How can we make use of specific AI tools to make staffing agencies more efficient? Today on The Staffing Show, we welcome Senior Account Executive at Ringover, Taylor Stewart, to discuss their powerful AI tool, Empower, and how it’s impacting the success rates of staffing firms. Tuning in, you’ll hear all about our guest’s career, what Ringover does, how the industry has evolved since she started, and more! Taylor goes on to tell us about Ringover’s new AI tool, Empower, and what it does before discussing some of the biggest operational inefficiencies she sees within the staffing industry, and how a tool like Empower can bridge those gaps. She even tells us about their AI simulation training, Pitch Room, and touches on how other staffing agencies are beginning to adopt the use of AI tools. Finally, our guest hints at what’s next for Ringover and tells us why it’s such a unique organization. Thanks for listening!
[0:01:13] DF: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today I’m extremely excited to be joined by Taylor Stewart, who is the Senior Account Executive at Ringover. Taylor, very good to have you here. Thanks for joining me on the show.
[0:01:26] TS: Yes, thank you so much for having me. Super excited to be here.
[0:01:30] DF: Awesome. Well, to dig right in, a couple of things for the audience. We’re going to be talking about AI, future of communications. We’re going to be talking about how you can use unstructured data and things that you can extract from it that maybe you haven’t thought of. It’s going to be a really fun conversation. Ringover is doing some cool stuff in the market. Excited to have you all learn more about it. To kick things off, Taylor, if you could tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the staffing industry.
[0:01:53] TS: Yeah. Yeah. Funny story. You don’t go to college and say like, “I’m going to be in the staffing industry.” But yeah, I graduated with a teaching degree and did not go on to teach. And I had a friend from college that was working at a healthcare staffing firm in Dallas, the Delta Companies, and he referred me in. I actually worked as a credentialing agent on DeLibra Wesley’s team during my time there.
[0:02:18] DF: Awesome. So great. She’s amazing.
[0:02:21] TS: Yeah. I love her. Love her. Shout out to D. Yeah, that was my first job out of college. I was there three and a half years, and that’s how I made my way into staffing.
[0:02:31] DF: Awesome. Great company to work for. Good starting point. I know, you and I talked briefly kind of about the transition and what you’ve seen happen in staffing, going from what credentialing used to look like to where things are now. Tell us a little bit about kind of the how things have evolved. And then I want to hear a little bit more about what is Ringover and what you guys are doing in the market.
[0:02:52] TS: Yeah. Yeah. Just based off of my experience back in 2012, a lot of the tasks were very manual. And we had those old school desk phones, making our calls out, manually dialing the phone numbers, having to manually log those conversations. I even think like we were putting together – we called them presentables at the time, typing up resumes and formatting those manually. Everything was just a lot of admin, a lot of admin work to the business flows.
And I just remember when it was time sheet day, and we were manually collecting time sheets or they were being faxed in. Yeah, just back in the day, everything took a lot longer to get done because you were doing it each step of the way. And where it is today, I’m still talking to firms that have some manual aspects to their workflows. They’re having conversations but then having to manually log that conversation into their ATS or CRM after the fact. And it’s putting a lot of manual effort on those salespeople and recruiters to create notes after the fact or during the call.
My passion now, being at Ringover, is to allow your team members to be able to actively listen while on conversations and not necessarily have to worry about typing notes during a call or spending time after each call to send those notes into their systems.
[0:04:22] DF: That’s awesome. Yeah, I saw a thing the other day that said that recruiters are spending 20% to 40% of every day on administrative tasks, which is like mindboggling to think that. It sounds so frustrating to be spending 20% to 40% of your time entering stuff into an ATS or updating a field in an ATS. And I think when I hear, when I first learned about Ringover, and I think probably a lot of people in the industry, they immediately are like, “Oh, it’s a VoIP system.” And I think what you guys are doing is quite a bit more than that. And I’m excited to dig into that. Can you tell us a little bit about who is Ringover? What are you guys doing today?
[0:05:00] TS: Yeah. Yeah. I know you mentioned a VoIP solution. I do think people still do come to us just with that knowledge of Ringover offering that phone solution. But we are more than that. We have really strong integration partners, especially in the staffing industry with those ATSs and CRMs. We have native integration. We are maintaining those and enhancing those. But we do provide phone, text messaging. With the integration, there is the automatic logging. But then, Empower is where we’re a big game changer and then become more than just that phone solution. Empower is our conversational AI tool. I know we’ll get into that more later in the conversation. But that’s been attracting more and more companies because we do have the AI solution included with the phone solution.
[0:05:50] DF: Yeah, which Empower is the thing I’m excited to talk about. I would like you to share what that is. And then we can kind of dig into how it’s impactful. And it’s an area that I’m actually passionate about myself. I started taking unstructured call transcripts about a year and a half ago and just going crazy with it, and just learning all the different ways that you can use it, all of the data that you can pull out. I’d love to have you share a little bit about what Empower is. And then we’ll talk about some of the different use cases that you can apply when you have unstructured data running through AI.
[0:06:22] TS: Perfect. Yeah. And you’re like some of the other prospects that come to me, right? There are teams that are pulling transcripts and loading them into, let’s say, ChatGPT and creating a summary, and then pushing it to their system. And so it’s adding more steps. But with our Empower tool, it’s our conversational AI tool. It’s more than just a notetaker. It is creating customized summaries for each conversation type. It’s allowing for upskilling feedback for each phone call and each video meeting that your team members are on. It’s analyzing sales framework so that you can make sure each rep is following the steps that you want them to follow.
We do have a section of Pitch Room where it allows them to practice their pitch before going out into the field and making those real live calls. AIRO Coach is an aspect of Empower, and it’s allowing your teammates to be on video meetings and have a live AI coach that’s helping them handle objections or prompting them with marketplace information, competitor info, if you will. And yeah, it’s a very powerful tool. I know we’ll talk about Ask Empower. That’s my favorite part. And most recent update within the Empower tool overall. But it’s becoming even more of a coaching tool and then providing those further analytics to all of your conversations.
[0:07:46] DF: I haven’t seen Empower myself, but I can tell you that last summer I started taking a month’s worth of call transcripts and uploading them. Lots of manual steps to do these things. And asking, “What are the things that I missed this month?” Rate myself this last week as a leader. Just starting to go deep into understanding what’s going on and the capabilities of what AI can help you understand about yourself and your team that you might not know is really profound. And it’s helped me not through Empower, but I think Empower would make it. So you get more impactful results out of it than what I’m doing. And also, not have to go through the manual steps of put all these into a Google doc first. I would love to talk about – I know you brought up Ask Empower. How does that work? And why is it your favorite?
[0:08:31] TS: Yeah. Ask Empower when it was first released, it was analyzing the last 1 to 10 conversations. You could focus on maybe 10 previous conversations with one contact and gain insight there. But since I’ve returned from maternity leave, it’s much more robust. It’s going across all the conversations in your database. Every phone call, every video meeting, it’s able to analyze those. And what you can do is search for patterns. Or in your example, where are we losing business? You could prompt Ask Empower with analyze the phone calls over the last 90 days of my recruiter’s phone conversations.
And among those calls, where are we losing out on a candidate? And it’s able to pick up those specific phone calls and bring those to your attention. You’re able to coach against those and improve your team that way. We actually have a case study from one of our construction staffing companies that work with us, and they were just saying they were using our Empower tool to analyze their conversations. And they were spending 60% to 70% less time individually spot-checking calls or going on ride-alongs with their sales team members. And so it’s basically allowing you to analyze all of your conversation data without having to take the time to manually do it conversation by conversation or transcript by transcript.
[0:10:04] DF: I think that’s one of the more impactful things that AI’s going to allow people to do is manage more people more effectively than you would be able to. You just simply don’t have the time to do this level of detail. I was also just – it was one of those topics where I’m going to be sharing stories as well because I’m so excited about it. I was with everybody on our team at different points. I’ve been like, after our calls, let’s each rate it, and then let’s have AI rate it. And let’s talk about what went well, what didn’t go well. How could we have improved? And I think that it just is one of the best use cases for AI is applying it to unstructured data in ways where it can find patterns and see things that we just don’t see because we’re so used to the common talk tracks that we have. I think that’s a great use case. And I didn’t realize that you’re going across the – you go across the entire call log for that individual. All of the recorded calls now?
[0:10:55] TS: Yeah, you can specify which contact you want to analyze all the conversations, or just all of their conversations on the team broadly, right? You can just say a prompt, “Over the last 30 days, how is the sales team handling objections?” And pick out maybe your all-stars on the team that are doing well. And then the tool can also select the team members that aren’t doing so well and might need some redirection, as far as coaching goes.
[0:11:26] DF: That’s great. And is there a self-coaching element to it as well? When people get off, are there automations or things along those lines, too?
[0:11:32] TS: Yes. Yes, there is. There’s definitely some upskilling feedback. Like me, individually, we use it internally, obviously. Every video meeting that I have with a prospect, I go in after the fact, and I look at my call score. I look up the upskilling feedback it gives me in our coaching section. It does things, like check your words per minute. Was I listening or talking more than listening? How well did I handle objections?
There’s the sales framework section, like I mentioned, and it’ll tell me based off of – we use the med pick framework in our system internally. And it’ll tell me maybe a question that I didn’t ask. Maybe I didn’t ask what the budget was. And so it’s giving me questions to start with on the next call with them and allow me to basically be self-coached by the AI tool and not have my manager analyze each individual call and say, “Hey, Taylor, you could have done this better next time.” It’s freeing up the time of my manager. And then I can see this information right away after the call.
[0:12:32] DF: That’s really great. And one of the other areas that I just think is cool, because I don’t have this, but would like a tool to do this in HubSpot. I’m sure there’s one, or maybe you guys even do it. But it also will take the unstructured data and update the ATS as well, is another use case, right?
[0:12:48] TS: Oh yes, absolutely. After each conversation, I know I mentioned being able to actively listen and not have to take notes while on a call. And so what Empower will do is you feed it customized templates for conversation type, whether it’s a pre-screen or an interview call. And then that is analyzing the conversation, summarizing it, and then logging that call to the ATS or the CRM for you automatically. No manual tasks. It’s updating into your system that Taylor had a conversation with Dave. And I don’t have to do any admin task after the fact.
To take it a step further in some of our integrations, we’ve released CRM autofill. And that picks up on pieces of information that maybe you need to update a field. In your instance with HubSpot, maybe you needed to update an email address or update desired start date in the recruiting use case. And then it does it for you. You could auto-update fields. We even have a self-check section. So, after the call. If you don’t want it automatically updating all your fields in your system. AI isn’t perfect all the time. But you can choose which one –
[0:13:57] DF: Not quite there yet.
[0:13:59] TS: Yeah, exactly. But definitely room for you to approve those and not have to go in and manually update each field yourself.
[0:14:06] DF: Awesome. That’s great. That’s one that I would like. From your seat, when you walk into staffing agencies or when you’re having conversations with them, what is kind of like the single biggest gap that you see currently in terms of how they’re operating?
[0:14:20] TS: Yeah, I’d say like with 2020, a lot of the firms were looking at alternatives for phones, right? Because a lot of them were on desk phones. And I think that’s where the shift happened of looking into VoIP solutions because of that remote workforce. Some of the prospects that come to me have already been on a VoIP solution. Or business went another way during that time and issued company cell phones or allowed them to use their personal cell phones.
And so in both instances, probably not an integration with the VoIP solution that my prospect is working with, or it’s not built out very well. It’s maybe just says like call happened. But especially in that personal cell phone use case, they don’t have any visibility into any of the calls being made. They’re depending on recruiters and salespeople to manually enter those calls into their ATS or CRM.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m in sales. And after each conversation I have, I, without a doubt, would not be able to keep up with that. Would not log every individual conversation, especially if it’s happening on my personal cell. And if out picking up the kids from daycare, I’m not going to remember to log a call with my –
[0:15:34] DF: Yeah.
[0:15:34] TS: Yeah. There’s a lot of gaps. There’s a lack of visibility there. And they’re not having that data go into their system for them to use it in other ways, for sure.
[0:15:47] DF: And so, it sounds like one of the things that you’re kind of seeing change is the – well, the issues is that people are not getting the data that they need from the conversations that are happening, which has forever been a problem. And also, something that I think with remote work, I was hearing a story the other day with somebody. I don’t remember what tool they used. It might have been your guys’ platform. They’re just saying they had mapped – they had their defined process for interviews. And then started having the recorded calls going. And they’re like, 20% of the recruiters were completely off script. But they’re like, “Oh. Well, good thing we have this perfect process that we created.”
[0:16:25] TS: And they’re not, they’re not following it, right? Yeah.
[0:16:27] DF: Yeah. Yeah.
[0:16:28] TS: Yes. That’s another thing. It does pick up on script adherence, too. You could feed it a script.
[0:16:33] DF: Oh, really? That’s cool.
[0:16:36] TS: Hey, they got a 20% on following your script.
[0:16:41] DF: Oh, that’s cool. I didn’t realize that. And so, I mean, I know a lot of these podcasts right now, we’re talking about AI. What are some of the other things that you see changing in staffing in terms of how they’re adopting AI or things that are going along with your product?
[0:16:55] TS: Yeah, I think in the beginning when there was so much buzz around AI, I think people were just kind of grabbing at everything that was coming across their desk of like, “If we don’t get AI, if we don’t start adopting AI tools, we’re going to fall behind.” And there wasn’t much thought to the tools that they were purchasing. They were just doing it so that they don’t get left behind.
And so now I definitely see that we’re dealing with more educated buyers. And they’re asking questions of legitimacy. How long have you been around? Who are you partnered with in the staffing industry? Is your tool geared towards the staffing industry? And asking for reference checks, asking to do a trial. People are taking their time now and being more thoughtful about what AI to implement into their processes than they were before.
[0:17:47] DF: Yeah, I did see at the beginning, there was – I remember talking to people. They’re like, “Do you know any AI products?” I’m like, “For what?” They’re like, “Just anybody. Anybody in staffing doing AI that you could introduce me to.” It’s like, “Okay. Sure. Why not?” We talk about this a lot. But starting with the outcome, what’s the challenge you’re trying to solve or the outcome you’re trying to achieve?
But there is also like that play around with the territory, which is going to be valuable. And I think that we’re seeing the staffing industry evolve into a more rapid adopter of it. And we don’t have the – I don’t think I have the final data, but it’s coming out here soon. But what we’re seeing is that the people, staffing agencies who are adopting more AI processes, higher correlations with growth. And I think that just goes to show the impact that it’s having.
And while I know there’s all these articles out about nobody’s seen a real ROI from AI, and I’m like I think it might be hard to measure sometimes. But I also think that the lack of ROI might be due to the incompetence of some of the purchases. When done well, it can be really, really impactful.
[0:18:54] TS: It can be really powerful. And as far as like ROI, I know Bullhorn, one of our ATS partners, they did a recent analysis, an impact analysis of Ringover on their customer base, and they’re finding that Ringover customers are placing people 12.1% faster. Time to place is increased.
[0:19:15] DF: That’s amazing.
[0:19:16] TS: They’re sourcing, I guess, 7% more of their current database. And I don’t think that’s by accident, right? Because if you’re automatically flowing all of your conversation data into your system, and you’re able to search on, “This person mentioned they have –”
[0:19:31] DF: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. It’s actually helping to get people out of the ATS too. Because when you go to search, you can find more. It’s like, “Oh, this person mentioned that they’re interested in this. Or they have the skill set.”
[0:19:42] TS: Exactly. Exactly.
[0:19:44] DF: What are some of the other just AI use cases?
[0:19:48] TS: Yeah, I touched on Pitch Room at the top of the call. But Pitch Room is our AI simulation training. Gone are the days of sitting in a room doing role plays with your peers. We now have Pitch Room. And so you can do back-and-forth coaching on a call. It’s basically like I’m talking to one of my prospects. And my manager set it up to be the difficulty level of a four. They’re really difficult to get past. But it’s helping me perfect my craft.
We have team members that are using that to onboard faster. So, as you’re bringing new reps on, they’re sending them into Pitch Room, having them coach before they go out into the field and make those live calls. And they’re also getting the Empower analytics off of those practice calls. So they’re getting the upskilling feedback of what to do better next time. So that when they start making those real calls, they’re prepared.
[0:20:44] DF: That’s amazing. We used a tool, not staffing specific, last summer for a bit. I was doing that, and our team was obsessed. They’re using it before calls to practice. They were getting scores. They’re getting scores after. And I was like, “Oh, all of the coaching that I should be doing, but don’t feel like I have time to do all the time is happening.” And it’s good in many instances, probably more nuanced than I would be. It’s actually really great. I feel like that concept has come a long way. It’s cool to see it in practice.
[0:21:12] TS: I love that one. Because in role plays, I don’t know, it’s either you’re with your peers, and they’re either really, really difficult or really, really easy. There’s never like an in between. And so it allows you to practice in multiple scenarios rather than –
[0:21:26] DF: Yeah. I mean, it’s always kind of awkward, too, right? Like, “Sure, let’s sit here and do this for an hour. This is going to be fun for both of us.”
[0:21:33] TS: Exactly.
[0:21:35] DF: It’s one of those moments where I’m like, “I’d rather do it with AI. I’d rather have this conversation with AI a few times than have to do it with my team.” And so with that, you guys have kind of a great suite of taking the unstructured call data, helping to coach people on it, train people on it, use it in the ATS. What’s next in staffing with AI? Or what’s next at Ringover? What’s to come in terms of where things are going?
[0:21:58] TS: Yeah, I can’t say exactly things that are being released, but just a hint with our Ask Empower tool, it won’t just be analyzing conversation data. That’s exciting that there will be more data points for that tool to be able to use to coach your team further, start winning more deals. And yeah, from the coaching aspect, that’s on the horizon. Very excited about that.
[0:22:24] DF: That’s great. Before we close out, the last question I have is I know there are a lot of ways to have calls recorded and a lot of platforms out there when it comes to VoIP. What is different about Ringover compared to why Ringover, and what makes you guys unique?
[0:22:41] TS: Yeah, absolutely. For one, we’re definitely being built more towards the staffing industry in mind compared to our competitors. Definitely keep that in mind. And based on the ATS and CRM partnerships that we have, the tool is going to be geared more specifically towards this industry.
The next thing is our sales team. Everyone has sold SaaS to staffing in the past, or even worked at a staffing firm themselves. We have the knowledge, we understand the workflows. Yeah, just the people that you work with are definitely going to be a lot more aligned with your goals.
[0:23:18] DF: Is the coaching – are there templates that come with that that are aligned with staffing out of the box? Is that how we’re – yeah.
[0:23:25] TS: Yeah. No, that’s a great question. Yeah, within our Empower tool, we’ve created sales and recruiting templates to get the team started, right? Yeah, we’re definitely trying to do more and more things to gear more towards staffing and gear more towards the adoption of it. If we’re providing these templates customized to the industry, I think that’s been very helpful as well.
[0:23:48] DF: That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s really great. I think with all of the prompting I’ve talked about, my excitement around all this stuff, I found that if you don’t have enough context, if you don’t have enough direction with it, it’s not as good. And I think having the out-of-the-box context on the industry can be really impactful. I always have custom instructions that I’m using for it to help give a little more guidance. And it sounds like you’re giving that out of the box as well. Awesome. Last question I’ve got for you is, what is your favorite or most fun personal use of AI?
[0:24:18] TS: No one judge me, but I’m a new mom of two now. And so while I was on maternity leave, I used Claude a lot. I would say that’s my favorite. I was even asking it questions like, “Why is my son not sleeping? He’s X-age.” And yeah, feeding it a lot. All the details. And maybe you shouldn’t go to them for medical advice. But Claude was my friend during maternity leave.
[0:24:44] DF: God, I’ve used it for so much of that, right? It’s a little overly – it’s like, “Oh, you got to go to the ER.” I’m like, “No, I’m not going to the ER for that.”
[0:24:53] TS: Yeah. I’m like, “Okay. Call my doctor.”
[0:24:54] DF: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a little excessive.
[0:24:57] TS: Yes.
[0:24:59] DF: Yeah. Awesome.
[0:25:00] TS: Definitely gave me tips and tricks, for sure.
[0:25:03] DF: Love it. Well, Taylor, so great having you on the show and talking about what you guys are doing at Ringover. It’s really exciting stuff. Something that I think could be impactful for all of the listeners. And again, if you haven’t, try poking around on some of your call transcripts. And where can people reach you if they want to get in touch?
[0:25:17] TS: Yeah, LinkedIn. I’m Taylor Stewart Karr. You can find me there. And then I think we’ll provide maybe a landing page for your listeners to find us.
[0:25:26] DF: Awesome. So, great. Well, thanks so much for joining me.
