Staffing rebuilt: How Integrity Staffing scaled 80% without adding headcount
Client overview
Integrity Staffing Solutions is a leading hiring and staffing firm in the light industrial & logistics, e-commerce, and other industries. For the past 26 years, it has taken an associate-first approach to connect talent with great companies, generating opportunities for associates to exceed their own expectations and advance their careers. Jaime Donnelly has been part of that story since 2000, working her way through virtually every role in the company before becoming CEO, including leading the org through employing over 100,000 associates during COVID.
Solving the speed-to-engagement problem with AI
Before implementing ConverzAI’s Virtual Recruiter, Integrity Staffing’s biggest obstacle wasn’t sourcing candidates. It was reaching them fast enough to matter.
Our challenge was speed to real candidate engagement. And by real, I mean voice engagement, because you can send emails, you can send texts, but candidates really want to talk to someone. In light industrial staffing, you don't get a second shot at a candidate. If you don't engage within hours of their application, they're gone.”
Without a way to scale that engagement, the team was losing ground on every side. Recruiters were manually reviewing applicants who had already moved on to another offer. Marketing spend was going toward candidates the team couldn’t reach in time. And the process was wearing on everyone.
We couldn't scale personalized engagement across thousands of applicants a week with human teams. It just wasn't possible. We were wasting money on paid advertising, wasting recruiter hours, and frustrating our candidates and our recruiters. The entire process was just frustrating for everyone.”
From apprehension to embedded in the DNA
Integrity named its Virtual Recruiter “Recruiter Jamie” – a coincidence of naming that Jaime herself still finds funny given her own name. But rolling out an AI voice agent to talk with candidates wasn’t an easy call for an associate-first organization.
It felt risky, just in our organization, me included. I'm not going to lie, I was a little nervous having the AI talk to our candidates. But now it's 100% embedded in our DNA.”
Three years in, Recruiter Jamie is used on every job order Integrity runs, regardless of volume. In the past 18 months alone, she’s engaged 66,000 candidates and 86% of them expressed interest in the role after the conversation. Fewer than 0.5% opted out of talking to the AI at all. Time to first real engagement, which used to take days and sometimes weeks, is now under 15 minutes from the moment someone applies.
Recruiters shift from reactive screening to relationship-building
The clearest change inside Integrity hasn’t been headcount but what the team spends its time on.
I like to say that Recruiter Jamie gets to do the hands work and our recruiters get to do the head and the heart work. She handles the repetitive, time-consuming initial engagement, screening and follow-up. That frees our recruiters to shift toward relationship-driven work, client engagement and candidate engagement which in this market is non-negotiable for client retention.”
It’s worth being precise about where the line sits: Recruiter Jamie doesn’t make hiring decisions or place candidates. She evaluates a candidate’s skills against the job description and surfaces that information so Integrity’s recruiters (not the AI) decide who’s right for the role and where a candidate who isn’t a fit for one job might be a strong fit for another.
That shift shows up directly in Integrity’s growth numbers. The old staffing math, one recruiter per roughly 100 open requisitions, no longer holds.
It's no longer one-for-one. If I have 100 open reqs, I don't need one recruiter for that anymore. That ratio has really changed. We haven't downsized our recruiting staff we've given our recruiters more meaningful work: more time visiting client sites, meeting supervisors face to face, building real relationships.”
That reinvested time shows up in the numbers Integrity tracks most closely as a staffing business: client Net Promoter Score climbed from 55 in Q1 2024 to 90 in Q1 2025 – a jump Jaime attributes directly to recruiters having the bandwidth to deepen client relationships instead of running screening calls.
Personalized engagement at true scale
Historically, staffing firms have had to choose between speed and personalization. Integrity no longer has to make that trade-off.
Before Recruiter Jamie, we were either efficient or personalized but we couldn't be both with thousands of candidates a week. Now we can scale real-time conversations without sacrificing tone or empathy. Every candidate talks to someone quickly, and if they need to get handed off to a live recruiter, they do.”
The impact reaches all the way through onboarding. What used to take three to five days from first contact to a fully onboarded candidate now happens in under an hour, keeping candidates warm instead of letting them go cold on a competing offer.
Candidate trust has followed the same trajectory. Integrity’s call center still exists but has been “dramatically scaled back,” in Jaime’s words, because far fewer candidates are calling in to ask about application status which in her experience of interviewing thousands of candidates a year, is one of the top complaints about the industry.
The AI doesn't ghost you. It doesn't forget. It doesn't drop the ball on follow-ups. All of that builds candidate trust.”
What made adoption stick
Three years of experience gave Jaime a clear view of what actually drives adoption on the recruiter side and it isn’t the technology itself.
The biggest piece of advice I can give is communicating what's in it for the recruiter. You have to eliminate the fear factor that this AI agent is going to take their job. It's not. It's here to help you, and it's not additive to your day. It's actually going to free up time. That was a lesson learned for us: once we turned that around in our communication and hands-on training, it changed how quickly our recruiters embraced the technology.”
One unexpected side effect: the rollout raised the bar on Integrity’s own internal process.
It actually called out the recruiters too where it forced them to get better at their own documentation. The quality of our job descriptions now is incredible, because the AI agent needs a quality job description to do her job well.”
The business case: growth, retention and staying human
Asked directly how she measures ROI, Jaime pointed to numbers that go beyond fill rate.
I've scaled significantly year over year in how many orders I'm filling and how many associates I've placed, without adding staff. And I've lost fewer clients because of my client engagement and I've increased market share with the clients I have. We're becoming stickier with our clients: getting more business, not losing it.”
Even with three years of results behind her, Jaime is clear about where she draws the line on autonomy.
This does not take the humans out of the process. It does not take human decision-making out of the process. You cannot, you should not do that.”
ConverzAI’s Virtual Recruiter continues to generate opportunity for Integrity Staffing’s candidates and clients proving that speed and personalization aren’t a trade-off when the technology is built to scale with your team, not around it.
Other light industrial and commercial staffing firms can put this same speed and scale to work. Request a demo to see how AI can bring transformational value to your staffing organization.
