Introduction:
Your staffing agency is growing – new client demands are rolling in, your team’s bandwidth is stretched, and you face a classic dilemma: do I hire more staff or invest in automation to handle the load? Founders and CEOs often grapple with this question. The knee-jerk response in a services business is to hire additional recruiters, sources, or coordinators as volume increases.
But in the age of advanced software, adding headcount isn’t the only way (and often not the best way) to scale capacity. In this post, we’ll explore how to determine when a process needs a human and when it could be better served by automation. The goal is a lean, effective operation where every person is doing high-value work and the repetitive tasks are largely handled by tech or automate those tasks.
The Traditional Approach: Throw People at the Problem
Staffing has always been a people-centric industry, so it’s natural to think more business = more employees. Certainly, talented recruiters and salespeople are critical for growth. But adding employees also adds significant cost (salary, benefits, training) and complexity (management overhead). If those new hires end up spending a large portion of their time on repetitive administrative tasks, you’re not fully leveraging their potential.
Consider the common scenario: as requisitions increase, you hire a recruiting coordinator to help with interview scheduling, data entry, and chasing paperwork. That coordinator indeed can alleviate some burden. But now you have another salary, and this person’s day is filled with easily automatable tasks. What if software could do 80% of that work? Perhaps you could reallocate that person to more value-added activities (like candidate engagement), or you might not need that extra hire at all until you reach a higher volume.
The cost difference can be stark. Automation solutions may entail a fixed monthly cost, but they don’t scale in cost with each new job or candidate, whereas people do. One analysis found that manual hiring costs grow linearly with volume, while automated processes keep costs much more stable as you scale. For example, if doubling your job orders would normally require two more coordinators (let’s say $50k each annually = $100k), a suite of automation tools might handle that extra load for a fraction of that cost.
Identifying Automation Opportunities:
Start by mapping out your workflow and pinpointing the tasks that are time-consuming, repetitive, and do not strictly require human judgment. Common candidates in a staffing context include:
– Resume Sourcing & Screening: Do recruiters manually scour LinkedIn or job boards for hours? Are they eyeballing each resume for basic qualifications? AI-driven sourcing tools and resume parsers can do the heavy lifting here, surfacing top candidates. Automation can filter out the clearly unqualified (often 80% + of applicants ), so humans focus only on the promising 15-20%.
– Interview Scheduling: This is a big one. Coordinating calendars between the candidate, recruiter, and client is a logistical puzzle. Automated scheduling tools or calendar integrations can handle this seamlessly – sending calendar invites, reminders, and even rescheduling if needed. This can save literally hours per hire. (Studies show recruiters can spend up to 5 hours per candidate just coordinating interviews – automation cuts that dramatically .)
– Follow-ups and Reminders: Is someone manually nudging candidates to complete assessments or follow up on interview feedback? Automated email/text workflows can send these reminders at scale and even personalize them. Similarly, for client follow-ups on feedback or paperwork.
– Data Entry & Reporting: If your team spends end-of-week updating spreadsheets or ATS fields, that’s automatable. Modern systems auto-log activities and can generate reports without human compilation.
– Initial Candidate Outreach: While personalized messaging is key for engagement, drafting the initial reach-out or sending batch messages for new openings can be automated or templatized with mailmerge. Some agencies use AI to draft personalized emails that recruiters then quickly review/tweak – speeding up outreach without sacrificing personal touch. A good litmus test is the 80/20 rule: if a task is largely the same each time with minor variations (the 80% repetitive grunt work vs. 20% nuance), target it for automation. For example, 80% of scheduling is standard info (time, place, confirmation) and 20% might be custom (special instructions for an interview) – a scheduling system handles the 80%, freeing staff to add the 20% nuance where needed.
A good litmus test is the 80/20 rule: if a task is largely the same each time with minor variations (the 80% repetitive grunt work vs. 20% nuance), target it for automation. For example, 80% of scheduling is standard info (time, place, confirmation) and 20% might be custom (special instructions for an interview) – a scheduling system handles the 80%, freeing staff to add the 20% nuance where needed.
When More People Are the Answer:
Automation is not a panacea to replace people. There are areas where human judgment, creativity, and relationship-building are irreplaceable:
– Client Acquisition & Relationship Management: While CRM automation can assist, landing new clients and nurturing those relationships often requires a human touch – understanding a client’s unique needs, negotiating terms, and providing consultative advice. If your sales team can’t keep up with leads or lacks bandwidth for strategic conversations, that’s a sign you might need another salesperson or account manager, not just an automation.
– Candidate Relationship and Closing: Similarly, converting a candidate’s interest into an accepted offer often hinges on personal engagement. Coaching a candidate through a tough decision, addressing their concerns, or just building trust – these are tasks for an experienced recruiter. If your recruiters are too busy to personally engage with top candidates (and you see candidates slipping away or ghosting), it might be time to hire more recruiters or sourcers. No chatbot can replicate genuine human rapport (at least not yet, and not fully).
– Complex Problem-Solving: Perhaps you want to launch a new service line or enter a new market segment. This strategic initiative might require dedicated human effort (e.g., a project manager or a specialist) to design processes, which you can later automate some parts of. But the vision and strategy work is human-led.
– Quality Control & Exception Handling: Automation handles the routine cases, but exceptional cases will always arise – an unusual client request, a candidate with a unique situation – and those often need a human to navigate. If volume grows, the absolute number of exceptions grows too, and you may need more staff to handle those edge cases, even if automation covers the majority.
The key is augmenting, not replacing. As a rule of thumb, automate to enable each employee to handle more volume without compromising quality. When the volume of high-value interactions (that need humans) increases beyond what your current team can manage even with automation support, that is when to hire.
Metrics to Guide the Decision:
Data can help decide hire vs. automate. Track metrics like:
– Recruiter Capacity: How many open jobs can one recruiter handle effectively? If that number is shrinking due to admin overload, automation might boost it back up. If it’s high but you still have more jobs, that suggests needing more people.
– Cost per Hire (CPH): Break down your CPH into labor cost vs. tech cost. If the labor portion is very high and increasing, consider automation to boost efficiency. Some studies show that AI tools can reduce certain screening costs by 75%.
– Time-to-fill and Process Steps: Are there particular stages where time-to-fill bottlenecks? If interview scheduling is adding 5 days, automation can cut that. If background checks or onboarding doc collection are slow due to manual chasing, automate. If the bottleneck is actually finding enough candidates or convincing them, more skilled recruiters might be the answer.
– Employee Overtime/Stress: If your team is consistently working late, burning out, or you notice quality slipping, and it’s due to volume of repetitive tasks, that screams for automation. Conversely, if the stress is coming from too many relationships to manage (candidates/clients) and not enough hours to give each personal attention, consider adding headcount.
One revealing metric is recruiter productivity: e.g., placements per recruiter per month. If you invest in a new automation tool, does that number go up? If yes, you scaled with tech. If you’re at max productivity per recruiter, even with good tools, then adding another recruiter could directly add placements.
Hybrid Approach – The Optimal Model:
In reality, it’s rarely either/or. The best approach is usually a combination: hire the right people and automate the right tasks. One example: instead of hiring two additional junior coordinators to handle admin, you invest in an automation suite and hire one additional senior recruiter. The automation takes care of coordinating and data updates, while the new recruiter focuses on building client relationships and engaging candidates. Net result: you spend roughly the same or less, but revenue potential grows more because you added revenue-generating talent supported by productivity-enhancing tech.
As your agency evolves, continuously reassess. Perhaps you automated your interview scheduling, and things ran smoothly until you doubled the number of clients – now the constraint is client management, so you hire a client success manager. Then later, you find sourcing is the slow part, so you invest in AI sourcing tools. It’s an ongoing balancing act to maximize efficiency and service quality.
Remember, automation scales more easily than people. If you set up a process to run automatically, it can likely handle 5x volume with minimal extra cost, whereas people cannot work 5x harder without burnout. So lean on automation to stretch capacity, and deploy your human hires where they make the most impact – in relationships, strategy, and dealing with the non-routine.
Read the full story of AI Automation Fever on Staffing.
Conclusion:
“Is more people always the answer?” Not anymore. In staffing today, the answer is nuanced. More people help when more human-driven interactions are needed. But if people are being used as expensive cogs to do machine-like tasks, it’s time to rethink. The agencies that thrive are those that smartly blend talent and tech – automating aggressively where it counts and hiring thoughtfully where humans truly make the difference.
At Everyday Consultants, we often help firms perform this analysis. We’ll map your workflows, identify quick automation wins (sometimes within Zoho’s suite of tools or via custom integrations), and highlight roles where a human touch is indispensable. The result is a roadmap that might save you from two unnecessary hires, and instead free up budget to hire one superstar recruiter (or to reward your current team) – all while automation takes care of the rest.
In short, grow your team and your tech in harmony. Leverage automation to do more with the great people you have, and bring in new people when higher-level needs justify it. That balanced approach will keep your operations lean, your team focused on what matters, and your profitability strong as you scale.
