What happens when the genie is already out of the bottle and the only winning move is to embrace it? In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, the companies that thrive aren’t the ones resisting change, but the ones willing to understand and harness its power. This is exactly what today’s guest, Brandon Metcalf, the CEO of Asymbl, champions when it comes to integrating and managing AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and many others. In this episode, Brandon Metcalf breaks down the evolving role of “digital workers” in the staffing industry, explaining how they complement, not replace, human talent and why the real focus should be on the jobs that need to be done rather than the technology itself. He discusses workforce orchestration, the skills required to manage digital labor, the importance of human-in-the-loop systems, and what the next three to five years may hold as AI reshapes staffing. Brandon also shares practical insights on ROI, onboarding with AI, and the first steps companies can take as they begin integrating digital workers into their operations.
[0:01:14] David Folwell: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Brandon Metcalf, who is the CEO and founder of Asymbl. Brandon, you’ve been in staffing for quite a while since 2004. Been in Kelly Services, founded and sold Talent Rover to Bullhorn. Now you’re running Asymbl. And you guys are on a bit of kind of a crazy growth trajectory at the moment. I think I heard 58x in there. And so you guys have a really cool story and are doing some amazing things on the ATS front that I’m excited to dig into.
To kick things off, I know I told a little bit of your background there. Love to just understand kind of how you got into staffing and a little bit about Asymbl. And then for our audience today, what we’re going to be jumping into heavily is AI, AI orchestration, AI agents, and what all of that means. Brandon’s an expert in it. We’re going to have some deep insights to share with you today.
[0:02:07] Brandon Metcalf: Awesome. Well, David, thanks for having me on. It’s excited to be on and chat. And my background, I actually started in financial services briefly, but staffing is really where I got my real career growing. I started with Kelly in 2004, Colorado. Then they sent me to California. Then I went to a headhunting firm called CV Partners. And when I was at CV Partners is where I got the idea of I don’t like the technology in the staffing industry, so I think I can build a better one.
I started building Talent Rover, or what became Talent Rover in 2009. We commercialized it in 2011. Scaled it to – we had offices in what? Eight countries? Nine offices in eight countries. Customers in about 40. Ninth fastest growing software company in the US according to Inc. in 2017. And then, yeah, we sold the business in March of 2018.
And then I went on and created a couple different companies. One of which was a company called Blueprint Advisory. A Salesforce consulting firm. We started that in late 2018 to help implement and customize Salesforce for clients. Talent Rover was built on Salesforce. So I did that.
And then a couple years back Salesforce approached us saying, “Hey, we’d like to talk with you about how you can help us win more business in the staffing industry.” Greg, my business partner, he was running Blueprint on the day-to-day. He started those conversations, and that led to coming up with an idea to build a different version of an ATS, now that we could start with a blank slate, if you will.
The concept there was the Salesforce ecosystem, you could either buy Salesforce and customize it. So build your own. Or buy a third party like Talent Rover was that reinvents the platform. But then you’re stuck with using how they want you to use it. That’s more of an OEM play. We wanted to bridge the gap. We wanted companies to get the full power of Salesforce from Salesforce without us reinventing Salesforce. But we wanted to solve the staffing and recruiting gaps inside of Salesforce.
We created what was originally an applicant tracking system plugged in specifically or primarily for the staffing industry. Launched the business in January of ’23. I really started focusing on the business myself later in ’24. And then it’s just kind of been a crazy ride where we’ve had this consulting business, and we’ve had this software business. We merged the two together. Asymbl rolled Blueprint in. Now we’re all Asymbl.
And then from there, started to gain a lot of traction. Started to get into AI. Salesforce brought us into a lot of different beta programs for AI. Started to use it internally and started to really figure out the value that we got from digital workers. That turned into a shift in the company again, where now we look at the businesses. We’re a workforce orchestration company. And what I essentially mean by that is we have recruiting technology or workforce applications, if you will, that help you find and hire human workers.
We’re not a staffing firm, but we provide the technology to do that. And then we also advise, consult, and are rolling out our own digital agents, digital workers if you will, to onboard digital workers really with the point of elevating and assisting humans to just be more productive, to get more work done faster. And then we have the Salesforce consulting and the platform expertise to know how to actually implement that all together.
Now, if you look at our customer mix, a lot of staffing firms, a lot of companies outside of staffing that do corporate recruiting, a lot of companies that just are looking for Salesforce consulting help, or a lot of companies that now are wanting assistance with how to actually use digital labor and get the value that we’re getting internally. It’s been a crazy ride. But staffing and the staffing industry is certainly near and dear to my heart, and an area that we’re always going to focus on.
[0:05:50] David Folwell: Awesome. And for those listening in, kind of describe or define what is a digital worker from your perspective.
[0:05:58] Brandon Metcalf: Yeah. A lot of people get hung up on what I call agent washing, right? Where everything’s an agent now. Not everything’s an agent. And frankly, not everything needs to be an agent. We call it digital workers because it is agents, but it’s also generative AI, it’s predictive AI. Sometimes it’s automated workflows, anything that can really help augment or elevate the work that a human would do, and provide reasoning and some thought around it to complete jobs.
And we have a philosophy of how to really look at it, how to onboard it, how to coach it, how to manage it. When you start talking about like coaching and managing, it really starts to really take the shape of an employee or a worker.
[0:06:38] David Folwell: That’s such a fun thought and also so interesting to be in a time where that’s what we’re talking about is actually managing digital AI workers. I know when we had talked previously, I think you had said that at Asymbl, you guys have 90 digital workers that exist within Asymbl today.
[0:06:54] Brandon Metcalf: Yeah, we have, I think, today probably closer to a hundred or so. We have a chief digital labor officer. His real job is – yeah. And it’s a real job. It’s exciting because he was the CEO of a really successful Salesforce implementation firm that he exited. He and I have known each other forever. And his whole job is to go across the company and look for ways for us to leverage digital workers to elevate the productivity that humans are doing. And he’s done it rapidly.
Although there are a lot of agents, there is a lot of assistance, as well. We have it deployed right now in about 10 different areas of the business. This year in 2025, we’ve been able to save about $5 million from actually doing this. I put down some goals for next year that 30% of all the productivity that we do as an organization will be produced by digital labor. And then also from there we have a lot of finance opportunity, if you will, as far as cost savings and reinvestment in other areas of the business.
I mean, we genuinely look at it as we’re not displacing our human workers. The jobs will evolve, the jobs will change, but everyone ends up becoming sort of a manager, and they’re managing these digital workers to a system. And if we can hit the 30%, which it looks like we’ll probably be able to exceed that, the financial impact’s huge.
[0:08:15] David Folwell: That’s insane. I mean, I have the outcomes that people expect with AI. I have a lot of people on here who are like, “Yeah, it’s game-changing. It’s really changed the world for how we’re operating.” And then I also have a lot of conversations with staffing agency owners who are saying, “You know what? We just haven’t found the thing that actually is driving value yet. And we haven’t found the real practical use cases that we feel like we can get the consistent deliverability out of that.”
I have my own thoughts around some of the reasons what might be driving that kind of belief or understanding of it. But I would love if you could talk about any of the specific digital workers where you feel like a use case where like this is a home run. We use it all day, and it works for us. And anything you can share that’s a little bit more specific?
[0:08:57] Brandon Metcalf: Yeah. If you’ve ever heard me talk about this topic, I make fun of let’s just slap an agent on it. You can just slap an AI agent. It’s going to solve all your problems, which is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Because you can’t just hire a random employee and say, “Hey, go figure out your job.” And you’re off to the races. But it’s that mentality of is this an IT project or is this a workforce? That is the starting point to answer your question.
And every business is different as to where you could start. But the way we recommend that you start is focus less on the technology and focus more on the jobs to be done. And really think about where do you want to apply this. Meaning we started with an SDR agent and we started with our recruiter agent. Salesforce’s Agentforce, SDR agent. We brought on that. And it was not a check the box, you’re off and running. It was, “All right. What does this thing do? What do we want the job to be done to accomplish? Does this meet the need? And then how do we actually determine motivation and success, if you will?”
We brought on this SDR agent. We said, “Here’s the goal.” We have a lot of inbound leads that we don’t really have the capacity from a human level to interact with all of them. We also have a lot of outbound that we want to do. How do we do both of those? And how do we make it so that we can talk to anyone at any time, follow up, give the right kind of cadence, and we’re constantly touching everyone?
With that, we brought on this SDR agent. We named it Teddy. And we named it for a reason because we wanted it to show up on activity reports. We wanted our human sales team to see it and understand it because our human team has to interact with it. And that was one of the goals we had with it is we don’t want this just to be an isolated automation type thing on the side. We want Teddy to qualify leads and disqualify leads, and then flip them over with scheduled appointments for our human team.
We want our human team. And at the time, we had one BDR, and his name is Mitch. He’s now an AE. Mitch would work with Teddy and review what Teddy was doing and be able to provide coaching to how Teddy was interacting, what it was saying, and how it was responding. And does it have the right knowledge?
And from there, it took a few months for us to really get it to where we wanted it to go. And then the exciting thing is, once it started to really perform how we wanted it to perform, we could turn up the volume. When we started with Teddy, he had a very small – I think we had like 30 or 40 leads that he was allowed to work with. Once it really starts to work, you just crank up the volume. And now he works with somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 leads at any given time.
The perspective though with him is if I would have expected that we would have set it up, given it the data, and just let it run wild, that it was going to be immensely successful. We actually went into using it as saying this is going to fail. How do we learn from this? How do we make him or it work better? And that mindset of we need to coach him. We need to review what he’s doing. And we need to look at this differently than we’re not going to give him email templates to go send out. That’s just straight-up automation we’ve been doing for years.
Instead, we’re going to coach him on, “You did this well. You didn’t do this well.” We’re going to update the data, so he has the right accurate data to talk about. And that iterative cycle actually made him perform really well.
Now Mitch has gotten promoted. We’re hiring another BDR. We’re growing like crazy. He’s managing 1,500 to 1,800 leads. I’m not hiring any other BDRs but one, which is just a testament of the success that it has. And then on the recruiting side, obviously we know a few things about recruiting for what we’ve been doing for so long, but we had a lot of growth last year or the beginning of this year at the end of last year.
And we tell this story a lot because it’s so true that we had to hire 100 people in about 100 days. And that was in January through March. And we had to hire them because we had client contracts. And we also had just the general keeping up with what was going on with the business. Otherwise, we would have slowed growth.
And I think we’ve 4X’d, 4.5X’d ’24 to ’25. What we ended up doing is bringing on a recruiting agent which is leveraging Asymbl’s recruiter suite, leveraging Agentforce and connecting those two things to create this recruiting coordinator. And the recruiting coordinator was the same thing. What’s the job to be done? What’s the success criteria and all that? And recruiting has a really good example of this.
One of the things that’s common for agents to be doing now is scheduling interviews. And this gets into the whole motivation piece of maybe that’s great for your company, maybe that’s not. For a staffing firm specifically, scheduling an interview, that could be one of the most important parts of your process because that could be the only time you get to talk to that hiring manager.
Other use cases, scheduling an interview is like, “No, it’s just straight up. I don’t need to talk to the hiring manager. Let’s just automate this, and let’s try to make it as fast as possible.” But that goes into the motivation for what do you want this thing to do? So, we brought on the recruiter agent. It scheduled, pre-screened, and did interview feedbacks, and just helped us stay coordinated throughout the whole process. It helped us get to these 113 people or something hired in 94 days. It was crazy, but it worked. It was effective. We still use it.
And now we have things like Polly People Ops, where if you have any people ops questions, you can talk to Polly. She’ll tell you about your benefits. She’ll help you do this. We’ve got a lot of them. But it goes back to what I was saying is what are you trying to accomplish? If we would have just got out of the gate, tried to create a very complex use case, which we’ve seen some of the clients we’ve been talking to want to start with, “Well, we want to do the hardest things.” “Why? Let’s start with something that is straightforward that you deeply understand, that’s got a straightforward process. Get it going. Get the ROI. Believe in what you’re doing, and then build from there. Then you can be really successful pretty quickly.”
[0:14:57] David Folwell: Yeah, I love those stories. And also, I haven’t used the term digital worker until we’ve talked. And I think it makes a lot of sense to think about it from that perspective because we just launched an AI project recently, and the learning and the prompt engineering that goes into it, and the iterations that go into it. These aren’t things that you roll out of the box and work perfectly, unless somebody has spent the time to make it work perfectly for that jobs to be done. But even then, the nuances of your business, the interactions in terms of how you communicate, I think there’s probably a lot of things that it needs to learn still.
[0:15:29] Brandon Metcalf: – GPTs for years. It’s one of the reasons why we got so excited about all of this, is I’ve been building GPTs and ChatGPT since it came out. I have ChatGPT, I Claude, and I have Gemini. All of them function different, all of them to give me different interactions.
I was at an executive dinner in October, and there were CEOs, CIOs, and COOs of multi-billion-dollar companies. And it was a fun dinner, because I went around to everyone, and I’m like, “Tell me how you’re using AI and how your company’s using AI.” And the answers were astonishing, because a lot of people are still – even at that level, “I don’t use it. It’s for my team,” or, “We’re not really using it yet. We’re just trying to figure out what we need to do.”
There’s a general sense still of how do you take what’s been proven successfully on the consumer side and turn it into real tangible business results. It’s a fun time to help companies with it. But the GPTs are assistants. I spend hours each day working with the GPTs for productivity stuff that I’m working on that make me super-efficient.
[0:16:31] David Folwell: It’s insane. I’m in the Claude skills, the GPTs. I’m also going across all of them. I haven’t figured out the one that kind of – actually, we’re going to talk about this next, but the concept of workforce orchestration. And when I think about the AI agent orchestration, I recently read that when you have the multiple agents talking to each other, that they outpace any one agent in terms of the intelligence, which is I don’t know of a tool that does that well yet. I’m sure it’s out there. Probably haven’t found it, but yeah. How are you – you have the digital – was it the chief digital labor officer?
[0:17:05] Brandon Metcalf: Yep.
[0:17:05] David Folwell: How are you orchestrating all of these agents? What does the kind of concept of workforce orchestration look like when you’re moving towards operations where you have digital labor and also the human element as well?
[0:17:16] Brandon Metcalf: Yeah. And what we mean by workforce orchestration is the combination of human and digital together. And then you have what you were referencing is agent orchestration and all that. How do you get all the agents to work with each other?
What we found from how we’re doing this is a human has to manage it. A human has to know what good is, and what you’re looking for, and why you’re looking for that. And that’s such a critical step. The human in the loop. I don’t really love the phrasing, but the human managing the output of the workers, I think, is the right answer.
Shiv, our chief digital labor officer, the way he’s approached this is what’s the lowest hanging fruits? Where can he start? And then from there, going literally department by department, having conversations with the exec saying, “What are you trying to accomplish?” We just finished a 2026 planning, budgeting, and all of that. Everyone has big lofty goals, and everyone also has cost efficiencies that I’m driving throughout the year, including this 30% demand for productivity from digital workers. Everyone’s focused on how are we going to use this, but it varies across the group.
Engineering rolled out code assistance to help you write code and QA. QA was a simple one out of the gate to say how do we get QA elevated with digital workers. But we have them in marketing, we have them in sales. Sales is exciting. Agent for Sales, what used to be called Salescloud, the whole tool now is just making our whole sales process better and faster.
You have Teddy, the SDR, you have a sales coach, which that sales coach can not only be for coaching sales, but can also be coaching recruiters, which is what we’re seeing a lot of our clients start to use it for. We’re about to deploy our web agent, so he can interact with clients and actually do things for clients on our website. We have business analyst, Ben. He actually does the BA stuff for our services projects that we’re working on. It’s kind of all over the place with where we’re at.
And all of them are at different levels of sophistication. Some of them are still in school, some of them are graduated two-year associates, if you will, of like where they’re at from a sophistication standpoint. And then we also have the GPTs. And I’m in ChatGPT a lot. I’m starting to use Claude more. Our engineering team loves Claude. A lot of our company loves using Gemini and Notebook LLM, and all of that.
When you start to quantify this all together, what are you getting from using of these tools? And how do these tools actually elevate you to do work? It’s not straight-up technology like an ATS, or CRM, or marketing automation. This is thinking for you. It’s giving you data. It’s giving you information in a way that a human would to speed you up.
Shiv’s got a big job. He’s pretty confident he’s going to blow the 30% number out of the water. I’m actually confident he’s going to do that as well. And then the exciting thing for us is our clients get to take advantage of this. Everything we learn, we then distill back to clients. This is how we thought about it. This is what works. This is what doesn’t work for us.
Staffing clients really benefit from both the sales side of what we’ve done, but also the recruitment side. And then we also help them with a lot of the back-office stuff as well, as far as not like pay and bill stuff, but administration, and operations, and all those types of things.
[0:20:21] David Folwell: You’re truly doing the eat your own dog food, build the digital workers, use them, prove them out internally. And then when somebody comes to work with you, they get access to the ones that are relevant for them. Are they hiring those digital workers? How does that work?
[0:20:38] Brandon Metcalf: To your first point. Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how any company is going to market with products or services that help companies without actually doing this themselves. It’s taken us years of winning, and failing, and trying, and really figuring out every piece of technology works a little differently. It needs a different type of data. It needs to be architected a little bit differently, but it has to be coached a little bit differently.
The way we coach an Agentforce agent versus the way we coach a GPT, very different. And figuring out how to get the success out of them that you want requires a different type of coaching mechanism. That’s been fun. But really, we’re eating our own dog food faster than we thought we could do. We call it drinking our own champagne.
[0:21:26] David Folwell: A way better one than eating your own dog food.
[0:21:30] Brandon Metcalf: 90 or 100. And Shiv’s been on board, I don’t know, maybe seven months. Is super quick. But I just don’t see how we’d be successful helping our clients if we didn’t understand it.
[0:21:40] David Folwell: Yeah. Well, that’s great. From a practical sense, if an agency starts working with you, do they get access to all of the agents? Is it a SaaS model? I mean, I’m digging a little bit into the weeds here, but there’s a curiosity from my own perspective. How are you approaching giving people access to the digital workers?
[0:21:59] Brandon Metcalf: That’s a pretty broad topic, right? Because what type of digital work are you talking about? From us, from a product standpoint, what’s commercially available today is our recruiter agent. But what we do for clients is it’s not really just the focus on selling our digital workers. It’s the transformation. And that’s where we spend a lot of time with digital labor. And more of our digital workers will roll out, and they’ll be commercialized for our clients as we’re comfortable.
As I was saying, many of them are still in school. A couple of them are junior associates, if you will. When they get more seasoned, we will make them available like the recruiter agent, or we will recommend what you should use. We kind of only focus at the Salesforce ecosystem for both staffing and for corporations. A lot of the stuff we do is around Agentforce. But we do things outside of Agentforce as well that tie to it.
One of the biggest things we do is in Slack. Almost every single one of our digital workers is connected to Slack because that’s where we operate out of. That’s a hot tip, if you will, for folks is look at Slack, especially if you’re on teams. It’s just a different planet you’re playing on.
But to answer your question, the recruiter agents are available. But it’s really more helping companies make the transition of how do you get started? How do you not be overwhelmed? We just put out a big blog post about how do you measure ROI? Because it’s not measuring the implementation. That’s a technology project. It’s managing the actual output that you’re getting from your digital workers. And how do you quantify that?
It’s both the cost of what you’re spending on the technology, but it’s also the savings of not hiring additional human headcount, or speed, the pace at which you can move and produce. In staffing or recruiting, how fast can you go through 800 resumes? We just posted a VP of people ops, so we are still definitely hiring humans. We have 800 applicants in a week. How would you go through that efficiently when we only have one human recruiter? We use our recruiter agent and all of that to speed it up and to make it effective.
[0:24:00] David Folwell: And so when you are looking at the ROI, you’re looking at the here’s how long it would have taken a human in this example. Here’s how long would it have taken a human to do it. Here’s how long – we’ve compressed that process down to 10 minutes instead of 3 hours.
[0:24:13] Brandon Metcalf: That’s one layer. The other layer is how long did it take you to hire? Back to the recruiter example and 800 resumes, or in the beginning of the year when we had to hire 100 people. If I need to onboard additional recruiters to get them up to speed, I have to train them. I have to make sure they understand this. Three, six months to get someone fully up and running.
I’ve already trained a digital worker, and I need to increase capacity. I just turn it up. And the cost of turning on that capacity versus the cost of onboarding a new human and training them to do the exact same job the other person does doesn’t even equate. But then when you start looking at the organizational structure of your company and you start to take a more holistic approach of like, “Well, wait a second. Where else could digital workers actually provide this level of value?” Either by giving an uplift to the humans. I mean, maybe more of an assistant, or by taking on some jobs that really do humans need to do anymore with all the technology that we have available for sales prospecting. This will be a controversial take for staffing, I’m sure.
Why are you doing cold calling? It’s effective for some. It’s not effective for others. I will tell you, it’s almost impossible for me to pick up my phone and talk to any of the solicitors that are calling me. Because now with the iPhone, it screens them out. I send them to voicemail. I don’t look at the voicemails. You’re never going to get me on the phone. However, the people that get through to me must be leveraging technology or maybe digital workers to find a different way to connect with me.
And I think if you look at the business, your business holistically, are you really leveraging technology overall and the way that it should be used now? And that includes your workforce. Is your workforce really set up for what we’re up to now?
[0:25:55] David Folwell: Yeah. And I’m going to kind of jump back to one of the topics that we just touched on earlier was the concept of human in the loop and managing these digital workers. What does that actually look like day-to-day?
[0:26:08] Brandon Metcalf: It depends. I didn’t answer your question either about do you hire them or not. And it just depends. I mean, managing a good GPT, I have to constantly coach my GPT. It’s getting better, but I continuously coach it. And Gemini, I’m not exactly thrilled with because I can’t personalize it like I can Claude or ChatGPT. And Gemini and I are having this constant conversation. I’m like, “Have they made that available yet?”
And hiring a digital worker can be as simple as giving someone access to a GPT if they want it as an assistant, or it could be very complex of like, “Okay, we’re going to bring on an SDR agent.” And we need to fully train it, and get it set up, and give it the data, and test it, and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. It really is across the board. But it’s funny you say it that way because, internally, that’s how we actually talk about it.
And when we’re doing headcount planning, we’re not just planning for humans, we’re planning for digital workers as well to augment this. There’s a whole process that we go through with it. But the management piece is really dependent on the technology. And then some of the technology is more complicated than others. And that might be where you start as well when you start to think about you’ve identified the job you want to be done, you’ve identified the workflow for that job, you’ve identified the success criteria for what will make that worker successful. Example, going back to should it schedule interviews? Should it not schedule interviews? Things like that.
And then as you’re starting to think about what I call the plumbing of how do you set this all up? Part of that’s also to think about, “Well, how do we coach it?” Can we coach it? Do we need a third party to help us coach it? Can that third party help us coach it and then teach us how to coach it? Or is it hands off, someone else needs to coach it fully? And then come up with your strategy.
And then the third part of that is ongoing consistency with the coaching. And the coaching is both telling it it’s doing a good job or a bad job, and giving it real reasons as to why, just like you would a human. But it’s also making sure it’s feeding the data, so it has the right data. The data is up-to-date. The data makes sense for it. It’s not getting confused where a lot of people are feeding it different types of data, and now it doesn’t know what’s up. There’s a strategy around all of it. But once you have it set up and you have the guardrails put around it for how you’re going to control it, how you’re going to manage it, how you’re going to coach it, the process gets a lot faster, and that’s where you start to see a lot of the efficiency gains.
[0:28:20] David Folwell: Yeah, it is amazing the nuances in this. I am at a level now where I’m – or obsession might be a better word, where I’m updating my personalized instructions in Claude on a weekly basis. I’m going in and looking at where am I at? What’s changed since last time I talked? And how am I going to have it guide me through this week? Help be a better assistant each week. And I also have the frustration on Gemini, even though the deep research is good.
[0:28:48] Brandon Metcalf: I play the three against each other, right? Especially if I’m working on something meaty, I will have ChatGPT give one – and all that. And they all come back, and they all have a different flavor. And then I tell each of them to analyze the other one. And as much as that sounds like a lot of work, all of the work that that’s doing would have taken me days.
[0:29:06] David Folwell: Yes.
[0:29:06] Brandon Metcalf: I’m doing it in a matter of an hour. For me, that’s like incredibly efficient. And even looking at cap tables, and funding rounds, and financing, and all of this, and help me make sense of this noise, I get answers faster than I’ve ever gotten them before.
[0:29:21] David Folwell: Yeah. It speeds things up so incredibly with that. The team that you’re hiring now and managing people who are managing the digital workers, what are the skills that you see them needing to develop that maybe weren’t part of it previously?
[0:29:37] Brandon Metcalf: One of the biggest things we look for is the interest of learning. Not everyone needs to be an expert on all things AI. That’s not what we’re after. But we want to have folks that are interested in learning and developing and growing, especially as we think the world of work has officially changed. We’re not waiting for this new technology. It’s here. And those who don’t embrace it now are going to be quickly outpaced. And that doesn’t matter what size company you are. You can be a three-person company competing with a billion-dollar company if you know how to play some of this stuff in the right space.
We look at that. And then we’re going more specialized overall of we want depth of experience in the categories or the areas that they’re being hired for, because we need the human level of experience to be able to tell the digital workers what’s good and what’s not good. The managers we’re hiring, the senior-level folks, they’re tasked with helping make these digital workers better.
That doesn’t mean we’re not hiring junior-level people, but junior-level people we hire, like the new BDR that we’re actively recruiting for right now, their job is going to be expected to manage Teddy and figuring out how to coach Teddy. And what that does for a junior-level BDR, which would be similar to a recruiter, some entry-level recruiter, is they really have to figure out what our products are, what our services are, what’s our differentiation, why we’re different, what makes us better, where we’re weak at, who our competitors are, who buys our products, what makes them successful. All of that core information, the new human BDR has to deeply understand because he or she has to coach Teddy on making sure that Teddy’s doing a good job.
Now, the flip side, Teddy’s already been coached. Teddy has a really good idea how to talk about all this stuff. The human BDR can actually look at Teddy and say, “How would you say this? How would you talk about this?” to elevate. So, now we can use the human SDR to do more strategic type outreach. Maybe we have a specific account we want to target. Maybe we want to go test the waters in a new industry. All of that we can do because we have Teddy again working with 1,500 to 1,800 leads at any given time. So the pipeline’s still coming in. Yeah.
[0:31:44] David Folwell: What does the future look like, do you think, for humans managing AI in the future? Are we ending up being the button pushers for the AI? What is that?
[0:31:54] Brandon Metcalf: I mean, I live in Austin, Texas, so we literally have robots walking down the streets. And I have Teslas that look just like Teslas that are self-driving and all that happening.
[0:32:02] David Folwell: We’re getting Waymo here next month, I think.
[0:32:04] Brandon Metcalf: Yeah, Waymos are everywhere. They’re pretty fun. I’ve never been able to get one because I don’t know if I’m going too far or whatever, but I’ve never gotten one here. I’ve been in one in San Francisco. I think there is a bit of fear, which is understandable. Where does this go? And what are the guardrails that are really put in as to what it can do and what it can’t do? It’s learning really, really quickly.
I will tell you, I don’t have a robot sitting in my office pressing buttons today. And I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But I do think like every industrial revolution, the world will change. Work has changed. How far it goes to the sci-fi stuff that we grew up on seeing? I don’t know. But I don’t think you can put Genie back in the bottle. And I think embracing it, learning it, and figuring out how it works and why it works the way it does, especially in a business context, puts you in a much better position than avoiding it because you don’t understand it, you don’t want to think about it because you’re going to have a hard time competing with other companies that are embracing it. I don’t have a better answer than that.
[0:33:09] David Folwell: Yeah, I think that’s the reality. I had somebody on the podcast a couple weeks ago, Cary Daniel with Nextaff, and he was talking about how it’s like, “Yeah, I will be the first to say that we could be staffing robots at some point.” That could be a thing where you’re like I need the human – I want these people to help with this. I want the robots to come in here and do this, things like that. There’s a world where not only just on the digital front, but on the physical front, well, we’re moving towards at some point.
[0:33:32] Brandon Metcalf: I mean, look at Amazon. I mean, all of their warehouses are pretty much mostly robots. But it’s also like – I always give the analogy of, well, what happened when cars came out? We replaced horses. This is different because this is intelligence, and this can think, and this can actually try to act like us. And it can educate itself, if you will. So, there is a difference. But we have to adapt.
[0:33:57] David Folwell: Yeah. Well, and I know you’ve talked about this a few times. I couldn’t agree more that adapting to the market is, I think, the only path at this point, about a change that’s about to happen.
[0:34:07] Brandon Metcalf: But also not wasting a bunch of money, which is the conversation I was having about I don’t see how you hire a firm that hasn’t actually lived or is living this themselves to help you. Because there is a lot of agent washing and a lot of you should do it this way, and these slap an agent quick starts in the services world. If they’re not actually using the technology, you’re going to waste 10, 15, 20 grand and be super, super frustrated, which is more of a crime in my opinion than wasting the money on trying to get it set up.
Go into it knowing that it’s probably going to fail the first few times. Going to have to learn. But what’s the roadmap? What’s the plan to teach it to bring it on this journey and find a partner that actually gets that? Because the frustration doesn’t have to be the frustration. The frustration can be like, “Great, I hired this college graduate who has no concept of business, but is a college graduate and has a degree and has some real education behind them.” A lot of the agents are digital workers. It’s kind of the same thing.
[0:35:06] David Folwell: Yeah. I think that, again, just a good way of looking at it, because the amount of time it takes to get it to where it needs to be, depending on what agent it is. There is training. There’s a lot of training, there’s handholding, there’s educating, especially to get it to align with your business.
[0:35:20] Brandon Metcalf: I get asked a lot, “When should I start?” “You should start now.” But you don’t have to boil the ocean. Talk to someone that can help you figure out where’s a good entry point. Maybe you want to start with GPTs. Maybe you want to start with an agent. But what are you trying to accomplish in the business? What level of experience and acumen does your company have with this type of technology? What level of interest does your company have? And use that as a barometer to say how fast and deep you go.
[0:35:48] David Folwell: Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And one of the things that you had mentioned, and I believe strongly, but you’ve talked about how the staffing firms that do figure this out are going to win a lot of market share, regardless of the size. And I think that’s one of the things. I mean, we’ve heard, I think, Sam Altman, or one of them. They’re all predicting that there’s going to be a billion-dollar one-to-three-person company in the next 2 years, which is an insane thought. But they are going to be surrounded by agents doing all of the tasks that humans would normally do. What do you think maybe three years, five years from now, what does that look like for a staffing agency?
[0:36:23] Brandon Metcalf: Yeah. I mean, three to five years, and the level of pace that everything – is a bold guess. I think the biggest thing over the next three years is going to be people actually understanding what to do and getting started and getting going with it. Just like any major industrial revolution, the change takes time, the confidence takes time, the know-how takes time. Everyone’s waiting to hear more and more customer success stories. Those customer success stories take time because people are actually implementing it now, deploying it. But they’re – guess what? Coaching it now, teaching it now. It’s starting to figure things out. We’ve been doing this for a couple years, which is why we can tell a story now of what we’ve been able to do.
What I see happening, I think, for the staffing industry is the ability to move much faster and the ability to break the dependency on legacy systems. The way you find candidates, I think, fundamentally changes. It’s no longer just about matching a resume to a job, which has never worked in the first place. It’s always been a crappy experience because resumes aren’t written well, and job descriptions aren’t written well. And then you have this technology that doesn’t really understand what each of them are saying.
Now you can look at what’s on the resume, what’s on the job, what’s your history with the candidate, how many phone calls have you made, did they pick up the phone, what’s said in the conversation, do they answer emails, do they turn time sheets on time, do they get called back, do they get extended? All of the holy grail stuff that every staffing firm has ever wanted, that data exists.
And this is really where the power of your ATS or your recruitment system comes in, as well as the CRM. All of that data that you’ve never really been able to use to make the business move faster. It’s always just been either a reference point, or a way to make sure the team is doing what the team is supposed to be doing, or to figure out where you’re at in the cycle for a placement.
Imagine all of that now can actually help you identify candidates faster. And by the way, you don’t necessarily have to have a recruiter doing that. The system can just tell you. The digital worker could tell you. And then depending where you want to go with the digital worker, maybe it connects with the candidate for you or connects with the client. This is where it starts to change.
And the staffing industry, I think, is a perfect use case for all of this. Because almost everything we do now – when I started in staffing, this wasn’t true. But everything we do now is digital. I used to sit next to the fax machine at Kelly Services waiting for the fax for the job description or the resume to come in. Those days are gone. But everything we do is digital. And it’s all about the interpersonal interactions with humans. That is the prime use case for this type of technology.
I think the companies who start now, even if it’s a small use case, if they start now in December of 2025, by December of 2026, they will probably have a good dozen or so digital workers doing different things. And it’d be interesting to see the rate of the ROI they’re getting. For us to save $5 million in really what was our first year of truly embracing this is incredible. Next year that number is going to be a lot bigger. And our revenue would not be growing the way it is if we weren’t embracing this because we don’t have the team. We have 180 people today. We would need probably three to 400 people to do what we do today if we didn’t have this. Staffing is a great example of that because you can hire really, really talented people who are specialists who don’t want to do all the administrative stuff. Let them be great at what they do, and then turn up the volume on the admin stuff.
[0:39:49] David Folwell: Yeah. I also think – just to add to that, a thought and question, but is the value chain for staffing, I feel it’s changing so drastically right now.
[0:39:58] Brandon Metcalf: I think it’s going to be elevated. And this is a big part for us with workforce orchestration. It’s not just the digital labor piece. That’s just to augment the human piece, it’s to make humans more effective. And finding humans that are these specialists that have the real talent of what you’re specifically looking for, it’s going to get harder, especially with the reskilling that needs to happen with most of the labor force to understand how to manage this technology and use it. But to find those needles in the haystack, I think the technology will speed up. But it’s still how do you convince them?
We’ve hired a lot of people, and we’re getting some really killer executives to join our team. How do you do that? What’s the story you’re going to tell? Why you over somewhere else? Because the need for the talent is going to increase, but the competitiveness to attract the talent is also going to increase.
[0:40:50] David Folwell: Yeah. And it sounds like when you’re bringing the top executives on, are you putting them through internal AI-first training? Do you have your own –
[0:41:00] Brandon Metcalf: I wish we were that sophisticated. Their AI-first training is here you go. Here’s the one we’re using today. Think about how you want to do your job. By the way, if we’re going to hire someone, I’m going to want to know why this needs to be a human, and why this can’t be a digital one, or what’s the hybrid approach? Also, here’s your budget. And digital labor is a big part of your budget. So, figure out how you’re going to use it. We’re hiring some pretty senior execs that it’s not a difficult concept for them to grasp what we’re trying to do, but fun to see them learn and adapt to what we’re doing. And then you just see the light bulb go off and then go bananas with it.
[0:41:37] David Folwell: Yeah. It is fun when you see that happen for anybody on the team. For the listeners, any staffing agencies that are listening to this, any suggestions on the first move, smallest – I mean, getting started obviously is important in terms of learning, understanding it. Any low-risk ways to do that or places where you feel like if you were a staffing agency owner, you’d be like, “All right, let’s go do this today.”
[0:41:58] Brandon Metcalf: The first step I would say for anyone is to have a conversation with a firm that knows what they’re doing with it that can give you some guidance of where should you start? The lowest risk is bringing on like a GPT. That may not be the right value for you. Figuring out like where is this entry point after you get some understanding of what can be done and why.
Honestly, and this might be weird coming from a technology provider, it’s less about the platform. It’s less about the system that you’re using. And it’s more about what you’re trying to accomplish. Because not everything is going to just be bolted on to the system that you use. There’s other things. ChatGPT, I use a lot. It’s not tied to any of my systems. But I also have ChatGPT connected to my systems and the agents as well. I’ve got two prongs there. But it depends on what you’re trying to do.
And again, how do you get to the point where you are seeing value, meaningful value, not just like, “Oh, yeah, it’s pretty cool it did this.” No, it’s actually producing real value. And how do you build on that? I think first step is a conversation with a firm that understands what they’re doing, how it’s working, doing it themselves that can give you some guidance. And then from there, you figure out where do you want to start. And that firm should be able to help you understand.
This is one of the core things that we do is let’s just have a conversation why you think you need to use this. And do you think you need to use this just because everyone else is doing it? Okay. Well, let’s talk about what’s some real value you could get. Or there’s a lot of companies that say, “I want an SDR agent, and I want it up and running in 30 days.” My first question is, why do you want it up and running in 30 days? What is this 30-day thing? Tell me.
Then we get into the conversation and uncover, well, everyone else is telling me I can have it in 30 days. I’m like, you could. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective. That type of conversation with a firm to help you conceptualize. And then from there, you may not need to use that firm to move the next steps, or you may. But at least then you have a game plan and an understanding of how to do this.
[0:43:53] David Folwell: Yeah, that’s great advice. And it is one of those things that you get into, and the learning is where the value comes from it. It’s a lot of iterations to get to value creation. Are there any final thoughts or closing comments that you’d like to share with the audience today?
[0:44:07] Brandon Metcalf: No. I mean, it’s exciting. It literally will dramatically change your business. It has ours. I mean, we launched the business in January of ’23. And for us to be where we’re at in December of ’25 with the goals that we have that we’re confident we’re going to hit in ’26, ’27 to ’28, there is no earthly way we would have been able to do this if we wouldn’t embrace it.
But at the same time, you got to be realistic of there’s going to be failures, there’s going to be setbacks. Now, luckily, we’re starting to see where companies have gone awry. And you’re seeing a lot like the MIT article about the 95% of agency fail. That’s because they slapped an agent on it. They didn’t put it in the workforce. Just have more conversations. I think SIA has done a really good job with bringing out the conference, the Collaboration Acts Conference that they did this year. I think that was immensely helpful.
I think there’s some really, really smart people in staffing, especially technologists that need to be balanced in with what is the workforce outcome you’re trying to deliver. And when those two things align, which we’re starting to see in a lot of different companies, the acceleration is going to be huge. I’m excited to hear the work that Adecco is doing. They’re doing a lot with AI and our potential and all the other stuff. So, the industry is going to get really interesting.
[0:45:21] David Folwell: And it’s going to be a fun few years. Well, Brandon, I really enjoyed this conversation. Some really great thoughts on AI. Thanks so much for joining today.
[0:45:27] Brandon Metcalf: Thanks for having me.
