By Gregg Carey, Co-Founder & CEO, More Staffing
Key takeaways:
- The competitive advantage isn’t AI or people, but the deliberate pairing of both, and most staffing firms aren’t building for that yet.
- Screening for AI fluency and operating instinct is now as important as screening for credentials but harder, and the industry hasn’t caught up.
- A strong placement into a broken system will underperform. Before you fill the role, build the workflow it plugs into.
There is a version of the future that keeps getting pitched to staffing firms right now. Perhaps there’s a version of this in many businesses. It goes something like this: agents will handle sourcing, screening will be automated, and the human recruiter becomes an oversight function at best.
I understand the appeal of that story. The tools are genuinely moving fast. But I think the framing is slightly off, and I think it is leading staffing firms to chase the wrong thing.
The businesses I work with every day, mostly small and mid-size operators in the one to 10 million dollar revenue range, aren’t asking for a fully automated talent pipeline. They are asking for someone who can actually do the job and, at the same time, knows how to use the tools available to them. Those are two different things, and right now the industry is getting better at the second while quietly letting the first slip.
The false binary that’s slowing the industry
The conversation around AI in staffing tends to collapse into two camps. One side says the technology will replace most of what recruiters do. The other says it’s overhyped and the fundamentals will win.
What I keep seeing on the ground is a third path. The unit that creates real operational leverage for a client is not a person and not an agent. It is the pairing of the two, where a capable human carries the context, judgment, and accountability, and the tools extend what that person can get done in a day.
That pairing does not happen automatically. Staffing firms have to think about it deliberately, and most are not doing that yet.
Why SMBs are the best testing ground for the human-AI pairing
Large enterprises have the runway to experiment. They can absorb a failed automation project, bring in consultants, rebuild. But that cushion is nuanced. Large organizations have long communication chains, layers of approval, and legacy infrastructure that slow things down. A small business does not have those buffers, and that cuts both ways. The margin for error is narrow. And the ability to move, adjust, and implement something new is faster.
When a small business owner hires offshore talent (or any talent), the margin for error in that placement is narrow. There is usually no HR department, no formal onboarding infrastructure, no manager with bandwidth to ramp someone up. The hire either adds capacity or creates drag.
What makes a placement land in that environment is whether the person coming in can operate without leaning on the owner for every decision. In a small business, every escalation that goes to the owner is a tax on the business. The owner is already the bottleneck. Adding another person who feeds into that bottleneck does not solve anything.
This is why the AI-first mindset in a candidate matters. A person who can build a process around a tool, who can sit down with a dashboard and figure out what it is telling them and act on it, that person adds capacity. A person who needs to be managed, regardless of their credentials, adds overhead.
In my experience, the staffing industry has defaulted to selecting for credentials for a long time. The shift toward selecting for operating instinct and tool fluency is not fully here yet. But the clients asking for it are getting louder.
What “AI-first mindset” actually means in a candidate
When I say AI-first mindset, I want to be specific, because it gets used loosely.
It does not mean the candidate has a long list of tools on their resume. It means they approach a problem by asking what information is available, how they can surface that information efficiently, and what decisions can be made without escalating.
In my experience working with offshore talent, younger candidates particularly in the Philippines and Latin America tend to bring an adaptability that I think comes from building skills inside a global, remote-first economy. Great offshore talent are the ones who don’t have legacy habits to unlearn. When you give them a workflow and ask them to own it, they own it.
That is a meaningful differentiator. And it’s one that staffing firms are underweighting because it is harder to screen for than a certification or years of experience in a specific tool.
The interview process has to evolve. The questions that surface this mindset are not just about tools. They are about how someone responds when the process breaks down, when the data does not match, when an escalation needs to be made and the playbook does not cover it. Those answers tell you whether someone is going to reduce your client’s management burden or increase it.
The roles that staffing firms should be building toward
When I think about the placement types that will matter most over the next few years, they do not fit neatly into the job titles staffing firms have traditionally filled.
The profile emerging across the clients I work with is something like: part operator, part workflow steward, part AI interface:
- In finance, that looks like someone who can not only reconcile accounts but build the reporting cadence, flag the anomalies, and know when to escalate versus when to resolve.
- In marketing, it looks like someone who can own a content calendar, brief out creative, and read performance data.
- In operations, it looks like someone who manages the customer-facing process but also maintains the system that tracks it.
They tend to sit in a middle layer (not entry level, but also not senior level) that small businesses have historically struggled to fill affordably. Offshore talent, when placed well and supported properly, makes that layer accessible.
The staffing firms that figure out how to consistently source and vet for this profile are going to be in a very different position than the ones still optimizing for volume of placements.
Intelligent workflows: What great talent can now tap into
Here’s something I have observed and come to believe: a great hire placed into a broken system is likely to underperform.
The system does not have to be sophisticated. But it has to exist. There has to be defined KPIs, a way to track them, and some documented logic around what happens when something goes off track. Without that, even a strong hire is spending most of their time figuring out what to prioritize, which is exactly the management burden you hired them to relieve.
What has changed is how accessible this kind of infrastructure has become. What I call intelligent workflows, a layer that connects live business data to embedded decision criteria and escalation logic, used to require significant technical lift to set up. Today, a capable hire can help build and own that system themselves. It can look like a dashboard pulling live data from the tools the business already uses, mapping KPIs onto that data, and surfacing a set of actions when something goes off track.
This is what makes the human-plus-AI pairing actually function:
- The workflow carries the institutional knowledge of the business.
- The person brings the judgment to act on it.
- The AI extends the capacity of both.
A great hire, one with an AI-first mindset, will know how to work within systems like intelligent workflows and, over time, build on them. They make it their operating hub and grow with it. That is the kind of talent that will thrive in today’s AI-driven business environment.
The staffing partner the market is starting to ask for
The bar is moving. Clients who have been burned by transactional placements, a resume delivered, a kickoff call, and then silence, are looking for something different. They want a partner who understands their business well enough to know whether the placement is working three months in. They want accountability that extends past the guarantee period. They want someone who can help them think through what the role should actually look like before filling it.
That is a higher bar. But it is also a much more defensible position. A firm that fills a seat is competing with every other firm that fills seats. A firm that places someone who can own outcomes, operate independently, and grow within the systems is competing in a much smaller field.
The human layer in this equation is not a concession to the limits of current AI. It is the thing that makes everything else work. Agents need context to function well. Workflows need someone to maintain them, adapt them, and catch what they miss. Clients need a human being they trust to own the outcome.
That foundation is a person. A well-selected, well-supported, AI-fluent person. And placing that person well is still the most important thing staffing firms can do.
Gregg Carey is the founder of More Staffing, a staffing and operational leverage firm focused on helping small and mid-size businesses build offshore talent infrastructure. He is also an operator with interests across e-commerce and service-based businesses.
