I think the main thing that I'm hearing a lot about is that there's a kind of C-suite desire to just deploy AI.And I think a lot of the people who have been sent off to go, when it comes to the kind of all-in-one platforms,
All of the market at the moment is converging.You'll see lots of vendors that are diversified having their recruitment magic.
And rather than actually doing the things that are like value-add and smart and intelligent, recruits have spent loads of their time doing kind of basic admin types of things.
I think something interesting that customers are doing at the moment, or a couple of customers that I've heard are doing at the moment, is they're trying to get a true picture of how
Welcome to the Staffing Ring, the podcast where the gloves come off and we go deep into the recruitment industry's best practices and tactics.We aim to bring you actionable insights for how staffing and recruiting agencies are winning today.
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Welcome to another episode of the Staffing Marine Podcast.I'm your host, Jason Lawson, and today I'm super excited to be joined by Josh Breslin.Welcome, Josh.Hey, Jason.
So Josh, wealth of experience in recruitment staffing, three years inventory and sales, smashed a lot of great deals and really served a whole breadth of customers and users.
And so we'll get deep into some of the use cases and things that Josh has seen. Of course, part of the Venturi group was the acquisition of AXS.So, you know, certainly a lot of experience across the AXS group as well.
And prior to joining Venturi, Josh was nine years in staffing, recruiting, hands-on, mix of site, contingent engineering, MSP, and RPO.So, wow, we've got a lot of experience to delve into today.So again, welcome to the Staffing Ring podcast.
Thank you, but I think you forgot to mention all of the volume of deals that I also lost.You said I won a few, I think we lost a few as well, but no, it's been fun.
Yeah, and certainly I think we always learn a lot from those that may have just missed us on those occasions.Or tried to, yeah.I'm sure a lot of the good ones along the way, right?
Like everything on the staffing ring, we dive straight into it, no mucking around. Straight into the question.So we think about where we are in the economic cycle and how the industry is going.
So really curious, Josh, in the world of staffing and recruiting agencies, what are you seeing as kind of the big market trends, the things that agency leaders should be really thinking about in terms of what they should be aware of, what's coming up, what's
I think the main thing that I'm hearing a lot about is that there's a kind of C-suite desire to just deploy AI.
And I think a lot of the kind of the people who have been sent off to go and be tasked to deploy that in the business are kind of looking around and trying to find the right solution that they can kind of push into the business.
Honestly, I don't think it's there right yet.So I think some people are being kind of caught bit hand in the cookie jar. I'm is the number one thing that I'm seeing.
And then the thing that I think people should be doing more of than they're not is automating.Automating's here, it's ready, it's real, it can be deployed at scale with some great use cases.
Kind of see AI on the other end of that stick, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah.And certainly, you know, like any evolution or revolution of technology, a lot of companies, you know, it's finding the balance between the bleeding edge and the leading edge, right?You don't want to be a laggard.
But again, as you say, there's a lot of buzz around AI.And I agree, certainly automation is one of the most practical ways an agency can really think.
Yeah, it's an AI of sorts, but it's more just automating and hopefully making the team and recruiters more productive.
I think there's a lot of AI tools at the moment on the market that aren't AI. I think there's a bit of bullshit being deployed, and there's a lot of ratios and programmatics and things like that.
A great example, we had a customer that moved from a TF IDF algorithm, which is like a matching tool, to an AI matching product.And the quality of results coming out the AI matching product was horrific.
And they were really keen to come back, but they were signed into 12 months of very expensive AI contract that they couldn't then get out of. That's just one silly example of how a shift to AI is seen as really positive.The devil's in the detail.
Is it actually better?So yeah, I think there's those kind of warning signs and cautionary tales out there already.And you've got to make sure something works before you go and put it out into the business, not get caught on the hype.
And yeah, just curious then in terms of trying new technology. There's a lot out there.Some will be brilliant and a lot will be, there's a sticker that says AI, but behind it, it's probably some manual sort of intervention.
I think about the ATS and CRM market, and there's marketplaces, and then there's best of breed, and all in one OS. What's your thinking in terms of that?Are we trending more towards consolidation OS, or do we still have a place in the market?
I think there's going to be a bit of an arms race in the next year to three years, maybe six months to three years with how quickly things are changing.But when it comes to the all-in-one platforms, all of the market at the moment is converging.
You'll see lots of vendors that are diversifying what they offer.The reason they're doing that is to go and have more of a target market that they can go and point at.
So as the technologies get bigger, you'll find that you ultimately have to back a horse.Who's going to get the most of it right?
And there's some really interesting strategic differences between how businesses are looking to bake AI into their solution.So let me take access, for example.It's the easiest thing for me to talk about.
Where Access is going to be really strong at AI is it's going to be able to overlay a chat GPT-like tool or a custom GPT into its various products.
So when you're writing that prompt and you're asking it something, yes, you can ask it about something in the CRM ATS.
but you can also probably ask it about payslip data or holiday balance because it's also tied into that kind of data center or data lake, which is where you're FastTrack366, right?
So that's kind of one kind of element of the strategies that are being taken in the kind of AI space. The second is maybe you're integrating AI into a breadth of different tools, right?Like Microsoft Power Platform, you'll have the tools available.
But again, if the tools are available, you also need the data to be available to be queried.So you've really got to look at things like holistically and go, how are they building the custom GBTs?
How are we pushing source data in and how are we going to make it usable?
Because the worst outcome of AI is going to be individual AIs that you have to ask about your front office, your middle office, your back office, your website, your telephony system.
Having all of these different pots of data is not going to be the successful outcome.It's about how you can combine all of that together and get all of your
kind of that data infrastructure in place so that you're asking all of the questions of the same language.So I think the rise of the all-in-one or, you know, the kind of the players that can offer a broad spectrum is what we'll see.
And my opinion is also as well, sorry, Jason, I'm off on a bit of a roll here. If you look at sales enablement, right, that's where a lot of the tech development that comes into recruitment comes from.
So you'll see the likes of a Salesforce or like Clary, for example, which now started out as one thing, but now has this entire suite with Clary Groove, et cetera.
It's not to shout them out individually, it's just symptomatic of what's happening in the market.So I think you can look up at that general sales enablement market that sits kind of above recruitment,
and make a good prediction as to what's going to flow downstream.Once you've had a look at that, you then go, right, who do we think is going to be able to deliver the most value out of all of the vendors?
And I think that's everyone's choice to make, which effectively constitutes to which horse are you going to back in the race?Sure.
And I think absolutely agree with all of that in terms of the thinking and the mindset around how to pick a horse and figure out the tech stack plan. I think what really underpins a lot of that is it's only as good as the data that you feed it.
And so the more data points you have from the whole candidate journey and client journey that you are curating as an agency, whether it be, yes, of course, if it's all in one, brilliant.
If it's more of a best of breed, make sure those integrations are rock solid, where the data is not being siloed.Don't swivel chair to different screens.Make sure all the data is in one data lake, data warehouse that AI can feed from.
Josh, we've spoken a lot about the AI and the data and the technology.Where does people come in, in terms of the trends and the movements of talent within agencies or consultants and how that is bearing down on agency leaders.
I think I used to work at the Engage group for quite a while and Tim Cook there, even four or five years ago when I left was talking about recruiters having their recruitment magic.
And rather than actually doing the things that are like value add and smart and intelligent, recruiters spent loads of their time doing kind of basic admin types of things.
So Tim's big thing was, how can we get people doing more of the recruitment magic?And they implemented a host of different things, which meant recruiters could go out and kind of do that at a higher rate.And I think that's what a desk level
this kind of AI revolution is going to do to recruiters.I saw some crazy marketing the other day talking about how exponentially you could grow your business just by implementing this one product.It was like, you know, 8, 9, 10 times.
It's not going to be that, but here and now you can get probably somewhere between 5% and 20% productivity more from your consultants with things like AI transcriptions of notes.That's one of the best applications of AI that I can see at the moment.
It's phenomenal.It just puts everything in order, makes it all ready, you can send it off to the client, you can put it in your CRM, whatever you need to do, that's brilliant.
Other than that, you can probably use ChatGPT to get some job adverts and job descriptions or communication templates and that kind of stuff.
So we're already starting to see a little bit of the recruitment magic kind of being enhanced by these types of tools.But I think that's probably also the long term vision of where this gets to.
So I don't know that it will be a year, three years, 10 years, but at some point, the number of jobs, the number of candidates, the number of clients that a recruiter can look after will be exponentially bigger.
And I think the curve is going to be longer and slower, and then it will shoot up in the medium to long term.But yeah, I think that's ultimately the goal.It's just a case of how quickly we get there, really.
Yeah, I think these things often take, you know, even with the explosion of AI, you know, it takes time for tactics and playbooks and actually understanding how to deploy and make good use of these technologies, which brings us nicely into round two.
Round two, we talk about the strategies, the tactics for agencies to win in today's market.So recording this mid 2024, most sectors are still challenging, staffing and recruiting are no different.
How are you thinking about, if we take all those technologies and AI and people, the playbooks or the tactics, what have you seen, maybe unconventional or slightly left field in terms of ways that agencies can really improve the candidate experience and or win new clients?
I think something interesting that customers are doing at the moment, or a couple of customers that I've heard are doing at the moment, is they're trying to get a true picture of how they're performing versus the market.
So if you are 50% down on last year, that might be horrific.But if actually the vast majority of your market is 90% down on last year, you might be doing fantastically well.
Equally, if the rest of your market is running at 90% of last year, you're doing really badly.So taking stock of exactly really where you are, most of the C-suite leaders or senior managers in businesses will have their networks, their contacts.
But I'm seeing some businesses take a really data-driven approach. And one of the CFOs I spoke to recently is, we're just asking if we can outperform our market by 5% and that's what they're trying to do.
And they've got a load of stuff in the background that's going on to kind of establish what that 5% is.But I think that's a real sensible stock check to take in the Dow market.
I also think, secondly, recruitment business owners, in my experience, or leadership teams, they don't like to admit that they're struggling at the time.
You'll very often hear about it kind of later down the line, maybe a couple of quarters coming out of it.So I think the more transparent everyone can be just to kind of set the right expectation of where they are right now is interesting.
and then also kind of comparing your performance to to your peers and your competitors if that's possible and you can get a sense of that certainly for anyone that that you know publishes accounts or well everyone that publishes accounts but also people who will kind of provide quarterly trading updates and things like that i think that's a really sensible um sensible way to approach it because ultimately
you know, you're not going to know how you're performing in that moment and in that minute.But I think the one thing that we've seen above all is a return to a BD-centric world, right?
And we've probably been that way for a long time now, at least 12 months.Some people were kind of slow to catch on to it, but that's certainly been the way.
I think everything that we're remembering now around BD, around clients, start deploying that with your candidates.Don't just look at it on the BD side because there will be a shift.There always is a shift, right?
It's just times a flat circle and the market will change around again. Any single tactic, tool, method that you're deploying with success in your BD, you've got to look at it and say, how can we use that on the other way, which is the candidate side.
Because I think we get very cyclical.And you know, everyone became farmers during the boom period.Now everyone's having to learn how to big up hunters again. And Jamie King always tells this story.I do forget the name of the business, actually.
But there's a certain business that we work with that they do incredibly well during the down periods because they're BD machines.They're really, really good at business development.
And when the market's tough, this is when they outperform their competitors. but they're not very good at the farming and they know this.
So when the market's in a boom time, it's not actually, they don't perform as well relative to their peers in that time.They're the extreme example on the other side of the spectrum.
But I think we just get so caught up in what our here and now is that we kind of forget what best practice is across everything.And that should be kind of the goal and what everyone's striving for, really.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.In terms of, you mentioned the data-driven benchmarking of an agency. Do you have any practical kind of examples or tools or metrics that agencies can really think about?What does good look like?
What does top quartile performance look like in 2024?
Yeah, so I think in 2024 is tough, in year is difficult, but there is a tool available and it links to Companies House.And what it allows you to do is create a comparison chart.And obviously what that will then do is it will solve for size, right?
It will convert that kind of financial data into ratios.So you can plot how you perform 2022, 2023 against competitors, get notified when people declare their accounts for 2024 and so on.
So that's a really interesting tool that enables you to kind of put some more meat on the bones in terms of the financial data that's flushing through the businesses and the accounts that come through.
Harder if you get down into that smaller scale and people are posting things like micro accounts that are less valuable.But there is ways and there's a host of market insight data that's shared.
Again, things like vacancy software, right, where you can go out and you can understand the trends. you can understand how your market is performing relative to kind of the broad spectrum labor market in the UK or globally, as the case may be.
So I'd be looking at testing out four or five different data sources, seeing when we look back, does that make sense?Does that pass the sniff test of this data making sense?And then project that moving forward with the new stuff.
Brilliant.Yeah.And I think, yeah, certainly just going back to the business development of clients and actually now is a good time to nurture those candidate relationships.
make sure those conversations are, one, beneficial and you're giving value at every moment.Two, those are being logged and captured within the ATS and CRM.
And then three, you can then some build automation to make sure you're nurturing, even when they're not a live prospect, candidate or client, you're still nurturing those relationships, again, with good communication value.
I'll just add to that quickly.Your AI transcription is your friend because everything goes into the record card.You follow up tasks in the future.Am I, as Josh, going to remember to call that person?Absolutely not, right?
get to call my mother at times.
So having that kind of task set in the diary, having that automated follow-up, putting them into drip campaigns, which we can get really sophisticated now, cross-channel, that is the beauty of the technology that's available versus what was 20 years ago, sat at the desk with a Rolodex and trying to remember who you called, right?
That's the progress.And if you're not doing that and you're not using that, you're probably a lot further behind than you think already.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And look, you know, all of this is, you know, really for agencies to help think about how they can win.I also see a lot of benefit in the industry as a whole, you know, improving best practice.
And that's where a lot of these community groups like Required, TRN, Team, APSCO, and many others, SIA and ASA in the US, are brilliant for that best practice and what's the right mix of talent and technology.
Because in challenging times, a lot of enterprises will be thinking, can we fill roles in-house?So as an industry, make sure we have all boats rising with the tide.
I think that's really important to think about as much as possible sharing best practice. Yeah, absolutely.All right.Let's, let's crack on.Round three.We've spoken a lot about product innovations, best of breed and, and integrations.
Just wanted to just go into a bit more tactics here and just in terms of recruitment agencies, you know, they are by nature a relationship communication driven business.So that matters a lot and we'll always do and always will.
How are you thinking about like, We spoke about AI and those that may just be a sticker on a bottle.
But really, yeah, what should agencies be looking out for when they're looking at new technology and deciding what's the right new software to bring in and how and who to trust in that process?
That is a, yeah, you're gonna have to stop me here and keep me on track.So number one is, you know, agencies don't buy very often relative to the number of times that a seller sells, right?That is just the name of the game.
And it's a little bit like their own hiring managers you know, how often are they speaking to candidates, you know, very little compared to the recruiter that's speaking to 20, 30 and shortlisting them down to 3 to 10, right?
So, first thing you need to establish is, do you have the expertise to buy well in your business?That's question number one.And then question number two is, do you have time to buy well as an organization?
If the answer's no to either of those things, it's going to be very difficult to be successful.I'd go as far as to say you've got to get lucky to be successful in that instance.So that brings into question the external consultant conversation.
Now, I want to preface this to say there are many wonderful external consultants out there that you can bring into your business to help you.
But the problem is they look exactly like, in many cases, the poor consultants that you should not bring into your business.And the poor consultants, there's a number of reasons why someone might be a poor consultant, right?
So sometimes they just lack industry or sector or system knowledge.Another thing is everyone's previous experience kind of biases them towards kind of what they bring to your meetings.
I can remember going back and forth on probably 15 to 20 truly irrelevant contractual clauses in one of our agreements with an external consultant.
And through the conversations around these points, it became really obvious to me that that person just did not know our industry, did not know the types of things that they should be looking for, the types of warning flags, getting breakdowns of all variable costs in advance of time.
There was none of the things that you should have done. and lots of the things that truly just weren't of risk or importance.So I think understanding if you've decided that you need a consultant, knowing you need a commercial consultant, right?
Is it a price question in which case you probably need a different person?So is it an integrations question? and making sure that your middle and back office and front office is all taught together.
Again, if it's automation or AI tech that you're buying, has that person done it before?Is the existing relationships, which means that they're going to push a certain product towards you more?
I hate to say it, sometimes commercial relationships, you know, there's political allegiances as well that exist out in the market.So, you know, I don't think all of these things are terrible things.
You just need to be eyes wide open to them before you engage and before you even think about buying to make sure that you're putting yourself in the strongest situation to get the best outcome.
Yeah, so much value there.And it makes me think of a startup idea, right?It's like a marketplace, like a trust pilot of specific staffing or recruiting consultants.
They'll be suited for different size of company, different types of whether you're doing temp, staffing, perm, exec, recruit. I'm
The final thing just on that as well is I've been approached by independent consultants countless times offering me an Argos catalog of logos in the recruitment space and said, oh, I can bring these people to your business.I'm getting
7% of the ARR here, if you can give me 9% then I'll bring them all to you.So that is the prime example of actually that's someone that's making on both sides of the deal.
And this is without us doing any discovery, speaking to the business, knowing if we're a fit, understanding their current processes. That is the warning sign.
So just, if you always look through the lens of, hey, is there any chance, is the 0.1% chance that this is us on the other end of those conversations, then you just need to be diligent about it.
And I won't name names, but it's just something to be aware of if you are engaging, that there's great, great consultants out there.There's also some really shoddy ones.And that selection is arguably more important than the next stage.
Absolutely, yeah.They can become a really valuable trusted advisor in terms of not just the transformation today, but also ongoing as new technology comes into the fore.So, yeah, absolutely key consideration.
And then just to the second part of the question as well, I think one of the things that I see a lot is new tech coming to the market.
I spoke to a couple of customers recently that have gone and acquired tech that's not very mature, that's not had significant
it hasn't had volume testing right and everyone looks at venturi in the old business and everyone thinks our venturi was an overnight success well i didn't know bernie that well i didn't work with him for that long but one of the things that by all accounts he did extremely well is he said hey we're only bringing this product to the uk when it's ready and we're going to keep it in a pack and build it and test it through usership and customers until because when you go into the uk market you've only got one
one shot at cracking that.I think everyone in the UK sees Venturi, sees an overnight success and thinks it's really easy to build a wonderfully competent system.In my experience, that's not the case.
When you've got customers that are having their contracts torn up and having money refunded to them because things are going wrong, generally that comes from consultants not being using the system day in, day out, finding the bugs, finding the flaws.
Again, another caveat to say there's some new entrants to the market that are awesome, that are really, really good.And if I didn't have my own allegiances, I'd go and try and use.
But again, not to say they're all bad, but it is something to be aware of.There's, you know, there's absolute benefit in knowing that you've got 10, 20, 30,000 daily consultants using that system.
And that, you know, kind of the sales process that you go through is reflective of the product that you end up with in the end.
Yeah, I think, yeah, there's a lot of shiny new objects out there that do seem interesting, and some of them will be brilliant in terms of transforming part of the process within the agency.
But yeah, again, it comes back to good due diligence, asking the questions, getting some referrals, and leveraging your network to see how battle-tested has this technology been.So fantastic insights there. Right, let's get on and into round four.
This is the speedball round.Quickfire Q&A, so I hope you're warmed up.For those not on the video, we're getting our gloves up now.Time for speedball.All right, Josh, here we go.Here we go.Imagine you are walking into the ring, big stadium.
What's your walk-on music theme song?
Oh, probably something non-hostile or aggressive.Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles.
Something nice and jovial, yeah.There you go.Full of confidence for that walk in music, I tell you.Best movie, Fight Club or Rocky?
This is a tough one.I'm going Rocky based on the volume of films and therefore enjoyment.Fight Club's a classic, but I think the Rocky just gets it on volume.
It's a great, great series for sure. Are you red or blue corner?
Definitely red corner.I'm a Manchester United fan.However, just caveat, I can't wear red.I look terrible in it.So I always wear blue.But yeah, red's the favorite color because otherwise I'm picking a different ball team.
So red by default, unless it's a wardrobe choice.Up there are waist strips, right?
Beach or snow? Beach.Beach.Beach.Love to ski, but beach.I'm with you.Absolutely.Coffee or tea?Coffee.Coffee.Coffee.RIP to the Pratt subscription, but yeah.I saw that.Yeah.Devastating.First world problems, right?Yeah.For sure.Yeah.I love coffee.
Just got to keep the caff on, like try and keep it before noon, right?Otherwise I'm up late. Salsa or guacamole?What?Not even close.Yeah, it's just always guacamole.Are you a texter or a caller?
Caller.You don't get very many texts back from me.I'm fairly unresponsive.So always a caller.
Yeah.And the nature of WhatsApp when you're in groups, it's just too much noise, isn't it?So... Lost in the sauce, yeah.Virtual or in real life?
In real life, yeah, can't beat it.We'll always try and go and see customers wherever possible, always.Love it.Rustic or modern?Modern.Modern.If I think about a hotel room, when I go in there, I want it to be modern.No, it's over the rustic for me.
Any top hotel tips, favorites, round?
Not that I'd be happy to share.I think you'd get judged.I'd get judged by my choice of Not that I'm willing to share, no, I feel like I'd be exposing myself.
Moving on swiftly, e-books or physical books?Are you a reader?
Physical always, like to turn the corner of, I'd never use a bookmark, turn the corner of the page that I'm on, unfold it and carry on to see where I'm at, so always physical.Old school, see a bit of rustic coming out of you there.
Just the old paper corner turn.True.All right.Right.We've got some few sort of open-ended questions here.
So kind of knockout piece of advice you've received either through the recruitment staffing journey you've had or, you know, while playing golf or elsewhere, what have you been, what's really stuck with you?
I just say you're never too important to be nice.That's like a really cheesy kind of saying or philosophy to live by, but you've got to try and give everyone the respect that you'd want.
And kind of, I think that's, if you follow that, you're not going too far wrong in any walk of life.
That's brilliant.I'm a bit of a stoic Marcus Aurelius fanboy, so yeah, a lot of that kind of mindset is amazing, just to keep your feet grounded, right, no matter where you are and who you're with.
Talking about books, any books you'd like to recommend to the audience?
Um, prisoners of geography, um, I think always loved, uh, kind of like politics.
Um, and then actually I think the geopolitics element of kind of how the land shapes each nation and it's kind of positional and security, um, situation is, is fascinating.So that's kind of sent me down a, um, uh, a bit of a thread.
Um, but that's a, that's a great kind of amble into it without being too heavy.So that's, that's what I'd recommend.
I'll certainly drop that in the show notes and take a look myself.And any podcasts that you'd listened to recently or recommend?
Yeah, Macro Monday.It's a macroeconomics podcast.That kind of is the opposite side of the geopolitics, or rather around how the land that we all live in shapes society.
This is kind of, at the moment, there's a lot on votedomics, obviously, with so many general elections and kind of
elections being held globally, certainly in Western Europe at the moment, understanding kind of financial policy and how that feeds into kind of the day-to-day world that we live in and why rates aren't cut in the US because they don't politicize it, all that kind of stuff.
So, really fascinating.I'm not always following every subject that they cover, but yeah, it's one I'd recommend for sure.
yeah well i think both both those recommendations are so of the time of the moment aren't they so um again i'll drop those in the show notes um and lastly on on the speedball round any favorite mobile apps or uh
I'm going to be really, really boring here and saying that the G Suite set of tools is vastly superior to the Teams and Outlook combination.So any founders, any MDs, Just go with the Google option.It's 21st century.
Yeah, life is easier with some of the widgets and tools that you can have, certainly if you're working mobile as well.So yeah, that's a big passion of mine.
I had the ability to just collaborate, you know, just in real time with, you know, the whole suite docs, cheats, everything is, you're always in sync and yeah, being remote hybrid.Yeah, certainly helps a lot. 100%, yeah.
Yeah, so here, we're at the cool down round now, so we can chill, we can just finish up with a few closing questions.
So first one is, if you think about just going forward, what's the biggest thing you're most excited about the industry, staffing, recruiting?
I think without being too twee, we've got, I speak to a lot of founders and owners, and I'm really excited about this next wave.Not to say I'm excited because the next wave takes us out of the old wave, but there's a real social responsibility ethos.
We're seeing so many B Corps now.I think there was probably a few a few people that gave recruitment a bad name in the past.
I kind of feel like that's well and truly behind us now and that we're on the up and I really like the vision and the direction of travel that the founders are putting us in.
So I feel like it's a time that you can kind of be a bit romantic about recruitment now where that maybe hasn't always been the case historically.
But yeah, certainly a good thing that when I look around, I see lots of exciting businesses and more and more businesses now that I look at and think, yeah, if I was recruiting again, I'd love to be with them.
And that's probably quite a nice spot to be in.
Yeah, I think the automation AI technology is really, you know, it means that successful agencies need to be professional agencies, whereas before you could be a little bit, you know, just a pad and a bone and off you go.
And it was a bit Wild West, whereas, yeah, I certainly think, yeah. Agreed.It's really become, and at the heart, look, it's still a people business, you know, and that flows through in the business and outside the business too.
What's the three big takeaways for the audience today, Josh?
Don't get caught with your hand in the AI cookie jar.I think that's number one.Number two, automate everything that you can that's not going to impact how your brand is seen and viewed.Big, big advocate of that.
And I think there's loads of improvements that can be had, especially in a middle and back office.And number three, consultant.Beware. the right one is worth their weight in gold, the wrong one is going to cost you a lot.
Yeah, that's, yeah, tasty treats, cookie jar and all.
So look, yeah, it's been, it's been amazing to hear your thoughts and insights and I think for the audience, you know, the wealth of experience you've got both from being in the recruitment, staffing, business and in the last
you know, three years and more in terms of being in the technology, serving many, many customers.Amazing kind of insights and experience.Before we wrap up, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to share?
I've got some, yeah, I've got some hot takes on marketing.I think we do an awful job being real about marketing in the rec tech space.I think we over promise.
I know of five or six different examples of some things that are advertised with customer names on that the customer's then knocking at the door of the vendor and saying, hey, we need you to take this down.
And I think it just sets the wrong expectation around what's possible.So I feel like if we can responsibly market, then the expectation of new customers will be more aligned to what is real and not hyperbole.
So that's kind of the one thing that we maybe didn't get to.
Yeah, I think, you know, certainly setting expectations, um, you know, both marketing and sales, you know, really helps serve the industry and the customers that we are looking to help.
And also for, you know, the RegTech business helps with the customer experience and the, and the customer journey.And then that leads to, you know, better lifetime value.So I think it's a win-win by being, uh,
you know, just more clear about what are the real features and benefits and time to value as well, which is a big one for agencies too.Yeah.I agree.It's just helping customers understand, isn't it?It is.It is.Great.All right.
So wrapping up, where can people find more about you, connect with you, Josh?
Yeah, address your complaints to linkedin.com forward slash Joshua Breslin.I'll happily solicit your feedback on there.And yeah, that's where you'll find me.
Brilliant, brilliant.Well, again, I'll drop those in the show notes.So thank you so much.It's been awesome.Really appreciate you being a guest on the Staff and Ring podcast.Pleasure to have you here.
And yeah, I'm sure our audience gained a ton of value from all of your insights. Maybe.Brilliant.All right, everyone, that's a wrap.Thank you again for listening to The Staffing Ring and we look forward to seeing you on our next podcast.
I've run out. And if you enjoyed this episode today, please leave us a 5-star rating.Thank you for listening to The Staffing Ring, and we'll see you in the next episode.
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