[Podcast] FDE+ | Stop Replacing Recruiters: Blending Human Expertise and Advanced AI Tools with Greg Benadiba, CEO Bilingual Source

• The Partnership Principle: why AI and humans working together outperform either alone
• What to automate first to free up time for client calls, interviews, and negotiation
• How to use custom GPT tools to improve consistency and recruiter output
• The importance of continual learning and development to stay competitive
• What separates transactional recruiters from consultative recruiters in the AI era

Greg Benadiba [00:00:00]:
Every time you meet somebody, your score is either rising in their mind or lowering. So every interaction you have with a candidate, with a client is either going to enhance or diminish your relationship equity. And why I’m telling you this is it’s very important to note some of the things that we can do with AI to ensure that our relationships are not only respected, but elevated.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:25]:
Hey, guys.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:25]:
Kortney Harmon, host of fte. We’re bringing you a special series of episodes called FDE Plus. Those are going to be highlights from our recent virtual conference where hundreds of you joined us for an incredible event focused on boosting revenue for 2025. Each of these sessions is packed with valuable insights, expert discussions, and actionable strategies to help you drive growth in your business.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:53]:
Whether you missed the live event or.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:55]:
Want to revisit each session, we’ve got you covered. We’re going to drop each of these 10 events to wrap up our year and kick off the new year. Right? So let’s dive into today’s session and uncover the key takeaways that will propel your success in the coming year. Stay tuned and let’s dive in.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:19]:
For those of you who don’t know, I’m sure you do because he is truly amazing. Greg Benadiba, look at my Spanish is the CEO of Bilingual Source and they are a bilingual, French and English bilingual recruiting agency. They’re truly innovative and really been in business for over 40 years. Is that right, Greg?

Greg Benadiba [00:01:39]:
That’s right. We’re in our 42nd year now.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:41]:
I love that. And through Greg’s leadership, they’ve really been at the forefront of innovation, using advanced AI to revolutionize recruiting expertise, French and English bilingual recruiting agency while maintaining their human centered approach. So he’s going to talk about stop replacing humans, start elevating them and the AI principles for recruitment. So with that being said, you already have your screen shared. You are on it, sir. You are ready to go.

Greg Benadiba [00:02:09]:
You called on me to do something and here I am. And I appreciate you, Kortney, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. So let’s talk a little bit about what we’re going to be covering today. So part of the things that I’m going to cover is sort of the way that I think about AI and its adoption, some costly implementation mistakes that I’ve made, and the way to actually scale both AI as well as strategy. Now, the tough part about building a talk like this is you don’t quite know who your audience is. And for that reason, I’m going to leave quite a bit of time at the end for some Q and A and closing thoughts. Because I want to help you. I want to make sure that you’ve got actionable insights to take with you and that you can work with.

Greg Benadiba [00:02:51]:
I mean, what Matt and Ben and Chris shared with you today is already amazing and a plethora of information. But who am I? Why should you be listening to me? So I’m a recruiter, heart and heart. I mean, I selected this business at the age of 25. I wanted to become a recruiter. The thought came to me because I was thinking talent acquisition is going to be the problem of the 21st century. And I knew it in my heart that finding good people was going to be really tough. And so I joined bilingual source 20 years ago at the ripe old age of 25. I quickly became the top biller of the organization recruitment leader.

Greg Benadiba [00:03:32]:
And you know, at my soul and at my heart, I’m really a tech guy. I’m an operations guy. I’ve always looked at the way things are done and looking for ways to improve upon them. Through my 20 year journey, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I’ve had a lot of wins. And for that reason, I’ve taken the time to crystallize all of those wins into principles. And my book, Recruitment Principles will be out in January of 2026. So look out for that and connect with me on LinkedIn. And essentially I’ve taken the position now of becoming a recruitment thought leader.

Greg Benadiba [00:04:08]:
This is very foreign to me and the reason why I’ve chosen to do this is, is I think it’s our duty as sort of the old dogs in recruitment to impart the wisdom and the knowledge that we’ve gained along the way. Just to show you how much of an old dog I am. That’s me coming to Bilingual Source at the ripe old age of 25. Back then, selfies had to be taken with actual cameras. And like I said, I mean, I became the top biller of the organization and led the way. First and foremost, though, I love recruitment. I think this is the best job in the world. And we are so lucky to be in such a powerful profession.

Greg Benadiba [00:04:45]:
And through my time at Bilingual Source, I’ve had a lot of success helping my team achieve a great deal of success. Consider Bilingual Source, sort of my laboratory. That’s what it’s been for the last 20 years. I’ve tested things, experimented with them. You know, one of the books that profoundly shaped my thinking is Ray Dalio’s book Principles. If you haven’t read it you should. And I’ll give you a key takeaway that I took with me. It’s, you know, in his book he says that he’s found it very, very helpful to look at life as a game in which you get to solve problems.

Greg Benadiba [00:05:21]:
And by solving each problem, by solving each part of the puzzle, you get a gem in the form of a principle. And that helps you avoid future problems. And collecting those gems continuously improves your decision making so that you can ascend to higher levels of play. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I’m bound to make many more. And what I hope to do today is to show you how to avoid some of them. So one of the first principles that I’ve really crystallized for us here today is the partnership principle. We’ve heard it. AI enhances human capabilities.

Greg Benadiba [00:05:54]:
The future of recruitment is humans and AI working together to create outcomes that neither could have achieved alone. AI excels at pattern recognition, data analysis, automation, but it will never understand the nuance of human motivation, the complexity of cultural fit, or the art of building trust with someone who’s considering a life changing career decision and how true that is. I mean, if you think about it, you know, some of you may be afraid based on what Ben said earlier, because he’s right, 95% of recruiters will become obsolete. So how do you become part of that 5%? The 5% that’s not going to become obsolete. It’s by diving deep and learning and honing in on your craft. Not just looking at it as a job, but looking at this as the truly glorious profession that it is. And if you do that and you make it a consistent effort to constantly and never endingly grow, you’ll definitely become part of the 5%. Now AI has a big part to do with that and you’re going to have to find ways of incorporating AI.

Greg Benadiba [00:06:58]:
So that’s really what I’m going to be talking about today is how I’ve actually taken AI to enhance my team and to actually move the needle. So I tried to keep this as low fluff as possible. However, unfortunately for some, I have created the separation principle. AI is definitely going to separate the two types of recruiters. The transactional recruiter from the consultative recruiter. The recruiter understands human psychology, strategic relationships and building value and guidance. The person who can advise their candidates and be their trusted partner while using AI will be the person who wins. So what do we automate? What do we actually do? You know, Ben has created an exhaustive list for us.

Greg Benadiba [00:07:41]:
You know, it’s going to take you hours to go into each one of those tools, to dive in, to do the demos like he has. It’s a full time job. So how do we go about as an organization or even if you’re a solopreneur, how do you go about determining what you want to automate first? So this is where I’ve come up with the value curve. And we’ve all seen this curve before, call it the Pareto principle. You know, these last three bars are really the 20% of activities that we should be doing. And those activities are offer calls, interviews, sales calls, intake calls. You know, I, I don’t see a future in which I would send a voice agent to make somebody an offer. I just don’t see that.

Greg Benadiba [00:08:24]:
I think that’s highly impersonal and that goes against my principles. I really don’t think there’s a future in which I’ll send an agent out to make a prospecting call. Again, impersonal, an intake call. Understanding the nuances of a search, getting the DNA, getting the fit. Right client visit. I mean, are we going to send optimists to, to go out to our clients, visit them to say, hey, nice facility? I don’t think so. This is where the human being and the relationship expert needs to be there. Negotiations.

Greg Benadiba [00:08:55]:
Anything that has to do with influencing outcomes. This is where our recruiters not only need to exist, but need to refine and hone in on their skills. A lot of people, I’d say the bulk of recruiters, fell into recruitment one way or another. And some fell in love, some did it as a job. I’ve seen both the people who truly love this profession and would willingly read recruitment books on their downtime, not only because they want to get better at their job, but because they really love what they do. Those are the people that are going to succeed in the future. So what’s the last book you read on negotiations? You know, I can tell you right now, if you haven’t read Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference, that’s a key book that you need to read. And for all of these high leverage point activities, I can assure you that there are excellent books, excellent audiobooks, podcasts.

Greg Benadiba [00:09:54]:
You’ve got FDE right here. You know, you’ve got Benjamin Mena, probably the best recruitment podcaster in the world, in my opinion. Who’s got his podcast. I mean, listening to his podcast alone, I can tell you it’s given me a lot of information. It’s gotten me thinking about what it is I’m going to be doing differently. We learn from one another, which is really why I think that this is the part that leaders need to be really focused on is continual development of their teams. Like here at Bilingual Source, every Tuesday and Thursday we do a lunch and learn where I’ll plug in and I’ll pop on Masterclass or you know, we’ll, we’ll listen to something instructional. This week we’re listening to my coach Darren Hardy, who was the author of the Compound Effect and he’s teaching us productivity.

Greg Benadiba [00:10:43]:
So it’s a program called Insane Productivity. So these are all the things that you can do as a leader to make sure that, that all of your people kind of enhance these skills as they go. And I think that that’s your responsibility as a leader is to constantly be sourcing for that. I mean if you don’t want to do it, you can outsource it. There are great recruitment trainers out there. Some of the ones that come to mind are Mark Whitby, Greg Savage, he’s got a great platform. Mike Walmsley, I mean he’s the OG of recruitment training. I mean these are the guys that can help you with the nuancing of these high leverage point activities.

Greg Benadiba [00:11:19]:
If you’ve got somebody that’s say 50, 50, whether or not they’re going to make it in an AI future, if you’re thinking I think this person could develop into an AI ready recruiter, develop them. This is what development looks like. And I think that that’s really your job as the leader is to make sure to develop your people and get them ready for the future. Constant and never ending improvement. Now what should be automated? I think we all know we’re, we’re doing it day to day. I mean you guys were speaking, I was listening. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to rush through a reference check call to kind of rush through my notes to try to really recapture what was said in that reference check so that I could type up a beautiful reference. I’ve typed up thousands of references in my life and the fact that I now have a conditioned AI note taker that not only listens to the call but can produce a forward facing document to my client automatically.

Greg Benadiba [00:12:14]:
I’m like a kid in a candy store, man. This is a beautiful thing. Billing data entry. I mean no longer are the days where you found a contact and have to put em in your CRM that should all be automated. I mean the second anybody’s doing anything mundane like that, you really need to Kind of figure out what you’d like to start to automate. Now, you can’t tackle it all at once. You gotta think of, out of this sort of 80% that we’re going to eliminate, which ones can I target that are going to have the greatest yield and impact straight away? So what I did, I can tell you exactly what I did. I took all of these things and I put them on little cards and I put them across my boardroom table, and I sat down and I evaluated each one to determine which one I’m going to start to automate first and foremost.

Greg Benadiba [00:12:56]:
And I’ll share with you a little bit about how I did that. We’ve all read this quote. You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I like to think of this quote in a different way. We only ever rise to the level that we elevate our systems to. And that’s an important philosophy because your job as the leader, as the operations manager, as the president, CEO, your job is to ensure that not only is your team equipped, but you’re also automating the things that they should not be doing any longer. So it’s a big job and it’s quite an endeavor. But if you do it correctly, this is what’s going to not only ensure your survival, but enable you to thrive.

Greg Benadiba [00:13:36]:
And the permutations of your business thriving are obviously, clients are happy, candidates are happy, families are impacted. And of course, your local economy is also heavily impacted by the work you do. As Benjamin mentioned. Right. AI Confusion. My God. The whole thing is this. You have to first know yourself.

Greg Benadiba [00:13:56]:
You know, are you a person that is going to jump into N8N and understand it and do the six months of work that it takes to get yourself up and ready with N8N? Have you calculated what your hourly wage is? You know, I can assure you that with the wage that we’re probably commanding at our levels respectively, it’s probably best to outsource to certain people on specific things that you would like done. But first and foremost, the only thing that you can do that nobody else can do for you is to get crystal clear on what your goals are and what you’d like to see happen. I’ve often thought of my desk as a place where I can imagine my desk in the future. How cool would it be if. How awesome would it be if. And these ideas come to me all the time. And so what I do is I jot them down. And then I think and I see if this is something we can implement right away or not.

Greg Benadiba [00:14:53]:
You know, I felt prey to jumping into all of this and I did a lot of work. I mean, it cost me time with my family and it was a big sacrifice. One such big loss was, you know, I tried to develop a scraping mechanism so that I could get all the job postings across Canada that are bilingual, French, English. So I adopted a platform called Browse AI cost me about 10 grand and all it ended up doing was giving us more noise. It didn’t move the needle. And so I learned from that and I learned that technology is only as good as the problem that you’re looking to fix. And that’s the thing having a very clear vision of what you’d like to see. And quite frankly, I think that’s the leader’s job.

Greg Benadiba [00:15:37]:
The leader’s job is to see the business as what it should be and then work diligently to not only get the business there, but then to educate all of the employees and the team members within that business on how it’s to their benefit. With AI and with everything else there, there are one way and two way decisions. A two way decision is a decision that you can easily reverse. It’s something that you can experiment with, you know, you can pull out if needed, no harm, no foul. Then there are one way decisions and those are the ones that need to be very calculated. And I’ll touch on a couple that I’m currently wrestling with. Another thing that I’ve done is I actually created my own custom GPT to enhance decision making around platform selection. So when I’m looking at a platform, I’ll process it through my decision making framework, which also has my goals set up.

Greg Benadiba [00:16:25]:
And it will give me a degree of probability as to whether or not this tool will actually get me there. I can also take the recording from an intake call and throw that into the decision making framework so we can hear the entire call and the nuance of the call to see if this is truly something that I should or should not adopt and then do an ROI benchmark. So figuring out if the return on investment will be there based on the cost, the capital expenditure. All this being said, one of the main principles that kind of guides that thinking is to do once well, so you never have to do again. And I know Ben talked about that and we’re going to talk about that and what it is that I do here at Bilingual Source to equip my team with cutting edge tools, my goal. So I think it’s important to have Your goal? My goal is to build an environment where my team can achieve 2 to 300% of their productivity gains by eliminating 80% of the tasks they shouldn’t be doing anymore. And I think that’s a beautiful goal. I think if a person were to join my team and, you know, see that we’re so technologically advanced that, you know, their desk is just buzzing with activity, even in a down market.

Greg Benadiba [00:17:24]:
That’s a retention mechanism right there. And where else are they going to go for that? It’ll be hard to find. I can assure you some leaders are doing a great job, but not as aggressively as we are. And I think that’s a testament to me wanting my desk to run the way it should. And, I mean, the reviews are kind of speaking for themselves. We just recently got a positive glassdoor review from one of our team members talking about the technological change. Again, it’s a lot. And we’re always introducing new methods, new techniques, and updates on all of the things that we’re doing internally.

Greg Benadiba [00:17:54]:
So setting up GPTs. I mean, I’ll show you a little bit about, you know, some of the GPTs that I’ve created. What I really like about GPT is, is. And again, some of these are still relatively new to our organization, as you can see. But the submission builder is a great one. It basically allows for my team to basically have all of their submissions be uniform. We’ll take the candidate’s resume, our notes from the interviews, and then the job description that we are currently presenting them to, and it’ll create a beautiful submission for us that’s uniform. This way, whatever comes out of our firm is consistent across the board.

Greg Benadiba [00:18:30]:
We’ve got a job description architect. This basically scrapes client data. It’ll also prompt you to see if this is a growth job or more of a steady role. Those are really the two types of roles we encounter. And then it’ll create a structured job description for you. We’ve got an NPC builder. We test people’s French. So this is actually a grading tool that tells us if they used AI to actually write their French test, which is very interesting.

Greg Benadiba [00:18:54]:
Candidate prep. I mean, this tool has created so many placements for me alone in the last month. You know, candidates are telling me that they are highly prepared when going for interviews. And again, this all stems from wanting to provide great service and wanting to give people the absolute best experience when they’re dealing with us. So this will give them an outline of not only the job details, but questions that they could ask in an Interview things that they should know about the industry. It’ll even create a lexicon in both French and English to give them key terminology about that role and about that industry, which is, which is pretty nifty. This way, you know, when a person arrives, they know the lingo of that business right off the top. So those are just some of the tools.

Greg Benadiba [00:19:41]:
Now, you know, I think what’s good about AI is it can ensure consistency across your company, especially if you, you run a larger organization. If this is a part of your process, say a submission being built uniformly across your organization. I think that that’s, that’s a really good thing. Now prompting, I can tell you guys the way that I prompt these things on the back end, I basically have used many different prompt models. But I like perfect prompt. What it’ll do for me is I’ll actually be able to, to create a JSON prompt out of the idea and then modify it accordingly. So I know I use that tool quite often. It’s actually pretty much daily making sure that I’m constantly tweaking my prompts, getting them to be exactly right so that the output that my team experiences is uniform and it’s always improving.

Greg Benadiba [00:20:26]:
Right. So the tools don’t go stale, they remain alive. We are in the experience economy and that experience is both for candidates, clients, but also for your teams. If you’re a leader, I think it’s your responsibility to ensure that your team members get the absolute best experience. Everything from onboarding to training to development, all the way to promotability. This way they stay with you for years. And you know, I’m very proud to say that I have team members that have been with me for 15, 18, 10, 7 years. These are long term players and I think the philosophy of wanting to be at their service, a servant leader, is something that is profound.

Greg Benadiba [00:21:05]:
Now the fact that we’re in the experience economy, you know, this is one of the issues that I’m wrestling with right now. Voice agents. We now have technology where we can deploy voice agents at scale and they can work autonomously 24,7. Now the problem that I’m kind of wrestling with in my mind is for high volume, if say I was a Bank of America, for instance, and I probably get a million applications a year, it’s a no brainer at that point. But for a recruitment firm like ours, where the bulk of the people that we actually recruit are proactive recruits, meaning they’re, they’re not reactive. A voice agent. I’ve meditated on this, I’ve thought about this at length. An A plus caliber talent is not going to spend a half hour with an agent before knowing more about a position.

Greg Benadiba [00:21:53]:
So I think when we’re adopting and implementing AI, we have to be very careful to be empathetic. And for me, empathy actually means stepping into the other person’s shoes and running through that process from cradle to grave to see whether or not it would work. And so far it doesn’t work in my mind, I’ve opted against it. Although the technology is great and it’s there and it’s. And it’s readily available for you guys. In fact, Benjamin’s sheet there has a few examples. Every interaction enhances or diminishes relationship equity. What does this mean? Every time you meet somebody, your score is either rising in their mind or lowering.

Greg Benadiba [00:22:33]:
So every interaction you have with a candidate, with a client is either going to enhance or diminish your relationship equity. And why I’m telling you this is it’s very important to note some of the things that we can do with AI to ensure that our relationships are not only respected, but elevated. So a couple ideas. Taking your website copy, why don’t you run that through AI to ensure that your website copy is as sharp as it can possibly be. Your socials. One of the things that I’ve learned is that search is migrating away from Google. We’ve talked about it and I think a lot of people are using various search methods. The bulk is actually not with Google any longer.

Greg Benadiba [00:23:12]:
What a paradigm shift. Everything’s changed. So one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve now conditioned our site to be more AI focused. What does that mean? If you go to our blog section onto bilingualsource.com, you’ll see that the articles that have been generated have been specifically conditioned as question and answer format and that is very specific in nature. And it’s targeted at AI so that when, when professionals are searching for the right recruiter within AI, we will populate because AI favors that sort of content. So finding, finding avenues by which you can do exactly what it is that you’re doing right now, but just enhance it and taking it, taking it up a notch will enhance relationship equity with everybody you interface with. Benjamin talked about this. This is something I’m stepping up with right now, especially with my book coming up.

Greg Benadiba [00:24:05]:
Yours and your team’s personal brands. I mean, there’s no longer any excuse. I think personal brand is going to be the future. You know, my marketing company that I work with, great company, they’re called Prospect Digital. He said something very poignant to me and he said, greg, whether companies realize it or not, they actually need to become a media company. And I thought about that. I was like, but I’m a recruiter. He’s like, yeah, but you need to be a media company because that attention is what’s going to drive future growth.

Greg Benadiba [00:24:34]:
And he’s right. It’s not a singular bullet. I think it’s a multifaceted approach. But certainly it can’t hurt to have yours and your team’s personal brands being developed. So creating content funnels for team members, giving them tools so that they can start posting on LinkedIn, driving outreach to you and your brand. I think that that’s very important. Top of funnel, mid funnel and end funnel outreach. All of these outreach sequences.

Greg Benadiba [00:25:00]:
We’ve partnered up with Archer Insights. He’s a genius. His name is Avash. To automate Clay and to get Clay Automation to where it needs to be again. You know, I could have gone in and dove in on this thing. In fact, I did. I did two full three hour YouTube videos on clay. And then I thought to myself, Greg, you know, based on your hourly rate, you’ve just spent probably a fifth or a sixth of of the budget that you would have spent hiring somebody to do this.

Greg Benadiba [00:25:29]:
So I’m a firm believer in staying in your lane. While it’s nice to know what these tools do and having a rudimentary understanding, I don’t know that you need to become a subject, subject matter expert. I think the guys that are working with Clay and with all these, these systems, they’re knee deep in it every day. They know the updates, they know exactly what’s happening in the back end of these platforms. It would be another full time job for you to take on and quite frankly, I don’t think you can afford it. You’re busy billing, you’re busy speaking to candidates and clients, which is where you should be. Enhancing relationship equity. Search updates and reporting.

Greg Benadiba [00:26:00]:
This is awesome. I mean, now, you know, gone are the days where employers are wondering, hey, what’s going on with my search? Well, now it’s automated, you know, and we can get reporting out to employers and then needless to say, research. I mean, you know, I know Matt touched upon, you know, the agents and GPT and the deep research. I use this all the time and I use it as a value add too. So I’ll give you an example. Just today I had a candidate on the line who is mother tongue French from another country, very intelligent. She’s A project manager. And one of the things she struggled with was articulating her genius in English because the words escaped her.

Greg Benadiba [00:26:37]:
So I basically took that call as well as my previous call, ran it through a GPT and I prompted it to build me a lexicon of terminology specific to the industry, with definitions as well as potential interview questions she may receive and how to articulate those interview questions in English. Then I asked her to take that project, read it, make sure that it’s accurate, and go ahead and adopt that language as her own, helping her further. I had another client last week. They’re in the nonprofit business here in Canada and they’re struggling financially. They don’t have the right salesperson. They came to me to find them the right salesperson because quite frankly, they’re about three years away from insolvency. So it’s a big search. I used the research agent to do a very deep research project on her industry and who the competitors are, some ideas as to how they can go about creating new networks, new relationships, new avenues that they should pursue in order to remain relevant.

Greg Benadiba [00:27:40]:
So research and market data reporting. This is, this is, this is a value add. This is where you go from just being a guy that fills jobs to a person that is a consultant because you care. And I know you care about your clients. So show them, show them by going above and beyond. You know, I’ve done a lot of demos, like I told you again, we’re running our own copy through an AI copywriter. We use Answer the Public, which is a nifty little website which tells you exactly what’s being searched in terms of keywords within your particular industry. Then you can take those keywords and generate articles for your blog or content for, for LinkedIn.

Greg Benadiba [00:28:16]:
And then of course, we talked about the reporting. So this is one of the structures that I’ve built, along with help of Tobias. Tobias is genius. He’s a young man, 19 years old. He lives in Denmark. He’s got a score of 160 on his IQ. He’s autistic. He went to a school with 10 other mathematicians in Denmark.

Greg Benadiba [00:28:40]:
They’re renowned for being one of the best schools. And he’s an entrepreneur. And I mean, you know, I’ve sat with him for many, many hours. I’ve learned so much from him. One of the key things that I learned though, is that what he does, I don’t want to do. And I think that that’s important, again, staying in your lane and knowing what you actually want to be doing. Because if you’re if you’re forcing yourself to go into something that you don’t want, really want to be doing, you know, it’s best to outsource that, protect your energy with a great deal of focus. And then, you know, for clay automation, you know, I deal with, I’ve known Arash forever.

Greg Benadiba [00:29:13]:
He’s, he’s a sales genius. Benjamin is right, he’s 100% right when he says that, you know, you can go to one of these so called automation experts and they will drive absolutely no value whatsoever. Ash understands exactly what it is to write good sales copy. He understands the philosophy of sales. He understands sales to a level and to a degree that I have not seen in a very long time. He’s extremely gifted. And so these are my colleagues in sort of that automation world and I’m very grateful. By the way, their information will be available on the downloadable document that I’ve left within the speaking notes there.

Greg Benadiba [00:29:51]:
So you should be able to download that. Okay, so here’s an easy one to tackle. If you are don’t currently have a note taker, you need one for a few different reasons. You know, I thought about this problem long and hard and I thought to myself it’s a no brainer. And here’s why your recruiters don’t take great notes. Let’s face it, I mean you look at a pre screen note or an interview note and it’s like there’s basic detail in there. With automation, what you’ll have is you’ll have a full rundown of the call and with the right platforms you can actually prompt each note type to be unique to that note type. So that’s what I’ve done on the back end.

Greg Benadiba [00:30:25]:
You know, I’ve gone ahead and used quilt. But you know, obviously there’s great note takers out there. Bottom line is what this allows us to do is free up our time to actually be in the conversation. Multitasking is such a nasty word in my mind because there’s no such thing. It’s either you’re focused on doing one thing or you’re switching between tasks and you’re becoming inefficient at both. What Quill allows you to do is to really focus in on the call, to be there, to be listening to the person because you know that the notes are being taken for you, which is incredibly helpful as well. You can condition the note taker to create action items. I’ve even conditioned these notetakers to create a score for the recruiter to know what questions they asked.

Greg Benadiba [00:31:08]:
Well as well as which questions they didn’t ask and they still need to and any action items that are left. So I think, you know, diving into to a platform like Quill is a great advantage. Now that being said, I did not do a demo with Metaview. I do use Otter, so Otter. I use it more for creating transcripts. So let’s just say this very call, if I ever wanted a transcript of it, I could download it and I could throw it in there and I’d get a transcript of it. Fireflies is another good one. But again, these ones are not kind of designed for recruiters at scale.

Greg Benadiba [00:31:41]:
So my advice is go with Quill. Great platform sourcing tools, obviously. Crelate. I just saw what they’re doing in there and that’s pretty amazing. It actually reminds me a lot of the sourcing tool that I’m using which is PIN in tandem with my current CRM. But I mean there are a lot of great sourcing tools out there. Again, I think it’s all about what’s going to move the needle for you and what is actually going to get you closer to your goal. Now one thing I wanted to talk about and I wanted to kind of impart to you guys is, you know, everybody’s focused on what change, what’s changing in the world.

Greg Benadiba [00:32:13]:
And obviously so it’s for good reason. But what I did was I actually sat down to think about what’s not going to change. And this is where I took the time to write my book, Recruitment Principles. Because what I was thinking and my logic and my reasoning around this was the world of AI is here. The rate of acceleration of change is exponential to say the least. There are new tools, new models every single day. It’s a full time job just figuring all that out. But what’s not going to change? What’s actually going to remain static in the recruitment industry as a whole? And that’s why I designed recruitment principles, the GPT.

Greg Benadiba [00:32:54]:
So this is actually based upon my book. It’ll be an add on to the book so people will be able to scan from the book directly into the GPT. But what this tool will be able to do for you is hopefully help you to elevate your recruiters. So let me give you some examples of how to use this. We’ve had scenarios where very delicate situations have come up and we’ve been able to describe those situations in great detail here. And using my 20 years of experience as a recruitment leader and my principles, what it does is it basically spits out output for you both for the candidate, both for the client or your colleague. And, you know, internally, I can tell you that this has been a real game changer. So it’s by far the most popular tool in our toolkit right now.

Greg Benadiba [00:33:43]:
My recruiters use this routinely to ensure that what it is that they are communicating or saying or doing is principled and that it’s the right approach. You know, how many times have you been maybe hot under the collar because of a situation, emotional, and you’ve said the wrong thing where you should have bit your tongue and you should have waited. Now we have a principles GPT where you can put in your situation, and it will give you Greg’s advice on what to do in that particular instance. And I can tell you right now that this has converted many different things. I’ll give you a case study example. One of my team members, Raghav, had a client ghost him. And he had been working on this search for months and finally got the right person. They interviewed the person, they brought her back for a second interview.

Greg Benadiba [00:34:28]:
And all of a sudden we got radio silence. And so he was frustrated, and he wrote me an email saying, this is what I’m going to write the client. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, please don’t write that. No. I took his situation, I put it into the GPT, showed him how to use it, and he’s like, holy moly, Greg. I was way off. I’m like, yes, you were. And that email would have cost you the relationship because you don’t know what’s happening on the other side.

Greg Benadiba [00:34:57]:
And that’s, in fact, chapter two of my book, don’t make assumptions. And assumptions are the root of all mistakes. And, you know, we’re frustrated because something’s happening, but at the end of the day, we’re assuming things. We don’t quite know what’s happening on the other side. And that’s why I designed this tool, is because I think, again, our job as leaders is to be able to elevate our recruiters to be competitive in this wild, wild world that we are in. And I wanted to make sure that I left enough time for those of you who may have some questions. So if anybody wants to go ahead and ask, I’m ready and able to help.

Kortney Harmon [00:35:32]:
I love it. We’ll leave it open for any questions. I’ll leave it open because Katie will pull the other side. Quill is actually one of our best integration partners. We love Quill. So I love that you mentioned that we work seamlessly together. And all the notes and everything that writes in our systems. Amazing.

Kortney Harmon [00:35:47]:
It’s like we planted that seed and I didn’t even know you’re going to say that. So amazing. Anyone else have any questions? Is anybody’s brains hurt from all of the AI stuff today? It has been a lot overall. I love all of the stuff that everyone shared. Greg shared a lot of great information as well.

Greg Benadiba [00:36:06]:
Again, I can’t say this enough, and I mean, Ben said it best. The impact that we’re having out there as recruiters is something that can’t be discounted. You know, we’re enhancing the lives of so many people around us. We are there for people when they need a resource, when they’re stuck in the mud. Change is hard and we are brokers of change. And I think, again, elevating our skills and getting up to where we need to be is paramount to stay relevant. Because think about it. I mean, if you don’t constantly and never endingly become more valuable, then AI will wipe you out.

Greg Benadiba [00:36:41]:
It just will. It will. I mean, sourcing tools can do it faster, cheaper, better. So what’s the value that you bring? You know, I’m sure you guys have heard this before. I’ve heard it a lot and I live it and breathe it. Recruitment is personal development disguised as a career. It truly is. This profession is marvelous.

Greg Benadiba [00:36:58]:
We’ve gotten the opportunity to learn from so many, so many great people. You get the opportunity to speak to candidates. You get to learn from each one of those candidates. It’s an absolutely marvelous industry. And I think you need to really make sure that you are upping your game in terms of skills every step of the way. Not for yourself, but for your candidates and for your clients and for your teams. You’re responsible. You take care of you for me and I’ll take care of me for you.

Greg Benadiba [00:37:23]:
Right, Kortney?

Kortney Harmon [00:37:24]:
Absolutely. And honestly, that’s a value proposition of what you have and how you can help your clients. If it’s not in your talk track, it should be because of the tools that you’re using. Using iron sharpens iron. And it is only a value proposition to them as well. You staying ahead of the cutting edge is only going to help them stay ahead of the cutting edge. Melissa said you did scare her a little bit, Greg, with the 5% prediction. Not gonna lie.

Kortney Harmon [00:37:48]:
As a new firm owner, that’s a lot to process.

Greg Benadiba [00:37:52]:
She said, you know, it’s gonna be okay. There’s a wave coming. So we just have to do the best that we can, control what you can Be laser focused on where your value is and what you should actually be doing. Outsource the rest and be scrappy about it too. I’m not saying to go spend a lot of money out there. What I’m saying is first take the time to plan and identify which one of the problems you have that needs a solution and then you go and look for the right provider. Right. And sometimes you get a system like a crelate, which has everything in one, Right.

Greg Benadiba [00:38:26]:
So you gotta go do the demos, you gotta go sit down and then post demo. You’ve gotta reflect to say, okay, is this going to fit? Is this going to be something worth migrating to and ask the right questions. That’s a big project, Right. Especially if you’ve got a whole team of people, because it’s hard, you’ve got to do the work. But, you know, I think once you’re on the other side of it, you’re stronger, you’re better, you’ve got life experience and that can bring value to everybody around you too. Just like I’m doing with you today.

Kortney Harmon [00:38:53]:
Absolutely. I did put Greg’s handout in the chat link, in the links here, so that would be easier if you need it. Mary Lou said, thank you, Greg, for the link, Very generous. I used it for a recruiter wanting to switch industries. Excellent game plan output. Many thanks.

Greg Benadiba [00:39:10]:
You’re welcome. And again, I think the whole reasoning behind this was what’s not going to change? And how are we going to train the machines to do what it is that we need them to do? Which is why I did the work and got together the recruitment principles that I think are true. But, you know, I think it’s going to be a lifelong process to get these principles to be just right. And there’s so many aspects of recruitment that I don’t know. Like, I know the perm market very well, but the temp and contract market, I’ve never been in it, right? So there’s a whole slew of principles that probably need to partner up with somebody on in the future to get those down so that we can actually condition the bots to do things the right way. Like right now, just to give you an example, I’ve got a new application called Cluli. And what Clulee is, is it sits on on your dashboard and if you’re on a call with somebody, it’s listening in and it can advise you as to what it is you should say next. I’m going to put my principles in there, see how it works, see if I’m able to embed my principles so that mid conversation I know exactly what to say to somebody.

Greg Benadiba [00:40:08]:
Because let’s face it, I mean, sometimes we’re on point, sometimes we’re tired. You know, we’re recruiters too. We’re human. And so it depends on where you are in your conscience, right? Are you at a point where you’re frazzled, tired, there was a big personal event in your life, you’re not quite there, or are you firing on all cylinders? And I think technology can help to make sure that we’re always bringing our A game to the table.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:28]:
I love that. Well, everybody loved your advice. One day at a time. So, so many amazing things. Greg, thank you so much for wrapping up this first half a day of amazing talks. So many things to think about, so many things to process. I hope everyone connects with Greg and Ben and Matt on LinkedIn. Continue to follow them because they are really driving what’s next.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:54]:
So I love all the insights. Thank you so much for your time.

Greg Benadiba [00:40:58]:
Thank you.

Kortney Harmon [00:41:01]:
We hope you found today’s session insightful and inspiring. Remember to stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we’ll be sharing all of this amazing content of our virtual conference. If you missed any part of it, don’t forget to subscribe to our show so you don’t miss anything upcoming. And if you like this valuable content, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share it with your network and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. We’d love to to hear your thoughts. Together we’re building a community of growth and learning. Until next time.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:00]:
Now for the harsh truth about technology. If your recruiting tech stack isn’t built on a living platform that continuously evolves with AI, it’s not an asset, it’s dragging you into irrelevance. So what exactly is a living platform? It’s the difference between survival and extinction. In recruiting, it evolves without you having to push it. Traditional systems require you to upgrade them. Living platforms upgrade themselves. It’s putting something in the box. And while you put it in the box, it’s getting sunlight, it’s getting water, it’s getting nutrition.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:35]:
To grow and thrive and be bigger every day. It gets smarter every day. Hi, I’m Kortney Harmon, Director of Industry Relations at crelate. Welcome to FDE Express, a short, sweet format of the Full Desk Experience, a Crelate original podcast. We’ll be diving into specific topics to show you how you grow your firm within 10 minutes or less. Each episode will cover quick hit topics to give you inspiration and food for thought for your talent businesses. Welcome back to the Fulldesk Experience where we talk about growth blockers across your people, process and tech. I’m your host, Kortney Harmon, Director of Industry Relations here at Crelate, and today we’re tackling the brutal truth that many in our industry do not want to hear.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:29]:
The traditional way you’ve been doing business in recruiting for decades is dead in a post AI world. That’s right, I said it dead. Let’s be completely transparent. If you’re still counting calls, submissions, interviews the same way you did five years ago, you’re not just falling behind, you’re already irrelevant. In an industry becoming transformed by AI. Those traditional metrics aren’t just failing to drive growth, they’re actually killing your business. So in this recruiting world, we’ve all been accustomed to certain metrics, me included the number of calls, your number of submissions, your number of interviews, and even placements. The uncomfortable truth is recruiting isn’t about filling seats.

Kortney Harmon [00:02:16]:
It’s actually about driving different business results. And your outdated KPIs are actually missing the point entirely. I had a call with a recruiting company last year. Each person on their team was actually making 50 calls daily, sending hundreds of LinkedIn messages weekly, submitting dozens of candidates. Their activity metrics looked incredible on paper, but as we dug deeper, their placement rates has actually dropped 15% and consultation retention was at an all time low. Our teams often get stuck in this hamster wheel of manual data. Essentially, it’s like a chore and almost never get to the point of actually producing meaningful results. Does that sound familiar? This is the death spiral of recruiting metrics and it is evolving drastically in this post AI world.

Kortney Harmon [00:03:08]:
Now let me be brutally honest, if you’re not leveraging AI in your recruiting workflows, you might as well close up shop now because your competitors who are will probably bury you in the next 18 months. Tech is evolving so fast it’s hard to keep up with. If you didn’t get a chance to listen to one of our previous episodes with Aaron Elder, the CEO here at Crelate, I encourage you to do so. He talked about that post AI world and what that means. The recruiting landscape has changed with the rise of AI technology. We’ve talked about it and and some conservative estimates show that AI driven changes will replace about 25% of jobs worldwide by 2026. And if we think recruiters or part of recruiting is immune, we probably need to think again. So let’s talk about some warning signs to show that you’re stuck on this KPI hamster wheel in the AI era.

Kortney Harmon [00:04:04]:
Number one, if you’re still doing the work AI could and should handle, that’s your first warning sign. Your team possibly is spending hours on tasks that AI systems could complete in minutes. It isn’t just efficient, it’s actually professional malpractice. In 2025, you’re falling behind by the minute. Number two warning sign is that your data lives in silos, your metrics live in different systems. And it happens. But the problem is that those systems don’t communicate. They’re preventing you from seeing the complete picture.

Kortney Harmon [00:04:40]:
In an AI era, isolated data just limits you and it actually is active sabotage towards your data and your growth of your firms. And number three, you’re looking backwards, not forwards. If you’re measuring what happened yesterday instead of what AI can predict tomorrow, you’re driving your business looking only in the review mirror. How’s that working out for you? The transition from startup to scale up is a big leap with unexpected hurdles. The same applies to transitioning from traditional recruiting to AI powered recruiting. Many aren’t going to make it, but for those who will, they’re going to thrive. So now that we’ve confronted the harsh reality, let’s talk solutions. I don’t care if it makes you uncomfortable.

Kortney Harmon [00:05:29]:
Your comfort zone is potentially what could be killing your business. We’re done being on this hamster wheel of trying to solve problems ourselves. It’s time to pull up the help chain. The help is AI and it’s non negotiable. It’s on like electricity in the background. So when you’re assessing your current recruiting KPIs through a lens of AI. You need to ask yourself, why are humans doing the work that AI should handle? If your recruiters are manually searching on LinkedIn, are you wasting human capital? Are you predicting or reporting? If your metrics can’t tell you which candidates will succeed before you hire them, your metrics might be a little dated. Can your platform learn or is it brain dead? A static system in a dynamic world isn’t just limiting, it’s suicide.

Kortney Harmon [00:06:21]:
So here’s the hard truth. If you’re still measuring the number of calls recruiters are making, instead of measuring AI powered engagement quality, the quality, not the quantity, you don’t just have a metrics problem, you potentially have a leadership problem. So let’s talk about how well functioning recruiting operations can deteriorate into exhausting cycles without the right technology foundation. This decline isn’t gradual anymore. It’s about acceleration towards being obsolete again. Did you see the episode with Aaron? He talked about the evolution of AI in the last six months. And what was being talked about last week. In this world where AI can source screen engage candidates around the clock, running your recruiting desk with purely human effort isn’t just efficient, it can be negligent.

Kortney Harmon [00:07:14]:
Here’s the warning signs. Your recruiting operations has shifted from a well oiled machine to the hamster wheel in the AI era. Number one, your recruiters are doing robot work. If your team is spending hours researching candidates when AI could be doing this automatically, we’re probably paying humans a premium rate to do the work that machines could do much better. Number two, your tech stack is a disconnected mess. We talked about those data silos. If your tools don’t talk to each other, you don’t have a technology ecosystem. It’s the junkyard.

Kortney Harmon [00:07:49]:
It’s not a platform to help your teams scale. And maybe, just maybe, your teams actually hate their jobs. When recruiters spend all day on repetitive tasks instead of building relationships, they’re very unhappy. It’s trying to keep up with all the things that happen in our work days that we just can’t keep up with. And the most dangerous thing about this KPI hamster wheel is that it feels like work. It’s just motion without progress. Your 60 hour work week means nothing if an AI system can’t produce better results in shorter time. Your expectations, your metrics, your output is going to change drastically in the next few months and even year.

Kortney Harmon [00:08:36]:
So let’s talk about seven steps to better recruiting metrics in this AI era. So let’s get Practical. I’m not here to coddle you. I’m here to save your business. The foundational success of AI integration isn’t a gentle evolution. It’s truly a radical transformation. The first thing you have to do in step one is you have to first stop measuring busy work. If you’re celebrating how many calls your recruiters are making, you’re measuring effort, not results.

Kortney Harmon [00:09:06]:
It’s like praising someone for how much they sweat instead of how far they ran. Step number two, we need to embrace AI specific outcomes. So in this AI era, if your human is handling a task that AI could. You’re not running a recruiting business, you’re running museum potentially of obsolete practices. We need to change how we think. Step number three, implement radical workflow automations. And many of you are doing this already. AI doesn’t just speed things up, it fundamentally transform what’s possible.

Kortney Harmon [00:09:40]:
If you’re just using AI to do old things faster, you can put a rocket engine on a horse cart. So hopefully you have those automations set up to help you move faster. Step number four, build a digital living platform, not a digital coffin. Most ATS systems aren’t just platforms. They’re where good data goes to die. A living platform evolves. Traditional systems just age. We don’t want to put things in a box just to have them in a box.

Kortney Harmon [00:10:13]:
Step number five, we have to deploy AI agents aggressively. Every hour your recruiter spends on research, initial outreach, or scheduling, an hour is wasted time. AI could handle those tasks for you. Step number six, redefine what actually recruiters do. And this is going to change so much in the next six months. The recruiter of 2025, who isn’t an AI wrangler, relationship builder and strategic advisor, isn’t a modern recruiter. We have to evolve how we’re handling our businesses and what a recruiter looks like in this day and age. So now step number seven is evolve or die.

Kortney Harmon [00:10:55]:
There’s no middle ground anymore. You’re either committed to continuous AI evolvement and evolution, or you’re preparing for your business’s obituary. So we’ve talked about the people and the process aspect of getting the KPI hamster wheel. Now for the harsh truth about technology. If your recruiting tech stack isn’t built on a living platform that continuously evolves with AI, it’s not an asset, it’s dragging you into irrelevance. So what exactly is a living platform? It’s the difference between survival and extinction. In recruiting, it evolves without you having to push it. Traditional systems require you to Upgrade them.

Kortney Harmon [00:11:36]:
Living platforms upgrade themselves. It’s putting something in the box. And while you put it in the box, it’s getting sunlight, it’s getting water, it’s getting nutrition. To grow and thrive and be bigger every day. It gets smarter every day. Your platform isn’t measurably more intelligent this month than last month. If it’s not alive, it’s decaying. It connects everything.

Kortney Harmon [00:12:00]:
Without human intervention, manual Data entry in 2025 isn’t just efficient, it’s something that shouldn’t happen anymore, alone, on its own. And a living platform doesn’t just store data for you, it activates it. Data sitting unused in your system isn’t an asset, it’s a wasted opportunity. We’ve all heard if it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen. So let me share a vision of what recruitment looks like with a living platform as your foundation. Imagine starting your day not with a to do list of manual tasks, but with a strategic briefing from your AI agent that you’ve already completed yesterday’s to do list while you slept. Your sourcing agent has already identified and Pre qualified 25 candidates overnight. Your outreach agent has personalized and sent communication with 40% response rate.

Kortney Harmon [00:12:50]:
Your analytics agent alerts you potential issues before they even become problems. This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening now. And if it’s not happening in your business, you’re already behind. So as we wrap up today’s episode, let me be crystal clear. The future of recruiting doesn’t belong to the hardest working or the most experienced any longer. It belongs to those who harness AI most effectively. Human effort without AI amplification is just becoming inefficient.

Kortney Harmon [00:13:19]:
The recruiters who thrive won’t be those working harder on the hamster wheel, but those who will leverage AI agents to handle routine tasks while focusing on their human talents is where it’s going to make the most impact. So if you want to continue to learn from experts on time management, networking, career development, overcoming burnout, that’s commendable. But if you’re not simultaneously implementing AI through your recruiting practices, then you’re arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. So I would encourage you to start by assessing your current technology foundation. Is it a static system that requires consistent manual updates, or is it a living platform that evolves with the rapidly changing recruiting landscape that we are in today? The future isn’t just coming, it’s already here. Dividing our industry into two groups. Those who embrace AI and those who will work for them. Thank you so much for your time today.

Kortney Harmon [00:14:16]:
This is an ever changing topic that we will continue to discuss and bring to the forefront of our industry. So stay tuned as we continue to talk about the recruiting world. In a post AI era, evolution isn’t just optional, it’s existential. That’s all for today’s episode of FDE Express. I’m Kortney Harmon with Crelate. If you have any questions or topics you’d like for us to cover in future episodes, please feel free to submit them to [email protected] or ask us live next session. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast. Wherever you listen and see, sign up for our monthly events to keep learning and growing your business.

Kortney Harmon [00:15:01]:
Thanks for tuning in to FDE Express, a short and sweet format of the full desk experience. We’ll see you next time.