You’re Doing AI Wrong: Getting More Value Out of AI in Staffing & Recruiting

September 22, 2025

I recently had the chance to speak at the TempNet Fall Conference in Salt Lake City on a topic that’s top of mind for many staffing and recruiting leaders: artificial intelligence.

AI has gone from novelty to necessity almost overnight. Whether you’re scrolling TikTok, searching Google, or asking ChatGPT for dinner ideas, the way people find and process information has changed dramatically. And for staffing companies, this shift has massive implications.

In my session, I walked through how AI is transforming candidate behavior, what that means for recruiters and salespeople, and how firms can use AI more effectively to gain a competitive edge. For those who attended — and for those across the industry who are still figuring out where to start — here’s a detailed recap of the key takeaways.

How AI is Changing Behavior

To start, I asked a few simple questions during the session:

If you needed quick dinner ideas, where would you go?
If you wanted to learn a new skill, how would you start?
If you were preparing for a job interview, who or what would you turn to for help?

Not long ago, the answers might have included cookbooks, manuals, or asking a mentor. But increasingly, the answers are AI platforms. People are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and other tools to not only provide information, but to personalize it — “Give me seven dinner ideas for a family of four, quick and healthy, peanut-free, two have to be on-the-go meals, two have to be slow cooker recipes and kid-friendly. Stay away from seafood and only one meal with red meat.”

This is exactly what’s happening in staffing. Candidates and clients are bringing those same expectations of personalized, on-demand, AI-driven support into their job searches and hiring processes.

AI in Staffing and Recruiting

Staffing firms are using AI across the board:

In marketing and sales: content creation, email personalization, social media management, SEO, lead scoring, and automated follow-ups.
In recruiting: job ad optimization, resume parsing, candidate matching, candidate nurturing campaigns, and sentiment analysis for employer branding.

But here’s the problem: too many firms are treating AI like a one-off writing assistant. They’re asking it to “write a blog post” or “create an outreach email” and then wondering why the output feels generic, shallow, or off-brand.

The real value of AI comes when you go beyond one-off outputs and start building systems, processes, and repeatable knowledge blocks that the AI can draw from.

The RAPPEL Prompting Framework

One way to get more value is to improve how you prompt AI. During the session, I shared the RAPPEL framework (from TrustInsights), which helps guide AI from generic outputs toward business-ready results:

Role – Define who the AI is supposed to “be.” For example: “You are an experienced B2B staffing salesperson specializing in light industrial staffing in Salt Lake City.”
Action – Clearly define the task you want completed (e.g., writing a voicemail script, creating an outreach sequence).
Prime – Give the AI background context: challenges your audience faces, mistakes to avoid, best practices.
Prompt – Then, and only then, ask for the actual deliverable.
Evaluate – Have the AI build a rubric, score its own work, and iterate.
Learn – Capture the methodology and convert it into system instructions so it can be repeated and scaled.

This approach shifts AI from being a random assistant into a structured partner that can produce higher-quality, more consistent, and more useful outputs.

The Power of Knowledge Blocks

The biggest takeaway I want to leave you with is this: if you want AI to deliver real business value, you need to teach it about your business.

That means building knowledge blocks — reusable assets that capture the DNA of your firm:

Your business model
Your service offerings
Your ideal client profiles (ICPs)
Your buyer personas (goals, challenges, objections, decision-making processes)
Your unique expertise and differentiators

When you layer this structured knowledge on top of AI, the outputs instantly become more specific, more relevant, and more aligned to your business goals.

Instead of asking AI for a generic outreach email, you can ask it to “Write an outreach sequence for operations managers in manufacturing who struggle with high turnover and production delays. Use our messaging framework and highlight our ability to reduce time-to-fill by 40%.”

That’s where AI shifts from being a novelty to being a scalable business engine.

Case Study: Turning Knowledge Into Revenue

In the session, I shared an example of how this plays out in real life.

We pulled three years of client revenue data and had AI analyze it. From there, we identified six key verticals to target, mapped out the buyer personas for each, and defined:

Their goals and responsibilities
Their pain points
Their decision-making processes
Their preferred ways of being reached
Their most common objections

Armed with that, we created customized messaging for each persona, reactivated dormant clients, and ran a 10-step automated campaign.

The result? More than $800,000 in new revenue.

Not because AI wrote better copy than a human could — but because we gave AI the right knowledge and built repeatable systems that could scale.

Recruiting Challenges and AI’s Role

Of course, AI isn’t just changing how staffing companies operate — it’s changing candidate behavior as well.

Bulk applications: Tools now make it possible for job seekers to apply to hundreds of jobs with a single click. Recruiters are drowning in volume, and AI will be necessary to parse, filter, and prioritize.
Candidate expectations: Speed is now the currency of recruiting. Surveys show that 21% of candidates expect an interview within 2–6 days of applying, 29% expect one within a week, and 42% will drop out of the process entirely if it takes too long.
Ghosting: Candidates disappear when communication lags, expectations aren’t met, or the process feels impersonal.

Here again, AI can help — not by replacing recruiters, but by supporting them with automation, personalization, and faster response times.

Building AI Maturity

When I talk to staffing leaders, I describe three levels of AI maturity:

Done By You – Using AI like a tool: writing prompts and engaging with large language models manually.
Done With You – Creating reusable custom GPTs and workflows tailored to your firm.
Done For You – Moving toward AI agents and embedded systems that handle work automatically.

No matter where you are on that spectrum, the key is to start with the end in mind. Know what you want to achieve, experiment daily, and document your successes so you can scale.

Practical Advice for Getting Started with AI in Your Staffing Business

If you’re wondering where to start, here are a few steps you can take right now:

Experiment daily – Treat AI like a muscle that gets stronger with practice.
Ask for help – Don’t just prompt for outputs, prompt for guidance: “What’s the best way to…”
Share successes – Encourage your team to share prompts and wins so you can build on them.
Document best practices – Turn what works into repeatable processes.
Build knowledge blocks – Codify your ICPs, personas, messaging frameworks, and differentiators.
Talk with your partners – Collaborate with vendors and tech partners who can help you scale.

Where to Take AI in Your Staffing Business

AI is not about replacing recruiters, marketers, or salespeople. It’s about giving them better tools to do what they already do — faster, smarter, and at scale.

The firms that win in the years ahead will be the ones that:

Understand how candidate and client behaviors are changing.
Use frameworks like RAPPEL to improve their prompting.
Build knowledge blocks that make AI outputs richer and more specific.
Approach AI not as a one-off novelty, but as a repeatable, scalable business system.

I hope this recap gives you some inspiration and practical direction. If you want to go deeper — or if you’re ready to start embedding AI into your staffing operations — I’d love to connect.

Reach out to me directly, or connect with the team at Haley Marketing, and let’s talk about how we can help you use AI to grow your business.

And also be sure to take advantage of the free Staffing and Recruiting AI GPTs I have built (for free) to help take your marketing and sales efforts to the next level.