Humans of Staffing

Most staffing founders learn the business from the inside out. Cary Daniel learned it from the outside in, and that gap became the entire blueprint for Nextaff. After launching his own agency in 1998 and opening 10 locations in 18 months, he discovered that staffing experience alone does not prepare you for back office operations, payroll financing, compliance, or technology. When he sold that company in 2003, he and co-founder James took everything they had learned the hard way and built Nextaff, a franchise model designed to solve that problem for others.

In this episode, Cary shares how Nextaff has grown across 21 franchise locations, what drove them to launch a virtual franchise model with a starting investment of $65,000 to $85,000, and how a recently completed acquisition gives franchisees access to VMS and MSP pipelines in healthcare and technology so they can start recruiting from day one without signing a lease or hiring full-time staff. He and co-hosts TJ Sehmi and Sammy Singh also cover where AI is already delivering ROI in franchise operations, and where the guardrails are not yet in place to go deeper.

Topics discussed:

• Launching 10 locations in 18 months as a first-time entrepreneur

• Why they franchised instead of opening a second independent agency

• How franchisees handle payroll, billing, and back office responsibilities

• Expanding into borderless healthcare and technology verticals

• Royalty fee structure based on gross wages rather than bill rate

• Virtual franchise model requirements and startup investment range

• AI agents in franchise development, sales training, and support

• Where AI adoption stops at the edge of sensitive financial data

• Healthcare staffing recovery post-COVID rate normalization

What if the most overlooked talent pool in staffing also happened to have four times better retention than traditional hires? Lisa Doyle, President and CEO of Galt, brings 30 years in the Human Capital space, including senior leadership at ManpowerGroup and Kelly, to a mission she spent her whole career preparing for without knowing it. She tells hosts TJ Sehmi and Mindy Gulledge that disability talent is not a charity hire, it is a competitive advantage that most organizations screen out before a single capability is evaluated.

Lisa walks through Galt's full placement model: sourcing exclusively from community partners with high concentrations of disability talent rather than job boards, running the IRIS psychological assessment to measure attributes like grit and self-confidence before placement, and delivering one-on-one coaching that continues after placement and expands to include hiring managers. The result is that managers who start skeptical frequently end up as the talent's loudest internal advocates, running the halls to find them new roles when an assignment ends.

Topics discussed:

• Skills-based hiring: 25 years ahead of the trend

• Why disability talent is screened out before capabilities are discussed

• IRIS assessment and pre-placement coaching model

• Sourcing from community partners, not job boards

• Four times better retention in client results

• Coaching hiring managers alongside placed talent

• AI bias risks and human guardrails in inclusive systems

• Anyone can become disabled: building inclusive from the start

After 23 years as a CVS Health executive, Jennifer Chavez bought a recruiting franchise. No warm pipeline, no corporate brand behind her. What got her first clients and candidates? She kept reaching out with messages intentionally written to make people laugh, and kept going back to the same people until they picked up. When they finally did, the most common response was: "I wanted to reply, I was just busy."

Jennifer also makes the case that skilled trades are the most undersupplied talent pool in the market right now, not tech. She's watching small manufacturing companies in Arizona, machine shops and clean air technology firms, struggle to find CNC machinists and technicians in ways that semiconductor companies with major PR budgets never have to. The shortage is not about willingness to hire. It is about not having enough people who know what the work is or want to do it.

Topics discussed:

• Transitioning from Fortune 500 executive to solo franchise owner

• Outreach tactics that generated responses without a recognizable brand name

• How Jennifer selects clients before committing recruiter time to a search

• Building day one onboarding steps into the recruiting process itself

• Why skilled trades are outpacing tech in unfilled demand right now

• AI policy gaps in small and mid-size businesses and who owns that problem

• Advanced manufacturing, med device, and biotech hiring trends in Arizona

Shane Glavin built PowerCFO after serving as CFO at LaborMAX Staffing, where he watched small agency owners at conferences celebrate rate wins that were actually bad deals. His profitability pyramid framework took one client from $4M in revenue operating in the red down to $3M in revenue with over $400K profit by strategically cutting unprofitable clients and fixing margin leakage most owners don't even know exists.

The numbers tell the real story: 70-80% of staffing agencies use factoring. Only 5-10% operate on their own cash, meaning the vast majority are functionally working for their funding companies. Shane's diagnostic process reveals why. He audits three years of tax returns and internal financials, and in 10-15% of cases finds catastrophic errors. One client's bookkeeper had been reconciling bank deposits against AR instead of offsetting it, double-counting over $1M in revenue. That client paid $400K in excess federal taxes before Shane filed an amended return. These aren't edge cases. They're symptoms of an industry flying blind on horrific data while making strategic decisions off symptoms instead of diagnosing root problems.

The seven layer profitability pyramid builds sequentially: you cannot move to layer two before mastering layer one. Layer one establishes timely, accurate monthly financial reviews and 13-week cash projections. Layer two implements weekly flash reports tracking the KPIs that actually matter. Layer three focuses on identifying real problems versus symptoms. Layers four through seven cover solution selection, execution, process adherence, and measurement. The firms that follow this framework aren't just profitable. They're acquisition-ready, with diversified client bases, documented margins by client, and operations that don't depend on the owner as a single point of failure.

Topics discussed:

• The seven layer profitability pyramid that must be built sequentially, starting with monthly financials and 13-week cash projections

• Why only 5-10% of staffing agencies operate on their own cash while 70-80% depend on factoring relationships

• The double-counted revenue error that cost one client $400K in overpaid federal taxes before amended returns

• How the $4M to $3M revenue case study worked: strategically cutting unprofitable clients to convert margin to cash

• Client concentration risk killing valuations: why 70% revenue dependence on one client makes a firm nearly unsellable

• The margin leakage diagnosis: three core metrics of revenue, margin depth beyond surface level, and actual cash flow

• Weekly flash reports as baseline requirement, not advanced practice, for competitive operational advantage

• Root problem identification versus symptom chasing: why layer three of the pyramid focuses on real issue diagnosis

• Acquisition readiness factors: client diversification, margin spread by client, and reducing owner dependency as bottleneck

• The 13% technology waste pattern: unused software burning margin because owners chase shiny tools without strategic vetting

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What does it take to place temporary workers on billion-dollar naval vessels where internet connectivity doesn't exist, credentials expire weekly, and a falling piece of metal from 80 feet can be fatal? Jay Prock runs Tidewater Staffing, a family operation that deliberately fights growth for growth's sake to maintain the quality and safety standards that keep 3,000-4,000 people working annually in Virginia's ship repair and shipbuilding industry.

After buying the company from his father in 2018, Jay discovered that the real competitive advantage wasn't technology or scale. It was overstaffing with onsite coordinators who physically walk temps from pier to vessel, hand them safety glasses when they forget them at 5:36 AM, and maintain relationships that keep workers from letting down someone they know personally. This approach, combined with mandatory six-point suspension hard hats with chin straps after a near-fatal incident, has created 82% participation in healthcare benefits where industry standard is closer to 5%.

Jay's contrarian philosophy, inspired by Bo Burlingham's "Small Giants," rejects geographic expansion and vertical diversification in favor of becoming the best operation in a single port. The result is $17,000 spent on hoodies for temps, training facilities with mock shipboard environments, and success stories like a laborer starting at $7.35/hour who exited a $22 million private equity sale as part owner.

Topics discussed:

Instant Teams maintains 18% annualized attrition in customer experience roles where the industry averages 40-60%. The difference isn't compensation structure or benefits packages. It's building around military spouses who treat remote work as their career identity anchor while relocating every two to three years.

Liza Rodewald, a former software engineer turned CEO, explains how she built a customer experience marketplace that solves a structural problem: military spouses aren't a protected class, so you can't specifically recruit them. Her solution was building a mobile app and community that organically fills the talent pool with military spouses before roles get posted. The unexpected advantage: US citizens working globally across every timezone on military bases, which are technically US soil even in Germany or Japan.

The conversation reveals how Instant Teams structures three revenue streams (BPO services, SaaS job board, brand activations), why Liza required every corporate employee to complete Google AI certification for baseline knowledge, and how they're positioning tier-two and tier-three support roles as AI eliminates tier-one. The key insight: whoever owns the training data and implementation expertise wins as customers struggle to train their own models.

Topics discussed:

RPO sales cycles run upwards of 18 months because these deals require buy-in from the top down,not the transactional "I need 10 temps, sign a contract tomorrow" motion of traditional staffing. The primary failure point: nine times out of 10, clients aren't prepared for the recruiting methodology and process that sits way outside the comfort zone of most hiring managers. After building an RPO practice from zero to over 50 recruiters during her 10-year tenure, Chloe was brought in by WSI six months ago to build TalentSync as deal minimums collapsed from 1,500+ annual hires to 250.

Cost-per-hire pricing at 3-5% of salary replaced the 25% direct hire model, but retention guarantees create friction when hiring managers reject candidates at day 9 of 10-day windows specifically to avoid costs. The 2021-2022 period delivered triple to quadruple EBITDA growth before collapsing at the end of 2022, with many healthcare-focused RPO firms that launched during the boom since gone under. The industry splits 50-50 on whether we're six months from fully AI-driven talent acquisition or if humans will always make the final hiring decision.

Topics discussed:

When your job vanishes with two hours' notice and your computer gets shut off mid-pandemic, you discover what you're really made of. Gary E. Benedik transformed that June 2020 gut punch into Arch Advisory Group, then sold it to Avenica; where he's now slashing headcount by 50% while scaling operations through behavioral assessment technology.

Gary walks Sammy and TJ through Avenica's data-driven approach: their HAALO assessment maps candidates to one of 22 behavioral personas, completely bypassing traditional resume screening. The foundation? A Manpower-Google-Cognizant study that found zero statistical correlation between resume content and actual job performance. By requiring both candidates and hiring managers to complete assessments, they're generating objective compatibility scores and eliminating what Gary calls "interview theater": The subjective performances that tell you nothing about actual job capability.

From touching over a million candidates annually at Sears to building Scout Exchange's AI marketplace connecting 3,500 staffing firms, Gary brings a battle-tested perspective on where machine learning creates real value versus expensive complexity in talent operations.

Topics discussed:

Former Microsoft and Yahoo executive David Windley explains how his AI sourcing startup maintains trust through architectural design choices that keep humans in control of hiring decisions. His approach addresses the core challenge facing staffing leaders: deploying AI that accelerates sourcing without introducing bias or losing candidate quality control.

Topics discussed:

Human-in-the-loop architecture implementation: Windley's specific system design where AI handles candidate discovery and assessment but humans retain all approval decisions, creating checkpoints that prevent algorithmic bias from affecting hiring outcomes

Semantic search advancement beyond Boolean logic: How large language models enable contextual resume comprehension versus rigid keyword matching, allowing AI to understand work experience nuances that traditional ATS systems miss

Trust framework for AI adoption: Why keeping humans as final decision-makers addresses recruiter concerns about AI reliability while still capturing productivity gains from automated candidate screening and assessment

Small firm market penetration strategy: Targeting the 1-4 partner recruiting firms that represent 80-85% of the search industry, plus planned distribution through PEO channel partnerships for faster market entry

AI interview capability roadmap: Windley's technical assessment that screening interviews (information gathering) will be automated before complex conversational interviews, based on current large language model capabilities

Executive hiring failure analysis: Why C-suite candidates typically fail due to political self-interest rather than technical competency, and how this pattern reveals itself over time despite skilled interview performance

LinkedIn's competitive constraints: How their social media engagement model (withholding contact information, forcing in-platform messaging) prevents optimal recruiting tool development, creating market opportunities for specialized AI solutions

Culture assessment methodology: The "as appropriate" interviewer framework that embeds dedicated culture evaluators in every interview loop, separate from technical screening, to ensure organizational fit

In this episode of Humans of Staffing, Jeremy Langevin, CEO of Horizontal Talent, demonstrates how his nearly $200 million firm successfully implements AI at scale while preserving the human elements that drive recruitment success. He reveals the tactical framework for "human-in-the-loop" AI deployment, where voice agents handle 20,000 candidate pre-screens simultaneously while recruiters focus on storytelling, empathy, and cultural assessment—the irreplaceable human capabilities that close deals.

Topics discussed: