The conversation around Artificial Intelligence in staffing has shifted from “if” to “how.” AI is no longer a distant future; it’s a present reality poised to redefine efficiency, productivity, and innovation throughout the staffing organization. Yet, for many staffing leaders, the question remains: “Where do we even begin?” The sheer breadth of AI capabilities and pace of change can feel overwhelming.
Fear not. Getting started with AI doesn’t require a complete overhaul or an army of data scientists. It’s about taking strategic, manageable steps that foster both top-down leadership and bottom-up innovation.
Here are 10 practical starting points to help your staffing firm confidently embark on its AI journey:
Identify a ‘willing and able’ AI champion.
Don’t wait for an AI seasoned expert to emerge—they may never feel ready given how quickly this field evolves. The pace of AI advancement is unprecedented in history, with new tools and capabilities emerging almost daily. This reality means that even seasoned professionals often experience imposter syndrome, feeling they don’t know enough to lead AI initiatives. Instead, find a capable and resourceful individual within your organization—someone curious, adaptable, and unintimidated by the learning curve ahead.
Look for someone who embraces the fact that everyone is learning together in this rapidly changing landscape. This person can become your internal AI change leader, experimenting with new tools and identifying initial opportunities. Their enthusiasm and willingness to dive in despite uncertainty, more than pre-existing knowledge, will be a powerful catalyst for your organization’s AI journey.
You likely have more AI in your organization than you think! Take an inventory of the AI functionality in your existing tech stack.
Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), email tools, and even your billing software might already have embedded AI features for things like resume parsing, candidate scoring, predictive analytics, or automated outreach. Remember that machine learning and semantic search capabilities—which many of these tools have had for years—are actually precursors to and subcategories of modern AI. Understanding what you already possess is a crucial first step to leveraging it fully.
But here’s the key: how well adopted are these features? AI capabilities are often positioned as “advanced features” in your ATS, CRM, email platforms, or premium add-ons, and advanced features tend to be significantly underutilized. Due to high turnover in our industry, few recruiters truly leverage the sophisticated search and match capabilities already at their fingertips.
Before chasing shiny AI objects, really dig into and build institutional knowledge of what your existing software and vendors actually do. Research what your core vendors are doing with AI development and reach out to build a fuller picture of their AI roadmaps. When we say “adopt the AI you have,” we really mean it—you may discover powerful capabilities hiding in plain sight within tools you’re already paying for.
Pick an enterprise AI tool and let employees experiment
Some staffing companies are leaving internal staff to use free AI tools, but this is not a great idea. Free versions often use your inputs—including proprietary candidate data, client information, and confidential business strategies—to train their models, potentially exposing sensitive information to competitors or the public.
Beyond data training concerns, free tools lack the security controls, data residency options, and compliance features necessary for handling PII, salary information, and other confidential staffing data. Spending on AI tools is much like spending on email, phones, and office automation software—it’s simply the cost of doing business today. You must invest in proper tools to protect your business and clients.
At Newbury, we selected ChatGPT’s enterprise version, but there are certainly other excellent corporate choices such as Google Gemini for Business, Anthropic Claude for Work, and Microsoft Copilot. Each offers enterprise-grade security, data protection, and administrative controls that free versions simply don’t provide.
Once you’ve secured an enterprise AI platform, if you haven’t implemented formal training yet, that’s perfectly fine—let employees experiment and explore in this safer environment. You’ll be amazed at what they discover and create when given the freedom to innovate within secure boundaries. This approach allows for organic learning while maintaining the data security and compliance standards your staffing business requires.
If security concerns are slowing you down, establish security guardrails and a simple AI policy
Some staffing firms are holding themselves back from formal or enterprise-wide engagement with AI because they fear making headlines around security breaches, especially given the sensitive PII and confidential client and candidate data that staffing firms routinely handle. If policy paralysis is holding your staffing firm back from getting started, you know where you need to focus first!
Security concerns can often be a major holdup, but they’re also entirely manageable with the right approach. Proactively research common AI security issues, especially regarding data privacy, intellectual property, and confidential information handling. Develop a clear, concise AI usage policy that provides necessary guardrails without stifling experimentation.
Staffing firms typically need policies addressing data handling protocols for AI tools (what can and cannot be input), approved vs. prohibited AI platforms, guidelines for client and candidate data protection, intellectual property safeguards, compliance with industry regulations (like GDPR or CCPA), incident reporting procedures, and regular security audits of AI tool usage. Many firms are also creating tiered approval processes—allowing certain AI tools for general business use while requiring additional authorization for tools that will process sensitive recruiting data.
A well-defined policy fosters confidence and allows your team to explore AI tools safely while protecting your firm’s reputation and maintaining client trust. The goal is creating smart boundaries, not building walls that prevent innovation.
Kick-off leader-driven change by training leaders in AI.
AI adoption is required by everyone, much like learning basic email or smartphone skills in their early days.. It’s crucial for leaders to actively enroll in AI training and gain hands-on experience with AI tools until they have their own personal “aha” moment. While staffing executives often don’t have or need logins to core tech stack systems, AI is different—leaders must demonstrate the change they want to see in their organizations by actively experimenting with AI themselves.
Understanding the strategic implications, ethical considerations, and practical applications of AI through direct experience, not just theoretical knowledge, empowers leadership to authentically champion the initiative, set a compelling vision, and inspire broader adoption across the organization. Leaders who can speak from personal experience about AI’s transformative potential become far more effective advocates for organizational change.
Start with one department and build from there
Instead of taking a purely top-down or bottom-up approach, another easy way to get started is to pick a single department and focus your initial AI efforts there. Train that department comprehensively around AI, then systematically analyze their tools and processes for opportunities to leverage AI effectively. This concentrated approach allows for deeper learning, faster iteration, and clearer success measurement.
Sales may be an excellent starting point since top-line growth is a key goal for every staffing company we know, and AI excels at numerous sales functions. AI can automate lead scoring and qualification, personalize outreach at scale, predict client churn risk, optimize pricing strategies, generate proposal content, and provide real-time conversation insights during client calls.
Leading CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce have invested heavily in AI features—from predictive analytics to automated email sequences—and will continue expanding these capabilities. When your sales team starts closing more deals or shortening sales cycles using AI, those success stories naturally fuel adoption across other departments.
Recruiting represents another staffing function exceptionally well-suited for AI implementation. By systematically analyzing recruiting business processes, AI automation opportunities can be identified, tested, and shared organization-wide. Business cases in recruiting often deliver faster ROI because staffing firms typically employ many recruiters executing standard, frequently repeated processes—resume screening, candidate sourcing, interview scheduling, and reference checking. When AI saves each recruiter just 30 minutes daily, those time savings multiply quickly across your entire recruiting team, creating compelling financial justification for broader AI investments.
Form an AI committee
Because AI impacts every role, function, and business process within a staffing organization, creating a cross-functional team responsible for accelerating AI adoption and value-add is both an easy and highly effective way to get started. This dedicated committee, focused on emerging technologies and particularly AI, should include representatives from sales, recruiting, operations, finance, and leadership.
The AI committee can work together to build up their collective knowledge, share successes, troubleshoot challenges, and drive change within their respective departments and across the enterprise. This cross-functional group can regularly convene to explore new AI tools, systematically examine business processes for high-value opportunities to integrate AI and identify quick wins that deliver significant impact with minimal effort.
Beyond serving as internal thought leaders and strategists, the committee creates accountability, prevents AI initiatives from becoming siloed, ensures diverse perspectives are considered, and helps prioritize investments based on organization-wide impact rather than departmental bias. The collaborative learning environment also accelerates skill development, as team members can learn from each other’s experiments and avoid duplicating efforts across departments.
Create a Teams or Slack channel to cultivate a culture of sharing & inspiration.
Where AI is in this moment, sharing AI successes and failures with colleagues can be a great way to get started with AI at the enterprise level, especially if you don’t have a big project team or budget. AI changes thrive on both top-down guidance and bottom-up motivation. Set up a dedicated communication channel and invite your “cheerleaders” and “super users” for different applications. Use this space for people to share all sorts of productivity and innovation ideas, interesting podcasts, YouTube videos, and blog posts about AI developments.
Encourage brainstorming sessions where team members help each other get better output, write more effective prompts, and—the best part—steal ideas from each other. This open sharing will inspire others, accelerate adoption organically, and create a quick, super supportive way to help each other ramp up around AI while driving efficiency and innovation bottom-up.
At Newbury, our Slack channel is called “how-can-AI-help-me-with-this”. Rather than feeling like AI is automating them away, employees feel empowered to be part of such a transformative change in the world. It’s the difference between being acted upon by technology and actively participating in shaping how it transforms your work.
Turn AI exploration into a fun team challenge
To truly motivate bottom-up engagement and tap into your team’s competitive spirit, consider launching a quarterly AI innovation competition that transforms experimentation into excitement. Offer meaningful cash prizes—perhaps $500 for individual winners and $1,000 for team submissions—to those who create the most impactful, creative, or efficiency-driving use of AI within the organization.
Structure the competition to encourage ongoing collaboration throughout the quarter rather than last-minute submissions. Create categories like “Biggest Time Saver,” “Most Creative Application,” and “Greatest Client Impact” to showcase AI’s versatility across different functions. Encourage participants to document their process, share lessons learned from failures, and present measurable results. Allow for peer voting combined with final judging by your AI committee to ensure both popular appeal and strategic alignment.
The beauty of this approach is that successful AI implementations will demonstrate clear ROI—whether through time savings, revenue generation, or process improvements—making the prize money an obvious investment rather than an expense. Beyond the financial incentives, winners become internal case studies and champions, creating a ripple effect that inspires others to experiment. This gamification approach transforms AI adoption from a top-down mandate into an engaging, collaborative journey where everyone wants to participate and contribute to your organization’s AI transformation.
Get data cleanup and enrichment projects started.
To maximize the impact of AI for your staffing organization, you’re going to need high-quality candidate, client, job, and placement data—and the broader and more voluminous the quality data, the better. AI algorithms and automations become exponentially more powerful when they can identify patterns across larger, richer datasets.
If you haven’t embraced data cleanup and enrichment yet, this represents both a critical foundation and an accessible starting point. Modern data cleanup tools powered by AI can now automate much of the heavy lifting, making this process far easier than in the past.
Start with a comprehensive health check of your ATS or CRM. Identify duplicate records, inconsistent entries, incomplete profiles, and outdated information. Focus on enriching key data points like skills, job classifications, salary ranges, and candidate qualifications.
Investing in data cleanup and enrichment now will provide a robust foundation that enables AI to perform significantly better—whether you’re automating candidate matching, generating predictive analytics, or calculating key performance indicators that quickly get you to actionable insights.
Getting started with AI is less about making a giant leap and more about taking practical and pragmatic steps forward. It can be really hard to make that first AI move, especially if you don’t have an obvious champion within your organization, but you really cannot afford to wait any longer.
For a deeper dive into your current AI readiness, Newbury Partners offers an online assessment designed specifically for staffing firms:
Ready to turn these ideas into action?
Newbury Partners can help bring all of these concepts to life for your staffing organization. Whether you need us to take the lead and get things rolling from the ground up, or you prefer to maintain control while we provide expertise and experience behind the scenes, we’re here to support your AI journey. We can work directly with your AI champion, collaborate with your AI committee, advise your executives, or embed with specific department heads—whatever approach fits your organization’s culture and readiness level.
Your staffing firm’s AI transformation should reflect your unique goals, constraints, and opportunities—not a one-size-fits-all template. We understand that every organization has different starting points, risk tolerances, and strategic priorities. That’s why we don’t believe in cookie-cutter solutions. Instead, we’ll work with you to craft a customized AI roadmap that builds on your existing strengths, addresses your specific challenges, and accelerates your journey from feeling overwhelmed by AI’s possibilities to feeling empowered by its impact on your business.
Meet with a member of our AI Advisory Team
