Today’s guest is a bold thinker and future-focused leader reimagining how staffing works. In this episode of The Staffing Show, Justin Clarke, founder and CEO of F|Staff, joins us to share how he built the industry’s first two-sided open marketplace for on-demand staffing and why reducing friction is key to the future of work. He reflects on the industry’s “garage full of tools,” the shift from AI twins to AI agents that help humans work smarter, and the evolving role of human-in-the-loop automation. Justin also explores the future of trucking automation, why culture matching matters as much as skills, and how personal loss inspired him to launch The Honey Foundation and foster a culture of kindness. Tune in for a forward-looking conversation about direct sourcing, collaboration, and building a staffing industry that works better for everyone.
[0:01:14] DF: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I’m super excited to be joined by Justin Clarke, who is the Founder and CEO of F|Staff, which is the industry’s first two-sided open marketplace for on-demand staffing. Justin started his company at just 19-years-old with one mission: to help people find meaningful work, especially the CDL truck drivers who keep our country moving. He quickly realized the traditional staffing model was broken, buried in paper and outdated processes. He got to work pioneering tech-first solutions before the industry even knew it needed them.
From early ATS adoption to being the first to deploy app-based staffing, now known as Avionté 24/7, Justin and F|Staff have led the charge in revolutionizing how workers and employers connect with zero friction and maximum efficiency. He’s a bold thinker, a future-focused leader, and a voice to where the industry is headed, especially as AI and automation redefine the future of work.
Outside the boardroom, Justin has served on the Arizona Trucking Association’s Board of Directors and is the Founder of The Honey Foundation, a kindness movement born from personal loss, and an active contributor and speaker for the staffing industry. He’s also a golf lover, a foodie, a traveler, a husband of 20 years running, and a dad to two amazing teens. Justin, super excited to have you back on the show. Always good to see your face.
[0:02:44] JC: Woo. Yeah, and I appreciate that. That was an intro, for sure. I appreciate that. It reminds me that we’ve come so far in the industry. But, yeah, I appreciate the intro and I am really excited to be here with you, David.
[0:02:55] DF: Always. I always enjoy our conversations. I feel like I walk away and learn, just a little bit smarter every time. I know one of the things you and I have talked about is how much staffing has changed over the years. You’ve been in it since 2008. Is that a starting year?
[0:03:09] JC: 2001. 2008 was really our tech revolution. But I started the company in 2001 at 19. We’re walking all the way back to rocks and paper, for sure, right?
[0:03:21] DF: Yeah. I know you, last time you were on the show, we went deep into having the “aha” moments. We’ve just seen all of the paper and be like, what is this? What are some of the big shifts you’ve seen? You can dig into that a little bit if there’s anything else. I just want to understand what’s the arc that you’re seeing right now.
[0:03:38] JC: Right. It has been overwhelming to keep up on the level and number of tools that are available. Just the number of vendors inside of each one of these spaces, but I’ll just name a few things that the staffing industry has seen, since, really, the tech revolution has taken over from paper applications and telephone calls. But we have CRM, we have ATS, we have VMS, we got TMS, we got LMS, HRIS, APIs, AI, HRs and RBIs. No, I’m just kidding. The last one’s baseball. That was not it, right, for sure.
We have so many tools, right? I feel, it’s starting to feel like my garage at the house, right? I have so many tools inside of that garage. I can tell you that I don’t know how to use very many of them at all. I feel like as CEOs of staffing agencies, that’s what we’re inundated with, right? We know what house we live in, we can get in and out of it, we definitely have added tools, we have more capabilities, but we haven’t yet even trained ourselves, yet our people on how to leverage those tools appropriately. That’s where I feel we’re at now, but we’ve been dealing with a lot. We’ve just been getting really inundated with a lot of really cool tools that are fantastic if integrated properly that they have provided an ROI for staffing companies. But in general, we have a garage full of tools and we need to figure out which ones really work for us at this point now. That’s where we’re at.
[0:05:05] DF: Yeah. I mean, I think with the AI making it so easy to build, the overwhelm of options and tools and software, and software that looks amazing. There’s no platforms out there at any given time… I probably have five to 15 pilots of something running. I’m like, got to remember to cancel. I’m not the best at that, but I’m working on it.
[0:05:27] JC: Exactly.
[0:05:28] DF: I’ve got to check out the new stuff. How are you approaching that? What’s your take on making sure you are getting the ROI and the tools, or what you need? I know you’ve been an early adopter on a lot of fronts. How are you handling this new world, where there’s just the full overwhelm at this point?
[0:05:43] JC: Yeah. What makes us different at F|Staff, I think, it’s really always our future forward mindset in that we’re really trying to think about things way ahead of product development, which means that times, we’ve had to create our own software and we’ve had to write our own stuff. There were really not shelf-ready available tools. Then now as the industries continue to mature, there are more shelf stable software tools available. As you mentioned, there’s also now future capabilities coming with AI and being able to build out your own unique tools, or tool sets that you want inside your company.
I think it’s exciting to see how we’re going to leverage the tools of the past. Are they going to just sit in the garage and they’re nice and shiny? Are we going to bring them out and remember how to use those tools, so we can continue to, I would say, improve human evolution and that we can do more with less time.
[0:06:34] DF: Yeah. Absolutely. I know one of the areas that you and I talked about a little bit was the, it’s hard to not have a podcast, or a conversation about AI a little bit if you’re an early adopter. We talked about AI agents, the concept of digital twins and the whole human in the loop. I know the digital twins is the concept that I’ve gotten excited about, hearing more about. I think you had some perspective on that. I’d love to hear how you were thinking about AI and its role in staffing right now.
[0:06:59] JC: Yeah. For me, it’s like, how did we use to think about it, and then how do we think about it today, right? Where we’re starting to see things come to life now. How we used to think about it was about AI twinning is really, was the whole concept. We were going to really train AI bots to do what the human did and be able to then 10X that outcome. Let’s take in the staffing industry a unique period of time, just like the recruiter screening an applicant and having that conversation, being able to be documented more clearly and done by an AI bot, instead of a recruiter. That was a test we’ve done early. We did that a couple of years ago, where we started looking at, again, human twinning with AI twins. Again, it worked really well, but I think that it also created another flow of friction and problems downhill that we weren’t really predicting.
Again, the way we thought about things before was AI twins. We would start to just replace certain human actions with twins and then we would add on new things that the humans would be doing. We are definitely thinking differently about that now. We’re thinking absolutely more along the lines of AI agents and really creating custom AI agents for each individual inside of a corporation, organization, community, etc., where that agent is super helpful in doing the redundant tasks that humans really don’t like doing and/or forget many times. Like, just recording a note, or capturing certain information from a conversation. We as humans only capture just a small percentage of what we’ll have in the conversation and AI tool sets will actually capture 100% of it, evaluate it, analyze it, summarize it, capture it inside of the detail and be able to leverage it down the road. That is a huge powerful addition to a human being.
That’s what we’re really looking at building now is agents that help the human being do a lot more faster and again, eliminate the redundant tasks that are in the way of doing more productive tasks.
[0:08:56] DF: Yeah, it is funny, because I feel the initial thoughts are, “Well, AI is going to take everybody’s jobs.” But in every automation cycle that we’ve had, everybody thinks that whatever technology is coming out is going to replace all of the humans. Then we find, well, it actually can’t do all of it and then we figure out where do humans fit into this and what does it take off of the human’s plate? The term I keep hearing is the human in the loop, which is where we’re moving, at least in the near term. You’ve had some interesting concepts around that, specifically on the CDL side as well, because I think right now when we look at the driverless trucks and where the world’s going from that perspective. I’d love to know how you see that playing out and where do you see value operation on that front as well.
[0:09:37] JC: Yeah. The human in the loop, if anybody’s not really heard that, that’s really just a concept. Again, it’s always keeping a human being inside of this automation process to ensure that the outcomes are what we want as humans, because AI agents might identify that they should continue to keep going down a process, where humans would identify that there’s enough water in this bucket, we don’t need any more water and we need to make sure that we are setting up guardrails. Then, retraining our agents, how to continue to interact.
That’s the whole idea is blending things together. In the world of trucking automation, we are starting to see some companies running some long-haul operations successfully with autonomous big trucks, right? You have this really big rig truck, 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight, combined gross vehicle weight with everything in the trailer and the truck and everything combined, and it is being driven by a computer, right? All of the motions and interactions, the braking, the acceleration, the turning, everything is controlled in this form. While that’s so great and somewhat scary for people on the road to understand and determine what is that risk, venture to say that a tired, restless driver on the road, an intoxicated driver on the road, a distracted driver on the road is probably, and we’ll determine that based on the data and research over time.
I believe that what we will prove to ourselves is that humans are much more dangerous on the road than autonomous vehicles. Then, again, it may take us 10, or 15, 20 years to really trust the research to determine that, but eventually, we will have autonomous trucks. One of the things that I talked about is autonomous trucks are great, but eventually, they will need human engagement, human involvement, right? A truck might be able to make 99% of its route and then it gets to the final delivery zone and there is a blue Honda in its way that it did not predict, can’t identify, and the truck will be smart enough to know not to run into the blue Honda, but it won’t be able to move the blue Honda, right?
It will absolutely need human engagement and human involvement to either get in the truck and then navigate the truck to a premier destination, wherever it might be better to put the trailer truck, and/or get a human to move the blue Honda, right? There is definitely going to be human involvement in our world of automation. Then, as you mentioned there is going to be job loss in one area, but there is going to be job gains in so many more areas, where we are going to need human coaching of robotics, human coaching of automation, human involvement or human in the loop.
Yeah. That is absolutely what we are thinking and building for the future is making sure that our technologies and the access to our candidate pool is directly available to the truck eventually, right? So that the truck can actually communicate and order and request the human’s help when the machine needs it. It is quite the evolution of moving from the 90s, where we didn’t really even have any Internet technology. We were using people and libraries to get information. Then moving to the age of receiving information on the Internet, right? Then, now being able to actually tell an AI agent stuff that you need help with and be able to get some really great guidance and then the next leap forward is these agents are going to be demanding help from humans, right?
The next evolution that we will run through will be, how are we helping machines evolve and then how as humans are we evolving in that new world. Quite a future that we really can’t predict the timing on, but it’s exciting to see the level of change. I’m excited about it. I tend to be very optimistic about the future of human beings and what we’re capable of, and I think that these new tech advancements will help increase our human capability in the end and being able to do just even greater things faster. I’m excited for that future. I don’t like slow futures. I like things that go fast. This is an exciting time for me.
[0:13:21] DF: It’s really funny to think about getting a text, or a call from your truck, something. Like, “Oh, the truck’s calling me. I got to go do – I got to go work for the truck. I got to go help it out.” I do feel like, that’s where a lot of these things are going is we’re going to have guard rails in place to make sure that they’re getting humans involved when needed. What are some of the things – you’re talking about one use case where you think humans are going to still be needed when things get a little bit overly complex. What are some other areas where you feel like technology can’t do it and why is that so critical from a staffing perspective?
[0:13:54] JC: Yes. Human creativity is going to be really important, I think, in this future. I’ve talked about this for probably at least a decade now, about people in tech work best together. That’s what we want to work towards is this future, people in tech working best together. Again, you got to get the tools off the shelf and use them to actually apply that next future. As I’ve been looking at what all the things that tech can do and trying to identify what the future of humans looks like, I’ve looked at three areas that I can identify that tech really needs human involvement.
Number one, it’s technology cannot tell a story. It can bring stories together, it can bring everything it’s known previously and then create a new story in that sense, right? But it can’t innovatively create a brand-new story, right? Has a real hard time with that. I’ve tried to test it even just with poetry writing. It struggles with complex arrangement of words in a creative form. It doesn’t work well with that. It just struggles there. Tech really can’t solve problems that it isn’t already trained to solve. It can solve tests that human beings aren’t even capable of solving, but we have arranged that test already for the computer module to solve. Tech really has a hard time solving new problems, or even creating the problem necessarily that it should be solving.
It doesn’t process live, new information really well. It’s real-time information. It’s being in real-time, but it is not present future. It’s active past. Then the biggest one that I tell people that tech will really never be able to do well is provide the human empathy that we give each other. It will never give you a hug in the same way that a human being can give you a hug, you can receive a hug. That love is just never going to be present in a machine. Then, that’s also then why humans are important. If the human race is going to be present, I believe love is the most important thing that we can continue to provide each other, give to each other, and remember that machines can’t apply that. Only humans can.
[0:15:56] DF: Yeah. It feels like, the more technology we bring on, the more human connection element is the differentiator, right? Really, see somebody having had that connection that you and I would connect to each other right now. Something that cannot be replicated from AI.
What are some of the things that the staffing leaders that are listening to this, what are some of the mindset shifts that you think they need to make in terms of, to stay relevant as we move through this AI progression? I know there’s a lot of unknowns, so it’s hard to know exactly what that looks like, but any forecast?
[0:16:27] JC: I would absolutely say, every staffing leader in the space right now is to stop being scared. That’s a trend that’s been present inside of staffing agencies and our models for years. We always have some secret door that you’ve got to open up to get access to a job. Or you have to call a special recruiter’s phone to be able to get the opportunity. A client sometimes isn’t served the way they need to be, but I believe we need to open our doors. I think we need to be really resilient through cooperation with each other and we can’t be scared, right? That’s the number one thing I would tell every leader is stop being scared. You won’t sail very far with fear driving your ship. You need to be focused on what you can do and not what you’re scared of.
[0:17:10] DF: Yeah. I feel like you always are approaching the industry and collaborating in a way that many don’t. What are some of the approaches that you’re taking to not be frozen from the AI that’s going to take over everything? What are some things that you’re doing that maybe are a little bit different to make sure you’re approaching the industry correctly?
[0:17:29] JC: Yeah. I believe in direct sourcing. I believe in getting my clients access to our candidates. I believe in giving our workers access to the jobs on demand. In real time, I don’t want to be any point of friction in the way of these people, our customers getting what they need as fast as they need it. I think it’s really pathetic, honestly, as an industry veteran back 25 years ago now when we started that everything was driven around us. It’s almost like we always put ourselves first in the staffing industry. Realistically, it should be the worker first, the customer second, and us third in the equation of how do we succeed together. It’s a fun world that we live in in staffing, but I do believe that leaders need to think a little differently.
[0:18:16] DF: Yeah. Actually, I remember, I don’t know if this was on the podcast, or if this was just a one-on-one conversation with you, but I was like, how do you measure success about me? If I just type, how long does it take you from point A to point B in the process? No. I’ve heard you go from apply to on the job. Have the least amount of friction.
[0:18:33] JC: If you can look forward and you can see the island that you want to get to, and you can really paint that pictures clearly for your people as possible and make sure that everybody is onboard and wants to go there, then it’s just puddles in the water, dude. Let’s go, and let’s go as fast as we can. What I would inspire all of our staffing industry leaders to do is let’s collaborate, let’s ask each other questions, let’s share information with each other, and what works and what doesn’t work, so that we can all really take care of the number one customer, our workers, getting everything that they need, because the future is going to continue to be hard to find quality employment as fast as you want it, and putting food on the tables of the people that we serve, I think, is our number one obligation in the industry, right? We have to be thinking about that.
[0:19:21] DF: Yeah, it’s actually sparked a thought that I haven’t applied to the staffing industry, and the software is a service world, or the SaaS world. Frequently talked about time to value. You’re supposed to measure from day one to the actual moment that somebody sees real value, what is that duration, and how do you shorten that as much as possible? In the staffing industry, we talk about a good candidate experience, but it’s how long does – how many conversations does your client need to have with you before they see that? How much effort does your candidate need to have with you before they actually see value as well? It can be an interesting metric to consider in the staffing space, so I’ve never sparked that there.
[0:19:59] JC: Yeah, we think about that a lot, and we track the touch points that a driver applicant has to go through until they get hired. It’s mapped on a process on our back wall. I mean, we’re always thinking about how do we reduce that, so we can make it faster for them to get through that process.
[0:20:13] DF: That’s amazing. What are some of the opportunities in terms of how you’re using AI today, or how you would recommend others using AI to augment staffing? I know you’ve talked about a couple different use cases already, but are there any big wins, or things to avoid, things that you’re like, “You know what? We tried it, didn’t go quite as planned, lesson learned.”
[0:20:34] JC: I’ll tell you this, I love thinking forward a lot. You know that, David, right? I’ll tell you, I’d like to see where things could go too, right? If there’s anybody listening that really cares about the future of the worker and what’s necessary. In staffing generally, and this is across the board, we match our workers to the skills that our clients are demanding, right? We also match a worker to a logo, because that’s attractive to the worker sometimes, because they are attracted to a brand. There’s a lot of reasons why a worker would want to go to work for a client, could be paid, could be benefits, could be all of these reasons, why they go to work there. I can promise you, I know the number one reason why a worker leaves, and it’s not the logo, it’s not the pay, it’s not the benefits, it’s not the name of the company, it’s the last name of their manager, or co-worker who pissed him off so much that they just couldn’t take it anymore and they are off and running. That is the reason why relationships fail inside of corporations.
It’s not because they don’t have the skills to survive, it’s because there’s a mismatch somewhere else. What solution I would like to see in the future of staffing is that we don’t just match to skills, we match to culture, and we match to the culture of the people that this individual worker will now work with. I think it’s important to know, if this new worker is an NFL football fan and their favorite team is the Raiders, that’s very important to note, so that they can understand that that is going to be a match inside of the culture of the workplace that we’re presenting. That’s just one example, right?
We can now look deeper into the social profiles of a manager, and just drag out attributes that then we can match over to the worker candidate profiles. If we do that effectively, we can truly match workers and managers in a way where they will just be so excited to work with each other, the success metrics on hires will go up, people will be happier at work and I think that’s all good things, right? I don’t want to match workers, because they have the right skills to match to the job. I would rather match the worker, because they match the culture of the workplace, the individuals that make up that culture and not just to put them to work at that company.
[0:22:56] DF: I think that is insanely forward thinking and also really smart. It’s interesting to think about corporate HR, there was a value-based hiring as a thing. Even then, I think they’re not often, I’m sure the manager is thinking about, “Who I’m going to hire.” Spend a lot more time on it. In staffing, a lot of times I think people are just going to still have a little bit of the butts in seats mentality sometimes, and partially, because of the time and effort that comes along with trying to do something like that. One of the best uses for AI is compressing the process that you couldn’t do normally. It’s like, this takes a human –
[0:23:26] JC: Way too long.
[0:23:27] DF: I don’t have the bandwidth to do that, but filtering through unstructured data is AI is fantastic at. It’s a great forward-looking thought. With that, we’re going to change gears a little bit from the AI talk that I was jumping to, and I want to talk a little bit about, we’ve had some major losses in the staff industry recently. We had Rishabh Mehrotra from Avionté, who was just a great person and a great leader, and I know you’ve had some personal stories in terms of turning tragedy into triumph, like in your background. You and I have talked about this off the podcast about your brother. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about what that experience is and your personal story?
[0:24:04] JC: Yeah. It really moved me in a whole new direction, right? I am an identical twin. At the time, it was 29 years, and it’s how old we were at the time of his passing in 2011. Backing up to that, he was actually my business partner. He and I bought our first house together. We were extremely close in our professional lives and our personal lives, and he was my best friend. You could imagine the feelings that I went through after his loss personally. But I was also left with a business that was co-led by our family, including him as one of our leaders.
While I was going through this loss personally, our company and all of our employees were also reeling from this loss personally. I had to really stand as a pillar of strength for my family. I had to stand as a pillar of strength for our community and then I had to stand really tall and strong every day I came into the office here to walk our people through those feelings and emotions and moments that they needed to cry, or moments that they needed to process something. Then also, to be in a positive mindset to help all the others who were able to get through that loss a little bit more quickly and not keep everybody in that emotional state.
It was one of the most challenging times of my personal and professional career and I feel like, really the loss just reshaped me as a human being, reshaped me as a leader. I definitely went through a metamorphosis in many ways, and now can lean on the strength that I have for going through those moments.
[0:25:46] DF: Yeah. I mean, I can’t even imagine what that had to be like, losing your brother alone, but then having to deal with that day-to-day as a partner in the business. How did that change you as a leader? How did that change you?
[0:26:00] JC: I probably got a little softer in some ways and harder in others. It was funny. It was like, everywhere that I was shifting, you could see, again, hardening in one area, and softening in another. You could see that I was really focused on using our time wisely, and then also enjoying every moment. There’s this tug and pull, definitely that I went through after that loss and just helping me really reshape myself, so that I could reshape others underneath me and really help empower anyone who may go through a similar loss in the future, or may just need to lean on my stories, or our events to be able to help them get through a different moment themselves. It drove me to create more things in the community, be more involved, be more engaged and again, I can probably enjoy more moments, instead of just letting time slip through.
[0:26:49] DF: Yeah. You always bring such a positive attitude. Is that tied to it at all, or connecting The Honey Foundation? I know that’s a kindness movement. Do you think that’s part of this idea?
[0:27:00] JC: Yeah, it’s directly tied to that loss. The Honey Foundation was founded after I had shared during Scott’s eulogy stories about him being kind, doing random acts of kindness for others and the things that he had done. That inspired a group to pay it forward in his honor, and then that inspired my wife and I to create a foundation for others to share their stories, to inspire more. Then that spawned us into a kindness education, curriculum request from the local school district, and then it has continued to evolve from there. It was a way to turn our tragedy into triumph, using our loss to really propel something good. That’s what we do in honor of Scott, really. Every day, we’re pushing that mission forward a little bit as we do with everything else.
[0:27:52] DF: Yeah, and that’s such a great acknowledgement of his kindness and also such a good thing for the community. I know it’s a, I guess, tied to that step as well. A little bit outside of the other things you do inside the organization as well to honor him.
[0:28:05] JC: Yeah, something really cool. We have a kindness for truckers initiative that we ran. We’ve got several different trucking companies that will incorporate our kindness missions inside of their culture, that then really has – they’ve had really positive results and everything inside of their company cultures after doing that. We involve our people here in different events that The Honey Foundation will run, whether it’s a local community food festival event, or a pay it forward coffee project that we run every single year, or even a local project in Arizona called Blanket the Homeless, where we distribute lightly used and new blankets to the homeless community in Phoenix. Because even though the desert gets really hot during the day, it does actually get really cold at night in the winter time. It’s one of those give back moments that we give there.
We really encourage our people here to give back to the community in whatever ways that make sense personally for them. Just showing up for your family, for your community, is really just part of the start of that, just choosing to get out of the house and doing something different. Maybe joining a community event, or volunteering some time, just get you outside of your normal bounds and get you invested more in the community that really supports you.
[0:29:11] DF: I absolutely love that. One last comment on this is that for other leaders that are dealing with loss, or going through crisis, what advice do you have for them in terms of how they can process it, or move forward and approach that?
[0:29:24] JC: Yeah, time, right? That was the biggest thing for me. I needed time to heal, and I needed our people to have time to heal. Everyone was healing at different speeds. It’s important to recognize that time is different for everyone, and you want to just be conscious of that and give the entire company the level of support that you would want to have for yourself. At the time of my brother’s loss, we brought in a local therapist, counselor that was able to then extend her services to everybody internally. Anyone who felt like they needed some extra guidance, support, or just time to talk separate from the office was given that time to do that.
If anybody needed extra time off, we were very conscious of that and aware of that. During that first year, we were definitely a little bit more lenient with our policies when it came to time. Time, number one thing. Then, I would say that collectively, it would be in that experience with, again, doing that with The Honey Foundation, I think that finding a project, no matter how big or small it might be to honor the one that’s gone and allow everyone to participate in that is a really healing process, and I think is helpful for moving the corporation back into the future vision of what the founder, or leader wanted for the company to begin with. The leader wants everything to move forward. But the leader would also want everyone to get the help and be given the time to be able to do that. Yeah, time and find a way to honor.
[0:30:52] DF: Yeah, that’s really great. I appreciate you sharing that story. We’re going to flip back over to just the forward looking. I know we talked about AI a lot, talked about technology a lot, as we do. Looking ahead next five to 10 years, if you had to bet on one major trend in the staffing industry, what do you think that looks like? What are some of the major things? One or two things that you think are going to happen in the next five to 10 years?
[0:31:18] JC: Yeah. I think the disruption is going to come from a really big unemployment boom. With the acceleration of AI, we are all trying to find the new things that we’re going to be doing with our time, and that has not yet been figured out. That’s my fear is that there’s going to be a huge acceleration of unemployment that’s going to disrupt the industry. The trends that are happening right now that will be finished in the five to 10-year run is just going to be direct source marketplace, direct staffing marketplace, web app, direct candidate sourcing and engagement.
We won’t be in the way anymore of our clients getting access to our candidates. We will be the conduit for that success. We will no longer be in the way. That’ll be the big trend. But it’s going to be forced upon us, because we’re going to have to get really gritty with running our operations and making sure that we can survive, because with that much job loss, there’s going to be a lot of candidates available, making it easier for our general customers to be hiring at the speed that maybe is a little bit faster than they’re used to, maybe diminishing some services for staffing.
Again, it’s important to ask and to be mindful of this, right? That is going to be a shifting – the industry moving forward is going to look completely different in five to 10 years than it does today.
[0:32:29] DF: Yeah. I think that to add to that, what we’re seeing right now is the early stages of how do I create more value beyond the transactional, let’s put a person in the seat, to how do I do project work, statement of work efforts, or strategic planning and forecasting, and I think that we’re seeing more and more of the deeper partnership plays winning in the market right now. I think it’s the early stages of potentially what you’re talking about as well. One of the other areas that you and I have talked about briefly is the idea of collaborating in the staffing industry with the, and I know we have all these events where all the staffing agencies show up, there’s a lot of competition. Sometimes people aren’t necessarily open to too deep of dialogue with people that they see as their directory partners. How are you approaching that, or maybe thinking about that definitely?
[0:33:18] JC: We’re really approaching that conversation, partnerships is a win-win opportunity. The specific use case in our business model is that we service clients 100% with CDL truck driver on-demand staffing. We do not really – well, we don’t staff outside of that. We have clients that have large warehouses and they use light industrial staffing companies for their internal staffing operations. I mean, every single one of them almost does. A great partnership opportunity that we’ve found is networking and partnering with light industrial staffing companies and sharing resources and leads with each other and really in a formal way where it really does have an economical reward for each party to supply that relationship back and forth that makes sense that we would both participate.
Yeah, it’s a win-win. Whenever you can find an adjacent staffing partner who would love to get more relationships where you have them and you would love to get more relationships where they have them. That’s a win-win relationship opportunity there for almost everybody in the staffing industry.
[0:34:18] DF: You’re creating more value for the customers you serve as well by bringing in a trusted partner. It means it’s a win-win-win. It seems like a smart thing to do and not something that you’re much about from a partnership perspective. Anything else that you would recommend in terms of, for the listeners that are sitting here going like, there’s so many major changes happening right now. We’ve talked about the overwhelm with the number of AI tools that are out there in the world. Any areas where you think it would be smart, or practical for starting to experiment in some of the new technology?
[0:34:50] JC: Yeah. I think the one I hear most is that people just aren’t using the tools that are available to them. You’re one of those early adopter types, David. I’m one of the earlier adopter types that just loves to start jumping into the brand-new playground. We don’t care if the signs aren’t up to tell us that these things are risky, right? We just want to play on the new stuff, right? I would say that that’s the number one thing that every staffing company, every company, every individual, every student, everyone needs to start playing with AI, right? I think the best way to learn is to play, right? The best way to learn is just to have fun and see what it’s capable of, whether that’s tools for you personally, whether that’s, if you like to cook and building recipes. I’ve seen friends use it again in all sorts of different ways to leverage AI to help them make decisions for their lives and make it easier. They just need to jump in and everybody needs – you almost need to be a demand of time, that corporations put on their individual people to say, “I demand that you spend one hour of your 40 hours a week using AI tools.” It might just be that, right, that we have to force it to make sure that everyone’s using it. Because we just can’t wait for late adopters at this point.
Traditionally, and the way that consumers are going to accept anything new, whether it’s a brand-new iPhone, or new products out there that come out that are helpful, we just can’t be waiting anymore, right? The speed of change is here, we’re in it and we can’t be waiting for late adopters. We need to have just more people playing with the tech, using it, and then I would say that you probably need, or not probably, you need a champion inside of the company. If it isn’t you, who is it that’s going to be focused on that area and making sure that people are using the tools and they are starting to leverage them. They are learning together. Whether that is a round table meeting once a week, where you bring heads together, or you do some over shoulder training with an IT manager. I don’t care how you do it, but you definitely need to be playing with the tools and seeing what they’re capable of.
[0:36:53] DF: Yeah. Could not agree more. I feel I could see the impact that it can have is so unbelievably significant, and I feel like, it’s the Internet just came out and computers just came out. If you’re not learning how to use them, a few years from now, you’re printing out the Map Quest and driving, right?
[0:37:13] JC: Exactly.
[0:37:13] DF: You’ve got to get people to adopt it. Any closing comments for the audience? Anything else you’d like to share today?
[0:37:19] JC: No, I appreciate you bringing me on and letting me babble about the future of staffing and the way that tech is going to engage with that. I’m excited for the future and I’m excited to really push things forward that we can on our side and I’m excited to see our friends in the industry continue to push things forward in a way that helps our whole industry grow, develop, and change in a way that really helps our workers succeed more than they do today.
[0:37:44] DF: Absolutely. Justin, where can people, if they want to connect with you, or learn more about how F|Staff operates, what’s the best way for people to connect with you?
[0:37:52] JC: Yeah, a couple of places. If you want to know more about things that we talked about today, I try to keep all of that in one place at justinclarke.info. Justinclark.info is a great place to grab more of these types of podcasts and information, and even information about our foundation and more resources there about me. If you want to know about the company, you just go to fstaff.com and you can learn a little bit more about what we’re doing as a company and engage with us right there.
I am pretty active on LinkedIn. If you want to send me a message, a note, a call through LinkedIn, be happy to catch up with anybody in the industry who wants to chat about any of this stuff, because I pretty much don’t shut up about it until I go to sleep for a few hours at night.
[0:38:34] DF: Well, really great having you on the show. Once again, always enjoy the conversation and how you’re looking at the future of the industry. Thanks so much for joining today.
[0:38:42] JC: Thank you, David.
