How Can AI Drive Sustainable Growth in Your Recruitment Business, with Julie McGrath, Ep #224

The Resilient Recruiter

Already exploring AI but unsure how to maximize its potential to elevate your recruitment business?

In this episode, our coach and Client Services Director, Julie McGrath, shares how you can further embrace AI when creating content specific to your niche market. Julie shares insights on how you can use AI to drive sustainable growth for your recruitment business.

Julie is a highly experienced coach with 15 years of experience in the recruitment industry, including 8 years as a solo recruiter specializing in Tech and Executive recruitment. Before her career in recruitment, Julie worked in large-scale operations and managed 200 people.

You will also get a preview of an AI Program she designed explicitly for Recruiters and recruitment business owners, including a Training program for recruiters to help with Business Development, account management, and candidate sourcing.

Episode Outline and Highlights

• [02:31] From a graphic designer to a recruitment business owner - how Julie got into recruitment.

• [09:57] Retrospect: things Julie would have done differently when starting her business.

• [16:02] Developing programs to assist young job seekers.

• [26:30] Running a successful RPO model.

• [31:03] Common qualities of successful recruitment business owners.

• [41:09] Leveraging AI to improve your recruitment business.

• [51:31] Creating content specific to your client and candidates’ needs through AI.

• [1:01:30] Testing ChatGPT 4.0.

Common Success Qualities of Recruiters and Recruitment Business Owners

Julie’s experience as a recruiter, business owner, and recruitment coach puts her in a position to work with some top-performing recruiters and business owners. She shared great insights and observations on the most common challenges and critical success factors.

“I'm very fortunate to be in this position where I get a peek behind the curtain of the top-performing recruiters. And then also those that are maybe new to the industry that are just starting and trying to define their feet, like we all did it at one point or another in our career.”

Here are the critical success factors that she shared:

• Consistency in actions and routines is foundational to success in business and personal growth.

• Implementation and Action - Top performers build consistent work routines and stay focused on both immediate tasks and long-term goals.

• Work on and in the Business - Balancing working "in" the business (daily operations) and "on" the business (strategic growth) is crucial.

• Goal Setting - Setting specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely (SMART) goals is essential.

• Accountability ensures continuous progress and the ability to navigate setbacks.

• Business Building vs. Job Creation - Successful recruitment business owners understand the difference between creating a business and creating a job for themselves.

• Resilience - This involves self-awareness, flexibility, and adaptability.

• Self-Awareness and Adaptability - Adapting to changes and being open to new approaches can lead to sustained success.

Julie believes these key factors can help business owners achieve high performance, build sustainable businesses, and effectively navigate industry challenges.

Leveraging AI to Enhance Your Recruitment Business

During our Live Summit in Edinburgh last year, Julie delivered a fascinating session on leveraging AI to improve recruitment businesses. ChatGPT was pretty new at that time, and she was able to provide an amazing take on why the recruitment community needs to embrace AI.

The world will look so different in the next 3-5 years, and I think that understanding AI as early as now can enable recruiters to contribute a more profound impact to their industries. Julie and I discussed her passion for AI, and how it can help recruiters and business owners further engage with their clients and candidates.

Julie pointed out that AI isn’t a new player on the field; it’s just that Generative AI, ChatGPT, and OpenAI have recently brought it into the limelight. She explained that while AI has been used for decades, primarily in automation, it’s now becoming more accessible to individuals and small businesses.

Julie’s passion for AI is driven by its potential to revolutionize the recruitment industry, and she believes that getting ahead of the curve will have a more positive impact. Julie underscored that even small businesses can compete effectively by creating targeted content and using AI to understand and meet the needs of their clients and candidates.

If you want to know more about how we can integrate AI into our recruitment process, you may check the link below for a free training session developed by Juli and our colleague Leanne.

Creating AI Content That Is Specific to Your Client and Candidate Needs

Julie also touched upon creating content with AI while focusing on providing a great experience for your clients and candidates. This is how she puts it: “And if you can spend your time and your skills more focused on providing a great experience for your clients and your candidate, using the emotional intelligence side of things that can't be replaced by AI just yet, and being able to use AI as a crutch to make you work faster and smarter with the data-driven insights and information that it can give you, I can only see this being a positive change in our world and the world of recruiting overall.”

She outlined a straightforward process when creating AI content with a human touch:

• Create your brand guidelines and support your content creation through data and insights.

• Understanding your clients - what they look for and what they want to consume will enable you to make data-driven decisions.

• Based on these data and insights, you are creating content for a specific person, nation, and target audience, instead of creating content for ‘everybody.

Julie McGrath Bio and Contact Info

Julie McGrath is a highly experienced coach and conducts our 1-2-1 monthly calls with members. She has 15 years of experience in the recruitment industry both in large-scale operations and running a solopreneur agency specializing in Tech and Executive recruitment.

She is an active STEM ambassador and panel judge for various socio-economic and diversity initiatives. She currently manages her own digital skills agency that supports businesses to embrace new technological processes and upskill staff for the new digital world of work.

Julie is also an NLP practitioner and this means she can help business owners break through mental and physical barriers so they can live a life of abundance and release the restrictions of mediocrity. Julie is well versed in helping recruitment business owners with business burnout, stress, loss of purpose and direction, and also those business owners who are doing well and want to continue achieving and attracting success into their lives.

• Julie on LinkedIn

• Access to Free Training on AI: Recruitmentcoach.com/AI

• Comprehensive Program on How to Recruit Smarter with AI

People and Resources Mentioned

• ChatGPT

• Fireflies

• Otter

• Google Gemini

• Recruitment Coach Live Summit in Florida

Connect with Mark Whitby

• Get your FREE 30-minute strategy call

• Mark on LinkedIn

• Mark on Twitter: @MarkWhitby

• Mark on Facebook

• Mark on Instagram: @RecruitmentCoach

Subscribe to The Resilient Recruiter

If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please take two minutes to leave a review. Your review is greatly appreciated because it helps us attract a bigger audience and help more recruiters.