when they’re in their early phase as well, they’re quite one dimensional. So being, having an enterprise focus and mindset around that and building out wider capabilities, maybe on your own than necessarily doing that is something else I see a lot of enterprise companies doing at the moment when it comes to AI.

 

But, At the end of the day, the most important thing you can do as a large organization is to make your work, make your employees sticky. And the only way to do that is to provide them great systems that are efficient, that save you time, so stop them from going off to your nearest competition where they’ve not implemented automation, they’ve not implemented AI, et cetera.

 

And what we’re actually seeing of an outcome of it now is a lot of companies that are deeply into deeply investing in these technologies, their attrition rates are literally falling away because people don’t want to go and work for the competitor down the road that has an on premise server based CRM system that doesn’t have any automation.

 

It doesn’t have any AI in it. All of a sudden, my KPIs are all focused on me clicking buttons rather than having an efficient system that could work for me, et cetera. So for me, it’s just start using this tech, just start doing it, start doing something, and you’ll find the right things that make it work for your business and make it work for your employees to make them sticky as well. 

 

So it’s a really good point that you had around like attrition rates. Actually, one of the, one of the kind of solid lead sources for us as an organization at Sourcewheel is people that leave and go to somewhere else. And then they realize that Sourcewheel is not part of the tech stack. And we got a call and say, Hey can you guys help us out here?

 

And we’ve had X, Y, and Z join us and they want to chat it through. I’m super conscious that we’re over by six minutes and what we had planned here. So I think what I’m going to do is I’m just going to round out this final one, this production number five, cause I think it’s really healthy to talk about it, which is it sales.

 

And 2025 is going to be in person, but recruiting is going to be done from behind a desk. So we’re basically saying that, if everyone’s freeing up more time to do face to face work, how’s that actually gonna play out in practice? And we’re saying that the client side work. So when we’re selling, we’re going to be doing that face to face, but consistently, we’re going to be online or using agents for that kind of candidate side.

 

Sean, I think that coming to you first on this one, my question to you is  we want to get salespeople back in the field. How do we do that culturally when they’ve been sat behind a desk for the last few years?  Yeah, I think it’s hardest for the salespeople that started during COVID because they don’t know anything different, right?

 

They just feel like I was able to do a good job over Skype or Zoom or whatever else, so I can sell that way. And now the best salespeople, they’re back in the office or in their clients offices. And that’s so relevant and so important because as we talk about all these technologies that are making people more efficient, if we get to the point where Ben’s saying where we can trust that we don’t even need to read anything, we can just click yes and our candidates are going to go directly over to the client has full control over who they want to spend their money with, right?

 

So if we’re all more or less have access to the same candidates, We need to provide a better level of service than our competitors do. And that’s based on relationships and it’s based on being in person. So often you’ll hear a client will say, I don’t like working with that agency, but we do because they deliver us lots of candidates.

 

That’s going to change, right? Because with technology, we’re all going to have more efficient ways of getting to candidates faster for clients. It’s going to be all based on do you understand the soft skills of what the client’s looking for? Do you know the people on their team or what they’re looking for?

 

It’s got to be in person because that’s the only way to really build That reputation and the rapport with them and even on the recruiting side some candidates. They want to be met in person They want to understand what’s going on, but it’s not It’s nowhere close to what it was in the past where every single person had to come into the office they just don’t want to do that.

 

We’ve adapted to that but There’s no doubt that if you look at talk about kpis for salespeople It’s much more measured on the amount of time you’re spending in front of a client and it’s less about Just how many recs did you get out of the system? No, it’s much more about the fill rates and the efficiency of the jobs that you’re getting.

 

I’d much rather to work on a smaller amount of roles and close all of them as opposed to, working on a ton and just not being very efficient with it. And that’s so much based on being in front of the client.  I appreciate it. Thank you, Sean. And just before I come to you on that, Ben, there’s been a question that’s been here that says you think both large and small taking a medium sized organizations are going to be looking at on site sales.

 

So do you think this is something that applies across the board? Or do you think this is going to be exclusive to one or the other?  I think it’s both all types of companies. I think large and small, you’ve got to be, in front of your clients. There’s no doubt about that. It’s  Probably the smaller, even more important than the large because the nice thing about the large companies, they have a brand to go along with them, right?

 

People know the large firms in the industry. So it’s easy to say, Oh, I’ll go to them because I know their name. The smaller ones are where you need to go in and build a reputation in person and have to have a better chance to compete. Yeah, I guess maybe smaller is even more important at this point. 

 

Yeah. So the rise of the startups really needs to budget in a lot of travel for next year.  Yeah. Loads of tech spend and loads of travel spend as well by the sounds of it. And Ben, then just to round this out,  we talk about a lot of tech. We’ve talked about all these predictions for 2025. How much time do you actually think people are going to have extra per week?

 

Like what’s your prediction on that?  Really hard to say because it’s not really something that consistently we’re seeing everyone create across the board from a customer perspective. It depends how much you automate and how much you utilize AI, right? Some people want to keep control of certain aspects of it.

 

I’m just going to add one more thing to what Sean was saying there. So yeah, absolutely. Sales reps and consultants do need to get back out in the field and do need to meet their clients and  probably travel across borders in order to grow business, et cetera, as you go. But When you think about it from a UK perspective and where people are more 360 based rather than 180 based, it’s going to be a hard blend as well, because  you’re also, you’re not only the master of your own destiny in terms of picking up the right jobs to work, you need to fill them yourself if you don’t have a dedicated resource team or recruitment team.

 

So I still think you’ll need to get out on the field, but you’ll probably need to dedicate certain days of a week that are going to be travel days versus others that are going to be more fulfillment. The good news is. AI is going to help you fill those jobs. So at least it’s going to have your back from that perspective in 2025.

 

 What was your original question? Sorry, mate.  How much time do you think we’re going to get? It was a really good point you made though. So how much time? So do you think if I’m a recruiter right now that’s, I implement automation, AI, everything else, we get a couple of agents in play by let’s say June next year, I’m looking at the second half of the year.

 

Have I got an extra two hours a week? I’ve got an extra day a week. Have I got three days a week. I can share mine, but I can’t hear what you think. Yeah, I think you’ll definitely get hours back in a day once everything’s in place and everything’s up and running. Now, whether that’s the majority of your day or the minority of your day, you’ve got free time.

 

No one really knows. Again, it depends how much you put in. We’ve got some customers in automation where there are 20 years of business. And automation does the equivalent of 22 users worth of activity, eight hours a day, five days a week. So it’s that’s halved the amount of activity that actually happens.

 

Now in reality, is all of that activity actually taking place before automation went in? Probably not. So it’s really hard to judge what those numbers really mean. So I’d take them all with a slight pinch of salt. And I would say maybe two thirds of the activity that you can  automate were realistically tasks that have actually been taken away from people.

 

And there’s another third where it’s like the tasks that you always wanted to happen, that no one ever bothered to do because they were too busy top drawing their candidates or putting them into tear sheets that no one else can find and everything else that was going on there as well.  That’s a very good point.

 

A very good point. I’m Guys, honestly, this has been amazing. I really appreciate you both coming on and sharing this. And I know it’s been 45 minutes this afternoon or this morning for you, Sean, to talk about what 2025 looks like. Maybe we should agree to meet up on the 4th of December 2025 and see how many of these came true.

 

That would be good fun.  I love it, man. But for those of you that joined us, that came along today, thank you for giving us your time. Hopefully being able to share some information with you, some insight. Hopefully maybe inspired you as well to maybe go and take some action on, on, on one of those, one of those elements.

 

But I think the key thing we’re saying here is, really data cleanliness is going to be important. You’re going to have to keep an eye out on agents and making sure that you’re aware of them or implementing them into your business. You’re going to have to reimagine KPIs or certainly that will be something that you should be open to.

 

Startups are just around the corner, so we need to make sure that we’re moving in a way that. Either benefits us as a startup or protects us as a larger org. And if we’re selling, we’re going to want to be doing that in person. Whilst most of that recruiting is going to be taking place behind the desk.

 

And that’s how we see 2025 playing out. So thanks to everyone for joining. We’re going to send a follow up email round. We’ll include a link to both Ben and Sean’s LinkedIn profiles on there. So feel free to connect with those guys, send them a message. I’m sure they’re more than happy to continue the conversation online, offline whatever you prefer.

 

But thanks again, both. And I’m looking forward to catching up with you in the year.  Cheers, Davey. Cheers, Sean. Cheers everybody. Bye. Talk to you guys later.