Two Eras of Growth: What AI Changes About the Model
The First Era: Pandemic-Driven Scale
Healthcare staffing grew 10x in three years during the pandemic. I had a front-row seat. I helped lead one staffing firm from $120M to $1.2B through innovation, acquisitions, and platform thinking.
But that growth was powered by unfortunate, pandemic-driven market demand. The tailwind did a lot of the work.
The Second Era: AI-Native Growth
What I'm part of building now is different. And I think it tells us something about where this whole industry is headed.
Over the past year, we've gone back to first principles to reimagine how work is done. We established an AI-native tech stack to complement our legacy systems. Not rip and replace, but rethink and extend.
We used AI to execute master data management work that would have taken a traditional team months. We built infrastructure, improved pay intelligence, shortened response times, and created an agent capable of personalized, 24/7 candidate engagement.
The Results
The results have been concrete:
- Placement growth of 55% quarter over quarter
- Outreach response rates above 40%
- 100% recruiter adoption of AI tools — not because anyone mandated it, but because the AI-assisted path was genuinely better and saved every recruiter 5-10 hours per week
Our innovation and business intelligence team increased their own output 30x, and didn't just imagine improvements — they built them. Now our technology team is leveraging AI to accelerate resolution of long-standing tech debt and deploy system improvements faster than anyone thought possible.
What I'm Most Proud Of
But here's what I'm most proud of: roles are changing. Team members are delivering wins they never had the opportunity to before. And we are encouraging them to question these developments, get involved, use their expertise and discernment, and ultimately help us improve how we work with AI. That's not a slogan. It's how adoption actually works.
Two Eras, Two Models
Here's what strikes me about the difference between these two eras of growth:
The 10x growth era was about scaling the human model. More recruiters, more capacity, more infrastructure to keep up. What we're building now is a different model entirely. AI isn't making the old way faster. It's creating a new way that compounds.
During the pandemic growth, the question was "can we keep up?" Now the question is "what becomes possible when every workflow in the business has AI woven into it?"
The staffing firms that are building AI into their operating core — not as a department, not as a side project, but as the way they run — are going to separate structurally from firms that treat it as a tool on the side. I've now seen both sides of transformational growth, and this one feels more durable.