As VP of Sales for North America at Ringover, Erich Hugunin sits at the intersection of communication technology and staffing, and talks to recruiting leaders across the country about how they’re really reaching candidates, not how they think they are. What he keeps finding is an industry buying tools one problem at a time: an outreach platform here, an automation tool there, each one solving its own narrow job while the candidate on the other end gets confused, then annoyed, then blocks the number entirely.
Hugunin sat down with StaffingHub at Avionté CONNECT to talk about why calling someone 10 times without leaving a voicemail gets you reported as spam, the concept of “data insurance,” and the one vendor question every staffing leader should be asking before they buy anything else.
Q. When a recruiter picks up the phone today, what actually gets somebody to stay on the line?
Erich Hugunin: Make the conversation two-way. Ask questions. If you’re trying to keep someone on the line, engage with them, don’t just talk at them about why they should work with you or what company you’re calling from. The whole goal, whether you’re calling a candidate or a prospect, is to get them talking. Ask what they’re available for, what they’re looking for right now, whether they’re open to a change. Get them talking about what they want and why they might want to make a move. That gets them engaged and thinking, and it gets you more response. The goal is always to get the other person talking more than you are.
Q. What’s a communication habit some recruiters are clinging to that they need to let go of?
EH: The big one is how they use the phone. They’re calling someone five, 10 times without leaving a voicemail, and then wondering why they’re getting flagged for spam. You are spamming. If I get five or 10 calls from the same number in 48 or 72 hours, I’m blocking it and reporting it.
If phone calls are one of your required KPIs, you still have to change how you do it. Call, leave a voicemail. But the bigger shift is going multi-threaded: follow up with a text. “Hey, I just left you a voicemail about this, do you have time to chat?” That turns a cold lead into a warm one, because now they can reply on their own terms: “Yeah, call me at 4.” Instead of calling back at 3, then again the next day at 7, you’re disrupting them and spamming them. You have to communicate on their terms, not yours, and that’s really hard for people to do.
You also have to back into this with data instead of assumption. A lot of teams think they know their best calling window because that’s just what they’ve always done. Go look at your connect rates, your response rates, your missed calls, and build your hours around that. You might assume Wednesday at a certain time is your best window, and the data says otherwise. I see people calling on Fridays purely to hit their weekly numbers, not because it’s effective. Look at the data, and fix both when you’re reaching out and how.
Q. Where do you think AI is actually making recruiters better at their job, versus just adding to noisy, spammy outreach?
EH: Something I heard recently was “data insurance.” Your data, your candidates, your client information, everything that lives in your ATS, is your business. It’s what differentiates you from your competitors, along with your recruiters. So using tools that feed that data back into your system instead of siloing it elsewhere is crucial. When your team is using tools outside your ATS that aren’t integrated, you’re not capturing that data, and you’re taking on risk.
That includes whether you have an enterprise edition of tools like Gemini or ChatGPT, something that ensures your team isn’t feeding client and candidate data into a tool that takes it outside your organization. People aren’t spending enough time on this, and the liability exposure is huge. We’re going to see massive class action lawsuits come out of this. It’s the wild west right now. That side of AI is more about protecting the business than making an individual recruiter better.
Where it does make recruiters better is time savings and upskilling. On the time savings side, AI can do the searching and matching that used to take a recruiter forever: surfacing who’s actively engaged right now, who’s most active on LinkedIn, so you know you’re reaching out to the right person. I don’t carry a notebook anymore. Showing up to a meeting already knowing everything you discussed last time makes you look sharp, and buyers notice that.
Then there’s upskilling. Attrition in recruiting runs anywhere from 20% to 40%, and a lot of that comes down to a lack of skills or tools. AI lets senior recruiters share their knowledge at scale, through pre-recorded calls a junior recruiter can practice against, or by checking script adherence and brand consistency. That gets a junior recruiter up to speed faster without a manager sitting next to them on every call, and it lets senior recruiters feel more valued too, because they’re more efficient and more productive.
Q. What’s the most expensive mistake you see firms make when they’re implementing these AI and communication tools?
EH: We heard Dirk mention earlier that 46% of firms haven’t even engaged with an AI tool yet. What makes this hard is that the market is confusing, overwhelming, and most of what people do buy, they use a fraction of.
The most expensive mistake is buying a single-point solution because someone recommended it, and it doesn’t talk to the rest of your tech stack, so it never gets properly adopted. I always think about four journeys when evaluating any technology: how it affects your salespeople, your recruiters, your candidate’s journey from start to finish, and your client’s journey from start to finish. If a tool only touches your recruiters, that’s a single-threaded solution. It might still help, but you’re going to end up buying something separate for your sales team, and something else again somewhere else.
Look for something that covers as many of those journeys as possible, or if it’s the best-in-class single-threaded tool, make sure it plays well with the other systems handling the rest. Does it integrate cleanly, or does it just hammer your APIs and slow everything down? Sometimes “doesn’t play well with others” isn’t about integration at all, it’s just that it eats up too much of your team’s time to use.
Q. What questions should people ask when vetting vendors to make sure a new tool will actually play well with the rest of their stack?
EH: Start simple: are they certified with the partner platform? Avionté has a partner program, so are they certified within it? A lot of newer companies have great, focused technology solving one specific problem, but they’re not certified anywhere, and you have to ask how many customers they have.
Ask about the depth of their integration, not just whether it technically connects. Ask who their partners are, not just who their reference clients are. And use your network. Ask other vendors what they think of a tool you’re evaluating. Clients ask me that all the time: what do you think of this tool, do you know anyone using it? Your network isn’t just for finding your next job. Use it for your tech stack decisions too.
Q. Beyond spamming, what else are staffing firms getting wrong about candidate outreach that they don’t even realize?
EH: We talked today with a healthcare staffing company doing about $100 million in revenue. Their exact words were that they’ve bought so many different solutions, engaged with so much, and they’re growing like crazy, but right now they’re texting candidates from four different platforms. None of those platforms talk to each other, except that each one logs a note back to Avionté, at least. So one candidate could get texts from four different phone numbers throughout their process.
They looked at each tool in isolation: this AI agent does this, this automation does that, this outreach tool drives people to the website. But the candidate on the other end got texted from four different numbers and has no idea which one to reply to. Is it the recruiter’s direct line? The automated tool? The engagement platform that reached out first? It’s confusing, and it can look like spam or even a phishing attempt. What’s wild is that it’s still technically working for them. But it’s worth stepping back and asking how you centralize that instead of layering on more single-threaded tools.
Q. What are you most excited about in the conversations you’re having here at CONNECT?
EH: I sat in on Dirk’s presentation earlier, and he laid out five trends that all tie back to each other. First, there’s actual stabilization in the market, the first we’ve seen since around 2022, which is both good news and a little unsettling after years of unpredictability.
Second is the labor squeeze. We’ve been in what people were calling “the great stay,” and now people are starting to move again, but only with the right outreach and the right offer.
Third, talent expectations have shifted: speed of communication, pay expectations. I’ve had to have real conversations with candidates about the fact that what they made in 2022 may not be what they make now, but there’s a path to it.
Fourth, AI adoption is no longer optional, and the firms adopting it fastest and most broadly are the ones showing up as the fastest growers in your State of Staffing data.
Fifth, skills and new credentials matter more than a college degree now. You can have a 20-year-old who’s excellent with a tool like Claude who could be genuinely impactful to your business.
All of it circles back to data hygiene and data insurance. Whoever takes that seriously and adopts the most broadly across their organization is going to come out ahead. One example that stuck with me: Brett, in one of the earlier panels, talked about focusing on profitability over growth and took his gross margin from 22% to 46% in a year through adoption. So it’s not always about growing revenue. If you can hold steady at your current revenue and add 20 points of gross margin, that’s a massive difference to your bottom line.
Q. For firms that are comfortable growing more slowly and staying focused on a niche, is that a legitimate choice, or are they setting up a bigger gap down the road?
EH: It’s okay not to chase it. But don’t expect the same results you saw in past upticks, because other firms are more willing to change now. You might see 5% growth while the industry grows 20%. If that’s fine for you because you’re running a lifestyle business, that’s a real choice, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It depends on what you want for your organization. If you want to be at the front of the wave, growing 40% while the industry grows 20%, that takes risk and moving quickly. And it’s okay to take that risk, as long as you’re willing to learn from it.
Q. A year from now, what will staffing firms be doing differently than they are today?
EH: I think the industry keeps evolving fast. This uptick we’re seeing is going to cause a growth spurt, and it’s going to separate the firms that adopted from the ones that didn’t. Some of the ones falling behind could be the big traditional names. Everyone assumes firms like Robert Half will always be here. What if they’re too slow to adopt? That opens room for smaller, more nimble, mid-sized firms to grow. At the same time, some of those smaller firms leaning entirely on “this is our niche, it’s always worked” might not make it either.
I think we’re going to see continued consolidation, even as the overall numbers grow. Look at IT staffing shifting toward IT consulting: fewer big development contracts, more focus on security and compliance. Can those firms shift fast enough, using AI to help identify the right candidates for roles they weren’t focused on before? The companies that adopted tools flexible enough to move with the market are going to make it. The ones doing what they’ve always done may not.
