Latest / Recruiting Evolution / FDE Express | Why 2026 Isn’t the Year of AI — It’s the Year of Operations
Transcript
- Kortney Harmon [00:00:00]: AI is truly accelerating everything, including bad processes. AI doesn't fix bad operations, it amplifies them. If your workflows are messy, AI just makes messier things happen faster. Kortney Harmon [00:00:17]: Hi, I'm Kortney Harmon, Director of Industry Relations at crelate. Kortney Harmon [00:00:21]: Welcome to FDE Express, a short, sweet Kortney Harmon [00:00:23]: format of the Full Desk Experience 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. Kortney Harmon [00:00:47]: Welcome back to the Full Desk Experience podcast. And today's episode is an express, which means it's just me. A quick rant, and hopefully something gets you thinking a little differently about how you're running your recruiting business today. So as for today's topic, I've actually been talking a lot about this on stages lately, and 2026 is, in my mind, the year of operations. Not the year of sourcing, not the year of sales, not even the year of AI. It's the year of operations. Because here's the reality. A lot of firms are quietly dealing with this right now. Kortney Harmon [00:01:26]: The recruiting industry isn't growing in breakneck paces like it once did. Some projections are showing the staffing markets are only growing around 2% this year. Now, that's not a collapse, but it's definitely not explosive growth. We're not quite recovered from that Covid or the C word. And what that means is something really important. You can't grow your way out of inefficiency anymore. You have to operate your way into performance. So there's a big shift happening right now. Kortney Harmon [00:01:59]: Over the last 20 years, recruiting firms really have largely run around activity metrics. And we're to the point that the calls, the submittals, the interviews, the placements, those things are familiar to you? And don't get me wrong, those things still matter. But the firms that are winning right now aren't just tracking activities. They're tracking systems. They're tracking workflows. They're focused on operational velocity. Because something interesting has happened across our industry, many firms actually have reduced seats over the last two years. Fewer recruiters, smaller teams, more cautious hiring. Kortney Harmon [00:02:40]: But the work didn't disappear. Clients still expect speed. Candidates still expect the experience. And recruiters, let's face it, they still need to deliver results. So the big question now becomes, how do you do more with fewer people? The answer isn't hustle. The answer is operations. Operations really becomes the heart of the firm. And I'm going to refer to that it's the heart of the firm. Kortney Harmon [00:03:10]: For a long time, Operations really sat in the background of the recruiting firms. Operations manage Systems pulled reports configured in ats. It was really seen as support. But that model doesn't work anymore. Because modern recruiting firms don't run people alone. They don't run on people alone. Hopefully they don't run them either. They run on systems, workflows, automations, data technology. Kortney Harmon [00:03:38]: And someone has to make all of those things work together. That someone is Operations. Operations is becoming the heart of the recruiting firm because every system in your business holds a piece of truth. Your candidate knows your or your ATS knows your candidates. Your CRM knows your clients. Hopefully those are together. Your sourcing platform knows your prospects. You could have it built in. Kortney Harmon [00:04:04]: Your email platform knows your conversations. Your back office system knows your revenue. None of those systems see the full picture unless you have the right one. But Operations does. Operations is the function that's connecting all of those systems so the business actually works. Because without that connection, you don't have a tech stack. You have tech chaos. And that's where a lot of firms are right now. Kortney Harmon [00:04:31]: They're looking where they can reduce spend because all these shiny tools came out. And now we're thinking how we can consolidate them differently. There was that tech explosion, but chaos came with it. Most recruiting firms today are running on 8 to 15 tools in their tech stack. ATSs, CRM, sourcing tools, AI tools, email automation, sales enablement, data enrichment, background checks, assessment platforms, payroll systems, back office software. And every single one promises efficiencies. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Many firms have actually created operational complexity more than they had five years ago. Kortney Harmon [00:05:17]: Because the tools don't talk. Or worse, they talk, but not well. Data gets duplicated, records get lost. Notes live in six places. Recruiters are jumping between systems just to understand what's happening. And the result? That technology that was supposed to make your life faster actually slows you down. Which is why, exactly, why operations is becoming the new leadership discipline in recruiting. Because someone has to answer all the questions like where does the data actually live? What system is actually the source of truth? What workflow should recruiters follow? What automations should exist and shouldn't exist? And without those answers, technology becomes noise. Kortney Harmon [00:06:03]: Instead of leverage, AI is truly accelerating everything, including bad processes. So let's talk about that elephant in the room, AI. Because if you're in recruiting today, AI is showing up everywhere. It's showing up in your sourcing tools and showing up in your campaigns and your outreach tools. It's showing up in your screening tools, it's showing up matching tools, it's showing up in your ATS and your CRM. But there's research out there that suggests over 80% of hiring workflows will involve AI in the next few years. But here's the kicker. A lot of firms implementing AI are not actually seeing dramatic improvements yet. Kortney Harmon [00:06:49]: But why? Because AI doesn't fix bad operations, it amplifies them. If your workflows are messy, AI just makes messier things happen faster. If your data is fragmented, AI pulls from fragmented data. If recruiters don't know which system to trust, AI creates more noise. And the firms that are seeing the biggest gains right now aren't the firms with the most tools. They're the firms with the best operational foundations. Clean data, clear workflows, defined ownership in systems. Because when those things exist, AI becomes a multiplier, not a distraction. Kortney Harmon [00:07:35]: The hidden ROI is really inside operations. And this is where operational leaders need to start thinking differently. Because inside most recruiting firms, there are huge productivity leaks hiding in plain sight. For example, I kind of pulled some of the audiences in which I'm speaking to. In the offices that we know, recruiters actually spend roughly, they agreed, 13 hours per week sourcing candidates for a single role. But if they had a better discover tool in workflows, many firms are reducing that to about two hours. What does that mean? That's 11 hours saved every week over the course of a year. That equals 71 additional working days per recruiter. Kortney Harmon [00:08:26]: Not from hiring more people, from better operations. Now think about that at scale. If the average recruiter salary is $63,000, that productivity shift represents around $12,600 in value per recruiter annually. In a 50 recruiter firm, that's like $600,000 operationally unlocked of value. And that's just one workflow. Here's another point of contention. Other hidden problem is really operational blind spots. Knowledge workers really spend around two and a half hours a day searching for information. Kortney Harmon [00:09:05]: Candidates, phone numbers, clients, emails, looking through past conversations, candidate notes, client history. But when firms start implementing better insight systems and unified data, that search time can drop from two and a half hours a day to 15 minutes per day. That's a reduction 90% time in research time, which, let's face it, adds up, adds up to around 500 hours per recruiter per year, redirected back into revenue activity. And oftentimes database utilization increases by 300%. Meaning your candidates need you. Oftentimes they're already sitting inside your system. Operations just hadn't unlocked it yet. So the hidden problems of data silos. Kortney Harmon [00:09:51]: It really leads to the biggest operational challenge I see across recruiting firms. Those data silos. Every system holds a piece of truth. We talked about that. Your ATS knows your candidates, your CRM knows your clients, your sourcing tools knows your prospects, so on and so forth. But leadership really can't see that full picture, which means decisions are made on partial data. And the questions that matter often go unanswered. Where are the deals coming from? Where is the true recruiter productivity? Which sourcing channels generate the most placements? Where are candidates dropping in our processes? Those are operational questions. Kortney Harmon [00:10:30]: And they're becoming critical to running a modern recruiting firm. So 2026, the firms that are winning, it's the year of operations. So what does that actually mean? That means a few things. It, number one, means tech consolidation. Stop adding tools. Start integrating systems. If your recruiters have to live in six platforms just to do their job, your operations is broken. Workflow ownership. Kortney Harmon [00:10:56]: Recruiters historically have seen freedom in how they work. And culturally, that is great, but it does create some chaos. Winning firms have clear workflows. How candidates move through the process, how deals move through the pipeline, how data gets entered, how communication happens. And that consistency creates speed. Number three is data literacy. Leaders no longer can rely on a gut instinct. They need operational visibility, not vanity metrics, but real business intelligence. Kortney Harmon [00:11:29]: Revenue per recruiter, pipeline velocity, conversation rates by clients, source to placement ratios. Those numbers all tell you how your firm is actually functioning and the real opportunity here. This is the good news. Most recruiting firms haven't figured this out yet. They're still thinking about growth in terms of more recruiters, more seats, more activities. But the firms that dominate in the next decade will think differently. They're going to ask, how do we build a recruiting firm that runs like a high performance operating system, where technology can support people, where data guides decisions, where workflows eliminate friction? Because when that happens, recruiters stop wasting time navigating systems and they get back to doing what actually matters, which is building relationships. So if you're listening to this and thinking about where to focus this year, don't start with more tools. Kortney Harmon [00:12:27]: Don't start with more recruiters. Start with operations. Ask yourself, where are our systems? Disconnected. Where are our workflows? Unclear. Where is our data fragmented? Because the firms that answer those questions will be the firms that figure out how to do more with less. And in today's market, that is the real competitive advantage. Guys, thanks so much for listening in to this FDE Express and just trying to get you to think differently. Hopefully you can share this with a recruiting leader who's trying to figure out the next steps in their industry and what is actually happening. Kortney Harmon [00:13:09]: Because this is where our conversations need to happen and how we address with our own firms how 2026 is your operations. Kortney Harmon [00:13:20]: 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 fulldesk@crelate.com or ask us live next session. And don't forget to subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen and sign up for our monthly events to keep learning and growing your business. Thanks for tuning in to FDE Express, a short and sweet format of the full desk experience. We'll see you next time. Kortney Harmon [00:13:52]: Time.