AI isn’t coming to recruitment. It’s already here. And the gap between recruiters who know how to use it and those who don’t is widening fast. My guest today has data proving it: recruiters adopting AI correctly are seeing up to 30% increases in GP per desk.
Manan Shah is CEO and co-founder of Recruiter Flow, an AI-first recruitment operating system built for search firms, agencies, and solo practitioners doing permanent and contract placements. After accidentally discovering that recruitment agencies were “a decade behind” in tech adoption, Manan and his team have built what could be the most comprehensive AI-enabled platform for modern recruiters.
This conversation gets tactical. We discuss how to run your firm with SaaS-level business intelligence, AI note-taking that structures unstructured data, job change alerts that put you in front of clients at exactly the right moment, and multichannel sequencing that lets you scale BD without adding headcount.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [4:53] How Manan accidentally discovered the recruiting agency market and why one client signed a 3-year contract after less than a year in business
- [10:38] What “RecOps” means and why recruitment firms need to adopt SaaS-style business intelligence
- [17:44] AI-first vs. AI-bolted-on and why your ATS needs to be rebuilt from the ground up
- [24:30] The three categories of AI adoption in recruitment: AI-native (high volume staffing), AI-assisted (mid-market), and AI-augmented (executive search)
- [37:45] Why recruiters choose Recruiter Flow: faster execution, minimal learning curve, no add-on pricing games
- [46:13] How AI note-taking captures tribal knowledge that recruiters never document and turns it into searchable intelligence
- [56:45] Data enrichment built in: contact finder, job change alerts, executive appointment monitoring
- [59:08] The four signals when someone changes jobs and why it’s a triple opportunity for business development
- [1:07:10] MPC automation with branded landing pages, client interaction tracking, and multichannel sequences
- [1:09:13] Multichannel conditional sequencing: LinkedIn to email to call, with logic that adapts based on prospect behavior
- [1:18:51] What’s next: 40+ AI agents in development, gamification dashboards, and the ability to build your own custom agents
- [1:22:18] Why AI doesn’t just lift the average but widens the gap between top and bottom performers
RecOps: Stop Guessing, Start Measuring
Many recruitment firm owners are flying blind. They figure out salary budgets, marketing spend, and incentive structures by gut feel. Manan introduced “RecOps” (Recruitment Operations), borrowed from how SaaS companies run. It means tracking the metrics that matter.
In SaaS, they know their customer lifetime value versus what they spend to acquire that customer should be 3:1. You should be spending one-third or less of what a client is worth to you on getting them. Simple, but many recruitment firms haven’t made this calculation. Successful firms are now hiring operations people (Director of Ops, Chief of Staff, Principal) who aren’t recruiters but keep the business running tight. They track what matters, spot problems early, and make scaling possible. This analytical approach separates firms that grow from firms that plateau.
Once you have operational discipline in place, the next step is capturing revenue signals before your competitors do.
Job Change Alerts: Three Opportunities From One Signal
When someone in your database changes jobs or gets promoted, you get three plays. First, that person’s new company often needs more hires or creates turnover when they bring in their own team. Second, their old company needs to backfill. Third, the one most people miss is that the person was probably interviewed elsewhere. Build rapport, and they might tell you about the other positions they turned down. Those companies might still be hiring.
Recruiter Flow monitors your database automatically and pings you when these changes happen. One customer called it “being systematic about being at the right place at the right time.” Coming soon: monitor target companies for executive appointments even when there’s no public announcement.
Spotting opportunities is one thing. Acting on them systematically is another. That’s where sequencing comes in.
Multichannel Sequencing: Scale Your BD Without Adding Headcount
Many agencies rely on their best billers to also do all the business development. They’re making calls when they remember, sending one-off emails, maybe a LinkedIn message here and there. Nothing systematic.
Recruiter Flow’s multichannel sequencing lets you map out an entire BD campaign with conditional logic. Send a LinkedIn connection request. If they accept in 3 days, send a message. If not, trigger an email instead. If they open your email 3+ times but don’t reply, the system creates a task for your recruiter to call them. You can rotate through multiple email addresses to protect deliverability without buying extra licenses. Everything flows back to one place. This means your team can run sophisticated, persistent BD campaigns that would normally require hiring a dedicated BD person.
