Hire Calling

How Recruiters Are Using Automation to Win Clients Faster With Patrick Barbour

• Pete Newsome • Episode 89

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Most recruiters waste time chasing leads that will never convert. Patrick Barbour decided to fix that with a new recruitment automation tool.

In this episode, we dive into the story behind RecStack, an AI-powered business development platform built specifically for staffing firms. Patrick, a former oil and gas recruiter, shares how a single insight changed everything: at any given time, only 3–5% of companies are actively looking for recruiting support. The rest? Wasted outreach.

RecStack flips the script by using AI to track real-time sales triggers, like funding rounds, leadership changes, and key departures, so you only engage with companies ready to hire. It doesn’t just identify targets; it researches them, enriches contact data, and crafts personalized outreach that sounds like you wrote it yourself.

Patrick explains why this shift isn’t about replacing recruiters, but freeing up time to do more. Automation handles the grunt work. You build the relationships.

Whether you're a solo recruiter or scaling an agency, this episode reveals how top firms are already using automation to win faster, work smarter, and never cold call a dead lead again.

Additional Resources:

🧠 WANT TO LEARN MORE? Be sure to subscribe and check out 4 Corner Resources at https://www.4cornerresources.com/

👋 FOLLOW PETE NEWSOME ONLINE:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenewsome/
Blog Articles: https://www.4cornerresources.com/blog/

👋 FOLLOW PATRICK BARBOUR ONLINE:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-barbour-082a461a7/

Pete Newsome:

You're listening to the Hire Calling Podcast, your source for all things hiring, staffing and recruiting. I'm Pete Newsome, and my guest today is Patrick Barber, who I have not known very long at all, but wasted no time inviting him to come on the podcast because of what he's doing Super innovative stuff. Patrick, how are you today?

Patrick Barbour:

I'm good, Pete. Thanks for having me on.

Pete Newsome:

Oh, man, immediately when we connected on LinkedIn, I said this is someone that I need to speak with live, and may as well do it publicly, because you are doing something that is so unique, is so timely that I wanted to be able to talk about it and share it to whoever is interested, which would be a pretty big audience of people, whether they realize it or not. But before we get into too much detail, you're the president of a staffing company and RecStack, which we'll talk about in a minute, but share a little bit about your background in recruiting and staffing before we get too deep into what we're really here to talk about.

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, pete. So my background is actually in the oil and gas industry. I worked as a project manager running large capital projects for about 10 years manager running large capital projects for about 10 years. In 2017, I decided to exit the corporate life and start, at the time, an industrial staffing company supplying skilled craft labor to oil and gas projects. That has since matured into a direct hire recruiting agency that specializes in placing engineers, superintendents, project managers in the oil and gas and commercial construction industries. But over the last two and a half years, we also developed a platform that allows us to leverage AI and automation primarily for business development for our own recruiting agency, and that's really matured over the last 18 to 24 months, where we're now helping other people leverage the same technology to do the same for their business. In a nutshell, obviously there's a lot of detail in between there, but that's Cliff Notes version, if you will.

Pete Newsome:

That's great, I appreciate it. So SearchNow, is your staffing business still thriving, still going, of course? How's the market right now?

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, the market our niche specifically is very, very strong. Obviously there's been some relatively significant political shifts, at least in the United States as it relates to the oil and gas industry, which has benefited us significantly, and so we are fairly busy. Although, being a founder of Rekstack and getting to work with other agency owners who are in various niches, I would say that's probably not necessarily true for all niches in recruiting, so it's a bit of a mixed bag and it just depends on where you're at, and yeah, so there's been a lot going on politically.

Pete Newsome:

I didn't notice.

Patrick Barbour:

I didn't notice.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah.

Patrick Barbour:

I'll send you some links after the show and get you read in on all that. Yeah.

Pete Newsome:

I appreciate that. Bring me up to speed. Yeah, that's a great point that you make, though, as those I've talked to peers around the country, it really depends on are you in the right industry right now? Do you have the right niche? And you certainly do. I mean. That goes without saying, I think, for anyone who does pay attention to what's going on at any level. So congrats on that for sure. I'm in Central Florida. We recruit nationally, but it's generally corporate positions and here where we are, the hospitality industry is so big, has been hit pretty hard recently with limited travel, and so I wouldn't say it's feast or famine. But, depending on the industry, we're seeing either celebrations or some concern right now that hopefully won't last very long. I think we're heading to a good spot.

Patrick Barbour:

No doubt I agree, and I think the other thing, obviously, demand in a niche is what everybody focuses on and that definitely should be your primary demand, I think, when you're evaluating your niche or if you're starting out looking to get into a niche, picking a niche.

Patrick Barbour:

But the other thing that I think a lot of people miss is really understanding the nuance of the niche that you are wanting to show up in and the channels and methods in which you're using business development. Right so, different channels will work different for work better or worse depending on the maturity of the industry or the companies themselves, the budgets they have for internal infrastructure. So cold email this shows up a lot, right? So if your target market is enterprise level businesses, folks who, companies that, let's say, can afford $50,000 a month for firewall software, you're pretty much not going to be successful cold emailing those companies. Right so that typically I work with a lot of different founders and sometimes one of the very first conversations that we have is that, specifically because I want to make sure that we're not going to be trying to knock on a door through a channel that I have some relative certainty that it's not going to work, and a lot of people don't think about that specifically.

Pete Newsome:

I agree 100% and I've experienced that firsthand. When we turned to digital marketing about six years ago, it was something that, as you probably are familiar with, our industry staffing industry in particular hasn't embraced, like many industries have. I tend to go all in on things if I discover something that I find attractive. I suspect you do too, and fell in love with the power of digital marketing, but what I quickly realized is we could primarily leverage that to attract SMB clients, not enterprise organizations. To your point, they're never going to get on Google and figure out how to find a staffing company. They have a line of 50 out the door if they're a name brand or a sizable employer at all. It's really wise that you would approach it that way, and it resonates with me and anyone who's tried to do something different in terms of business development and how they go about prospecting. You really have to understand the audience and how they're going to receive the message and the medium that you can use, or it'll be a disaster pretty quickly.

Patrick Barbour:

No doubt about it. No doubt about it. Yeah, and it's surprisingly it seems to be an area where a lot of people are not really thinking and paying attention to. I'll talk to folks who I just talked to, somebody recently who specializes in placing CPAs in accounting, which is notoriously what I would consider to be a supply-constrained niche. I would say right now, the majority of recruiting niches are demand-constrained, meaning it's much harder to get the client than it is the candidate.

Patrick Barbour:

That niche specifically, I think, is completely the other way around. You can, with your eyes closed, run into 100 different accounting firms who would hire a CPA on the spot. If you can deliver that, then you would be in business. But finding the candidates and attacking it that way, and so when I presented it to them that way, leading with a candidate and how we do that, what are the nuances around those candidates specifically that typically keep their butts in the same seats for a long period of time, and what are the things that typically move the needle for those candidates to get them even remotely interested in making a move? And then focusing on that primarily thinking about it through those lenses, I think is also important. It's not just do these people need me or not. There's usually more layers to the onion?

Pete Newsome:

There absolutely is, and it's clear that you've spent a lot of time thinking about this and that firsthand experience right, because you don't just show up and figure these things out. They're not necessarily intuitive. You have to know the market and then you have to know, or I'll say, have some experience approaching the market and getting feedback along the way, and the more reps you get at that, the better your information is going to be and then you can apply it. But again, our industry this is a good segue to start talking about AI is very tried and true in how we've done things, and I started the same way. My company's 20 years old now.

Pete Newsome:

But the industry when I started hadn't changed much. In the previous 20, 30 years it was being local knocking on doors, shaking hands, kissing babies, making lots of phone calls, traditional sales, taking people out, doing that whole thing. And it is a relationship-based business because it's difficult to differentiate yourself from one competitor to the next. We all have access to the same canopool, we use largely the same tools, although I'll caveat that by saying that it's changing rapidly right now the tools that we use but historically we've all kind of had the same offering and so you really had to differentiate yourself based on the individual relationships. I think that's changing at lightning pace right now. What's your take on that?

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, I agree, and we've actually seen evidence of this in other recruiting markets. The UK is a great place to go and find that, where the commoditization phenomenon of recruiting and staffing has been a race to the bottom, where it's super transactional, it's people just basically pushing resumes across an email, so on and so forth. And I would say, generally speaking, right now, even today, as we're recording this, may 20th 2025, there are AI agents and platforms out there, at least from the transactional part of recruiting, and when I say transactional part, I'm talking about creating candidate market maps, lead scoring those candidates against some requirements to some degree, creating copy that then reaches out to those candidates and sequencing it in omni-channel. All of that today can be done by AI, and probably better than you and me, and done at a higher level and more consistent, and so on and so forth. And hiring managers, companies, p&l, people that are managing P&Ls within an organization. Some are aware that it exists, some probably suspect that it might be out there, but I would say that it's still fairly early.

Patrick Barbour:

At some point, though, that toothpaste is going to be out of the tube, and so, as recruiters, as agency owners, you really have to start thinking about what is going to allow a hiring manager, a business leader, to make a your network and pool of candidates, bench of candidates, et cetera, et cetera. I think that the value of that is significantly diminishing as we move forward with AI and other technology suites is helping and assisting those leaders solve problems, not only the actual recruiting and transactional part of getting candidates and butts in seats in their organization, but helping them solve problems upstream of recruiting that they're having to figure out before they reach out to Pete or Patrick to help fill that role. So things like employer brand reputation, load leveling a department with making sure that they have the right headcount requirement based on company demand, slas these sorts of things I think really will help to justify and build the value, continue to build the value or sustain the value that those leaders would see in investing money in a service like that see in investing money in a service like that.

Pete Newsome:

I agree, that's very well said, and you mentioned the toothpaste being out of the tube. I think it's out of the tube and hardly anyone realizes it. Yeah, I almost feel like chicken little when we start talking about AI, where, again, maybe it's my OCD passive nature, where, once I latch onto something, I tend to go deep. And I've been going deeper and deeper in AI since Sam Altman put out his first tweet. I think it was late November, was that 2022? Which seems crazy, right, how long ago. It was now saying hey, check out this new product we just launched, right, and that was ChatGPT, of course, and I just happened to see the tweet within an hour of him putting it out and went okay, the world will never be the same again. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Pete Newsome:

So, as I've gone deeper, as I've adopted tools, even recently, that didn't exist a few months ago, right, these things are changing so fast. I look around and I don't think most people are reacting to a significant enough degree to what's happening right now. I want to get your opinion on that and if you agree and I suspect you probably do why is that? What do you attribute that to? Because it's something I find curious. I want to get more into the details of Rackstack, and let's do that, but just on AI in general. I think it is going to change the job market so fast, so significantly, and we're just not taking it seriously enough.

Patrick Barbour:

You're spot on. It is happening and I think the main reason is not due to a lack of ignorance. I think that at least recruiters anyways, I think the majority of them realize and recognize that AI is for real. It is changing the game. I think the constraint with most folks is just a lack of really knowing anything about it, or knowing where to begin and how to dig in and not spin their wheels and get overwhelmed and that sort of thing.

Patrick Barbour:

The bottom line and this is not to segue too soon into RekStack, but this was one of the problems that we wanted to solve with RekStack in that recruiters, we don't make our money by fiddling with shiny objects and AI and technology. They're a tool that we use to help fuel an actual business motion. But recruiters actually make their money by building relationships, having conversations with clients and candidates and attending events and doing lunch and learns and this sort of thing right, getting deals done, and so that's primarily, I think, for most recruiters. That's where their skillset lies right. That's where they're really strong in.

Patrick Barbour:

Some folks have the ability to dabble and develop additional expertises and leveraging different tech stacks and platforms and what have you. But by and large, I would say that's not the case for most recruiters and because of that, because there's just a big question mark around it, it becomes like this paralyzing effect where they just don't, they freeze up, they don't know where to go, they don't know what to say, and then you have some folks who really go like. The recruiters that understand how to leverage AI will be able to produce far more than those that don't. And yeah, at some point we'll likely be able to run circles around. And for the recruiters that aren't really elevating their service offering in terms of the value that they're delivering to those clients, like we talked about, a minute ago and helping solving other problems other than just pushing resumes across an email.

Patrick Barbour:

Those folks are going to become obsolete fairly quickly.

Pete Newsome:

There's so many directions we could take this yeah, I know I don't want to take too much time before we get into RectStack, because that's what we're here to talk about. But when I think of the recruiting, the staffing business, forget back office operations for a minute. That's its own discussion. We could talk for hours about that too, and how AI is going to impact it or can impact it right now. But when you think of sales and recruiting, I tend to separate those generically, even though we know they're very intertwined in how we actually operate.

Pete Newsome:

But I would say, other than the few positions like CPAs that you mentioned and maybe some of the spaces you're involved in with very specialized roles but generally speaking it is the challenge of staffing companies is to generate new business, right Prospecting. If you say what's assigned a percentage to it, I would say 90% of collectively staffing companies challenges our new business, and then 10% is recruiting. We can always get better at recruiting, but of the two one limits your growth right Much more than the other. But before we get into RECSAC, just from an AI standpoint, with recruiting, how much do you think it should be involved in right now in terms of the day-to-day processes that have been manual forever? Where do you think that lies between? Where the handoff from AI goes to a human. I have my opinion on that, but I want to hear your thoughts.

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, absolutely. To start out, I say this to any founder that I work with If you're a direct hire agency and you're doing less than a million dollars a year, I can guarantee you that virtually nobody knows you exist. You can almost bank on it, and for staffing companies, that's going to be a little bit different. Maybe turn that into more of an EBITDA type assessment, right, because top line for staffing is usually much higher, but, by and large, if you are under that threshold, virtually nobody knows you exist and, as a result, your number one focus, the number one problem that you have to solve for in your business, is letting people know about your stuff. That is literally it Right, and so that is, in my opinion, where AI and automation really comes in terms of lead generation, getting the message out, doing it in a strategic and data driven way so that you're actually reaching people in your ICP, but also not only just reaching people in your ICP, but reaching people that are in your ICP that are actually experiencing things in their business right now that create immediate demand for your service, and using that as an angle to not only know who to reach out to, but when to reach out to them and what to say based on what's going on in their business. We call those sales triggers. But that's a big part of what AI should be doing and, in terms of percentage, it should be doing a hundred percent of that work Today. If you are doing any of that, if you're someone who is doing any type of outbound, where you're scraping lists, you're cleaning lists, you're writing copy and sequencing cold emails together and spend taxing and trying to figure out templates and all that you're already behind. You need to stop doing that. 100% of that needs to be automated and that is.

Patrick Barbour:

I was on a webinar last week and this came up. That is actually the gold of these tools, right, rackstack and there's a bunch of others. The tool itself is not going to grow your business. Just because you sign up for a tool like Rackstack or you start using AI and automation and agents and this sort of thing to do lead gem, your business is not going to grow. The growth actually happens from what you do, with the time that gets freed up by the AI, by the automation, and that you backfill it with more of the activity that actually moves the needle in your business Attending events, doing lunch and learns, talking to clients talking to candidates. Now that you, if you were doing all of the Legion stuff manual before and that was eating up, say, four hours a day, three hours a day If all of a sudden you can now repurpose that to doing the stuff that is actually going to generate revenue for your company, just a force multiplier of volume will cause growth in your business.

Patrick Barbour:

Where I do see some folks trip up, they will be early adopters to technology like this.

Patrick Barbour:

They'll start seeing results, but then they don't repurpose the time that they get back to actually ring the register on what they've gained from the automation and the technology itself.

Patrick Barbour:

And yeah, I'm getting you know, I'll talk to people, I'm getting all these leads and this is great, but I'm not making any more money. And so the first thing I always say is show me your calendar, just share your screen and show me your calendar. They'll pull up their calendar and it's like golf and gym and all of this really cool fun stuff, but it's not backfilled with more client calls and visits and events and so on and so forth. And so that's actually a lot of people get wrapped around the axle on that. Where it's not the AI that's actually making you money and it's not going to replace you. That's the other thing, like, oh, you're right, ai is not going to replace you. It's going to allow you to do more, as long as you're willing to do more. Now, people that have teams obviously have an advantage in that, but we work with a lot of solar 360 recruiters that don't have that luxury and they miss that mark.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, I think your product is perfect for someone who is on their own right, because it's almost when I started. I was by myself. It's a common story for someone who starts a staffing company and I quickly realized I could. As soon as I got my first rec, which took about a week, I couldn't be out selling and recruiting. I couldn't be in two places at once. So I hired my first recruiter much sooner than I anticipated, based on my original business plan. I actually threw it in the trash. This is no good, but those folks who don't have that option and have to stay on their own your solution is perfect for them. I think it's really exciting. So let's start to get into that a little bit. Sure, tell me about your journey that led you to building RekStack in the first place. Was there a light bulb moment or how did you evolve into that?

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, it was really solving our own problem. We, I guess about two and a half years ago three years ago our marketing motion, if you will, our business development motion really evolved from primarily cold emailing. At the time, this was like pre-COVID and COVID years where basically, you could send an email to anybody and shoot your agreement across and they would sign it. And so shortly after COVID, that began to change very quickly and so I began to learn more about omni-channel triggers, this sort of thing, and started hiring consultants and piecing together a motion that began to work quite well. However, to make it work at a high level and have it run consistently was painful At that height.

Patrick Barbour:

We had about three full-time VAs in the Philippines managing this motion. We were subscribed to about 15 different platforms. Our monthly cost just to run that motion alone was about $7,500 a month and it wasn't very consistent. If anybody's hired a VA I know there's good ones out there I don't want to get hate mail in my inbox. I know there's good VAs out there, but a lot of them are not great and can be unreliable, and so we were not immune to that. Yeah, we had a good year and I said to hell with this Technology is starting to evolve. This is back when tools like clay and these sorts of things started hitting the scene and really expanded my mind in terms of what could be possible, and so we put some money together and started building this thing out and, yeah, it's grown to where it is today.

Pete Newsome:

That's beautiful. We all have a story behind innovation and it's usually because things aren't working out exactly as we needed them to. I never in a million years. I mean, my website for the first 13 years of Four Corner Resources was five pages and I would say things like what the hell are you supposed to put on a staffing website? You have needs. We find people like that's it, here's our address.

Pete Newsome:

Next thing I know when I discovered the power of digital marketing, my whole perspective changed. Right, because you don't know what you don't know. And you started going down this road and sounds like you realized hey, there's lots of options out there, but if I do it myself, I can control the outcome a whole lot better, which I again commend you for doing. But not many people will take that step because it takes a lot of effort, right, that's not easy to build something, to do something new and innovative. So where did you? That's a whole. Maybe I'll interview you one day about how you built it right, but let's, I think what people want to hear is what Rackstack does Just start from the basics. We know it's for business development primarily is what RekStack does Just start from the basics. We know it's for business development primarily, but walk through what it does, it's almost like magic right when you see what AI can do right now.

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, totally so. Rekstack if you go to our website, you'll see that RekStack is actually positioned as a recruitment business in a box. It's designed to really consolidate all of the technology platforms that a recruitment agency would need into one platform. But the really sexy part of the system, as you pointed out, is what we do with our business development motion, and so, essentially, what we're really big believers in is taking a two-pronged approach having a really strong, what we call trigger-led, omni-channel outbound motion where we are proactively and aggressively reaching out to and playing offense with the types of leads that are experiencing things in their business that indicate that they would probably need us, in parallel to also having a really strong kick-ass brand through content creation and really high quality content adding value, lead magnets, short form video this sort of thing across, at a minimum, linkedin and YouTube. If you're in recruiting and you're not showing up in those two places, you're really missing out. Those are the two top platforms where B2B decision makers are going to get educated these days, and so you definitely want to show up there. So having both of those working in parallel is what we believe needs to happen in recruiting agencies, to have consistent and stable business development. And, yeah, that's the way RekStack has been designed.

Patrick Barbour:

In my experience and in my opinion, recruiters have two problems that they have to solve in order to do business development at a high level. You need to be able to one, catch people's attention, and two, you need to be able to build trust with them very quickly. We are in a trust recession, as I like to say. Business decision makers, business leaders they have the markets have matured, they've been sold to a gazillion different ways, and so they're far more protective of their time, they're far more skeptical, and so that's why the content piece of things is so important. Right, we catch people's attention through the triggers because it's timely, it's super custom and relevant and personalized, but we also need to very quickly build trust, and so that's where content putting yourself out there, sharing things that you are expert in, et cetera, et cetera that helps deliver both of those as a one-two punch. So, yeah, at a high level, that's what we do.

Pete Newsome:

So let's share some info on the triggers, if you will. And that caught my attention right away when I first went to your website and it resonated with me very strongly, because one of the things I've shared with my team for years is I've tried to encourage people on how to sell effectively. I'll just say sometimes I'm better at that than others, but that was my background right, I was a sales guy and I knew that I could sell when I started the business. It was very natural for me. But, as I alluded to earlier, that's a limitation that many staffings have is how to scale a sales organization, and one of the things about our industry is that the buyers put out a sign in their front yard telling you their house is for sale. Right, it's like a billboard. We have a need and the whole world knows it, and it's on you to capitalize right, and most industries don't have that luxury.

Pete Newsome:

I sold technology solutions for years. I had to dig to find out if and when there was going to be a need. Where are your pain points? All that stuff that we know is necessary, not in staffing right, not in direct hire. They show you that they have a need. You've picked up on some things beyond that. So if you wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts on those sales triggers, yeah, absolutely so.

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, in my opinion, the days of just blasting your ICP, your ideal client profile, just because they have this job title in a company that's in this industry, with this headcount, that is a waste of time and a waste of resources.

Patrick Barbour:

A lot of people don't realize this, but if you go to sites like SalesLoft and Gong and these sorts of things, they do a lot of really good research on B2B sales and have a lot of really good data out there.

Patrick Barbour:

I read a study about six months ago In your total addressable market, in your TAM at any given time, only three to five percent of that TAM is actively looking for your solution right now.

Patrick Barbour:

And so when you think about cold outreach so if you're cold calling, you're emailing, you're DMing people on LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera you're really only going after that sliver of the pie right, that 3% to 5%. That's what you're trying to capture. The reality is that even of that sliver of the pie the 3% to 5% half of those people have already decided who they're going to work with. Right sliver of the pie, the three to 5% half of those people have already decided who they're going to work with right, because when they were in the other part, the other 95% of the pie, they were getting nurtured and absorbing content, building relationships and all that. So think about it that way If you're only really trying to capture that one and a half to 2% of your TAM at any given moment, the effort that you put behind and who you're reaching out to needs to be extremely focused, right?

Patrick Barbour:

If not, you're kind of pissing in the wind, for lack of a better phrase. In terms of triggers themselves, we focus on both company-level triggers and persona-level triggers. Okay, at the company level, we tested over 35 different sales triggers that were used across all sorts of different industries that have a sales motion, and what we found were there were four really strong sales triggers at the company level that worked really good for a recruiting and staffing offer, and so those four were essentially hiring, which is pretty standard. What you've already alluded to hiring being we can look at companies that are posting jobs on job boards, so we look at LinkedIn job postings, we look at Indeed job postings, we also scrape company career pages and for the types of roles that we want to place pretty straightforward, but we do that in obviously an automated way and at scale.

Patrick Barbour:

The second one is a trigger that we like to call vacancy, and so the vacancy trigger is where we're actually monitoring the types of candidates that you like to place and work with, and what we're looking for is when one of those candidates makes a move to another company. What we're doing is we're looking back at the company that they just left. We're finding the decision maker, the hiring manager, in that organization for that role, and then we're reaching out and saying, hey, pete, I saw Patrick Barber just left for X, y and Z competitor, we can backfill that role, et cetera, et cetera. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the angle that we're taking. The third trigger that we like to monitor and run is what we call leadership change, and so that's where we're looking for any type of director, vp, c-suite level leader that is new to an organization in your ICP.

Patrick Barbour:

Typically not always, but typically there's some sort of headcount shakeup right when they're building out their own team and so on and so forth.

Patrick Barbour:

Sometimes they're coming in to cut the fat and right size the business, and so it's not always a hundred percent relevant, but it is a very productive and good angle to take, also a great way to start making relationships with new leaders. We found that to be maybe not initially bearing fruit right out of the gate, but further down the road it tends to yield fairly well. And then funding, which is also, depending on your niche, not always relevant. If you're in hospitality, for example, that might not be a relevant trigger, but for those that where this would be relevant, any companies that are being funded by private equity venture capital, government subsidies. Usually that's to fuel some sort of growth initiative that requires human capital. So those are the four that we, that REC stack, our GTM team, will build out and customize to your niche and basically run automated, if you will, and replenish leads automated as those companies begin to come through those triggers, if you will, and we use that to drive. Now, sorry, go ahead.

Pete Newsome:

Those are things that a human can all identify on their own, be done manually, collectively. Humans are terrible at that, right? Companies spend so much money on systems and tools that will enable people to do that effectively and on a schedule and track it, manage it all of the above and it fails over and over right? And there's so many different failure points with a human involved in that, and it's time consuming, right? That's the other thing. Everything you just mentioned. It makes so much sense. You hear it and so thank you for sharing that. I really wanted you to.

Pete Newsome:

You did exactly what I was hoping for. You explained what's on your website, which jumped right out at me because it's so obvious, so straightforward, yet so incredibly difficult to execute, and I don't have turned to marketing personally if I thought, if I knew how to figure that out with humans, we don't need humans to do it anymore. That's the point. So I won't ask you to share your secret sauce and how you do it, but this is the point. So I won't ask you to share your secret sauce on how you do it, but this is something that I want to make sure everyone understands. If you start working with someone from an onboarding standpoint I'll make an assumption here is that you gather what that ICP looks like, you understand their parameters and once that takes place and you say, go, it's just going to work right, it's going to happen. Obviously, there's I'm sure there's some hands-on stuff you need to do along the way, but touch on that a little bit. Once that initial engagement begins, what do you do? And then what are your customers do with Rekstack?

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, absolutely so. Our goal for our Rekstack users is to keep you out of the system as much as possible until we have leads coming in and saying hey, pete, I'd like to learn more, I'd like to jump on a call, so on and so forth. Upstream of that, the majority of everything is fairly done for you, either by the automation or our team. Specifically, our onboarding process is fairly robust. We have a client success manager, lisa, who's awesome at her job, and one of the very first things that she does with new clients is a deep dive in your ICP and in your niche. First things that she does with new clients is a deep dive in your ICP and in your niche. We have a framework that she'll follow and walk new clients through so that we're pulling the information that we need to essentially build out these custom campaigns for your niche specifically. And then from there, obviously there's a back and forth where we take it to our engineering team, they put it together, then we show it to the client and kind of walk them through. Okay, who are we reaching out to? What are we saying? Is this what you had in mind? Yes, no, and we calibrate from there the actual motion itself from an actual launch standpoint is obviously the trigger is identified, and then there's a series of enrichments that take place where we're leveraging integration partners, but also AI agents, to go and do a lot of what we call research enrichments, where we're researching the company, we're lead scoring the company, first of all to the ICP, to make sure that this is for sure the type of company and opportunity that our client wants to go after. We're enriching for contact data, of course, email addresses, cell phone numbers, because we do like to reach out via omni-channel. And then we'll do research enrichments where we're just like what you would do manually.

Patrick Barbour:

Right, if I was going to write a really awesome email to this, my dream 100 CEOs of companies that I'd want to work with I would probably take a couple hours for each CEO and I would research their company.

Patrick Barbour:

I'd want to know what they do, what they sell, who their clients are, what that pain point looks like, is there any recent news items out there that might be relevant, regulatory, what have you, et cetera, et cetera, and I would use that information to write a really awesome email that is taking advantage and leveraging the angle of the trigger to cut through the noise and catch their attention and so on and so forth. And so basically what we're doing with these agents is exactly that, except it's scale. So we'll deploy them to go research the company, the person. If it's like a hiring trigger, for example, and they have a job posting posted on a job board, we'll overlay the job posting with the research that we know about the company and the person and help to understand what the perfect candidate would look like for them specifically in that role, and then use that to write really custom copy, very personalized. There's no spend, taxing or templates or anything like that. It's one-on-one, as if a human was writing it, and so that's emotion, if you will.

Pete Newsome:

It's hard not, it's hard to, as you're talking, blending these things together that individually are so time intensive. Right, you went from the enrichments to the writing of the email, where, if you separate those and I think we should I want everyone listening to know really what we're talking about. First, we have to identify the need and the prospect and the contact information or the opportunity. I'll just say you go through the process of identifying the contact information and gaining knowledge about that prospect. That's an enormous savings of time If there's a better use of AI.

Pete Newsome:

I don't know what it is, but this is something no one likes to do. It's inherently necessary to do, and those who don't do it are going to not be very successful, right? So it's something we know we need to do. No one likes to do it, no one has time to do it effectively, and you're cutting that entirely out of the process by having the agent do it all for them. If you could, the phrase enrichment is one that is very closely associated with everything that you're describing, but maybe unfamiliar to people. So could you describe that from a high level, what that means in this world of AI?

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, Another way of thinking about enrichment would be getting information right. So if we talk about a contact data enrichment, we are getting the contact data information the cell phone number, the email address. What have you of that contact?

Patrick Barbour:

If we're talking about a research enrichment. We're talking about getting the information and the level of detail and specificity and nuance that we would want to use and leverage in an email that we're sending or a DM that we're sending to somebody that would be totally different than probably 99% of the other recruiters that are in the DMs and in their inbox saying the same hey, how's everything going? We do contingent search and this sort of saw your hiring like all of that we're avoiding-.

Pete Newsome:

You mean the dozen emails I get a day people asking if I need a staffing company.

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, exactly, those would be the ones, exactly, exactly.

Pete Newsome:

Or if I'm looking for a job. Yes, exactly.

Patrick Barbour:

I get text messages on that now for remote roles, which is pretty funny, yeah. So enrichment is just another way of saying getting the information that we need to do, whatever the thing is.

Pete Newsome:

A huge expenditure of time, like work, research, whatever it is need to do it. No one likes to do it, often doesn't get done. So now that's the second piece, and the third is the actual content creation. So that's where I wanted to stop and not have those things blended together, because I think they warrant an individual description. So we've identified the opportunity, the prospect, we've learned about them and now you're using that to craft a custom message with, again, humans aren't touching this at all.

Patrick Barbour:

That's right. Yeah, there's no human touching this, it's all a hundred. There is some calibration on the front end in terms of onboarding and getting it dialed into your ICP and all that. But once that's said, it's relatively set it and forget it for lack of a better phrase there.

Pete Newsome:

But yeah, you're right. So what does someone need to have when they come to you and want to use Rackstack? Is there a specific ATS or CRM tool they need to already have purchased? How does that work?

Patrick Barbour:

No, we actually have a built-in CRM and ATS in the tool, actually have a built-in CRM and ATS in the tool. So if you're not in love with your CRM or ATS, you can cut that expense and use ours. We do have users who are absolutely in love with theirs and they want to keep it, and so you can have that. But there's no prereq per se for using Rackstack in terms of technology and tech stack. The one thing that you do need to be willing to have a willingness to do and we haven't really talked about it much on this call yet but you need to be willing to create content. I cannot stress how important that is. The outbound motion is obviously the sexy thing and it definitely works, but, as I mentioned before, you're really only capturing in reality about one and a half to two and a half percent of your total addressable market if that's all you're doing to generate leads for your business. If you're not creating content, two things you're missing, two things here. One, for those leads that you're reaching out to through that outbound motion, I can assure you that, even if your email or DM or what have you is relevant and timely and it catches their attention, the very next thing that they're going to do is they're going to go check you out, just like if you were to order something on Uber Eats. Right, you're not going to order something on Uber Eats from a restaurant that doesn't have pictures of their food and a menu to select from, and so on and so forth. This is no different. Buyers in general have never had more information at their fingertips to make informed buying decisions, and so they're going to go to check you out. Typically, they're either going to go to your website, but these days, we find folks actually going directly to your LinkedIn page, and the reason being is because people want to work with people. I hate to be cliche, but that's actually the truth. And so if they go to your LinkedIn profile or your website and it looks every other recruiter's profile and website and there's no content, there's nothing that you're sharing that is giving them the warm and fuzzy that you understand their market or that you can actually help them or that you're teaching them anything, it's very hard to build trust from that point on.

Patrick Barbour:

So if you remember two things that we have to solve for catching people's attention and building trust, that's where the trust part comes in, and I talked to a lot of people who are just running an outbound motion. They're not really big on content, they don't really put any time into their brand and for those folks they'll generate leads on the cold outbound, but they're very hard to convert. This is where you hear people complain about people getting ghosted and this sort of thing. It's just because they're not convinced that you haven't sold them. They don't trust you completely yet that you're the right one.

Patrick Barbour:

You had a good message, it was timely, et cetera, but you didn't move the ball forward, and so that is the first problem that content solves for in the short term. In the long term, obviously in the short term, right In the long term, obviously, the other 95% of your total addressable market, who are people that you want to work with and can work with, but they're just not buying from you right now. That's how you are nurturing those folks in the meantime until they move into that other bucket. And then, when they do, if you're doing that at a high level and you're leveraging persona triggers, which we haven't talked about yet that's where you really, that's where inbound lead generation comes from, and so on and so forth, and so, yeah, that's, that's super, super important.

Pete Newsome:

Well, you've touched on it twice and I think it's something that is, I guess, looked at in the wrong way from from salespeople who are motivated to put up numbers immediately, and that is a near-term opportunity, immediate need. Are we going to be able to work on that, versus I'm just laying the groundwork for a long-term relationship and when, back in my selling days, I would almost run the other way If I met someone for the first time and they said so glad you're here. Here's a need that I have, because what follows that is no one else has been able to fill it. We're paying 30% under market, our interview process is unrealistic, we can't make a decision. Whatever it is. I don't know what the problem is, but I know there is a problem, and if someone's too eager to work with me upfront or that initial contact will lead to an opportunity, that means they're going to open that door for everyone else, and so I see immense value in making that initial contact that doesn't lead to an immediate opportunity and to your point, having content that you create on a regular basis. I mean, I've certainly seen the value and power of that over the past six years where, as I joked about it, it was not really a joke. It makes me cringe when I'm embarrassed.

Pete Newsome:

If anyone has access to the way back site, you can see what our website was. I hate to think how much business was lost because someone went to our website saw there was nothing unique about it. It didn't offer any kind of authority or credibility building when they look at it and they would move on and we would never know it. And now I have a high level of confidence that the opposite will happen. That website will enhance our credibility and authority and start to build trust right and in addition to reviews and all those things that we pay attention to, that for years we didn't, we ignored. So, even without all the efforts that RekStack can produce for someone, having content is such a missed opportunity for a staffing company. So I really like that you're reiterating that, because it's something that is very near and dear to my heart. Independent of AI, but as you said, everyone has access to information at their fingertips. Now they're going to use it and if you don't stand up to that test, you'll never know. They'll just move on.

Patrick Barbour:

That's exactly right, and I think, the other thing too. So, like, most recruiters are not creating content at all, and so just by doing content, even if you're not very good at it which spoiler alert if you haven't done it before, you're going to suck at this at the beginning. That's just no-transcript, the stronger I get, so on and so forth, and so that also applies here, like everything else in life. That being said, just doing it there very quickly needs to be a maturation, and the way that you're doing it, the types of content that you're putting out, the different modalities, if you will like short, I'm a big proponent of lead magnets. I'm a very big proponent of short form video, this sort of thing.

Patrick Barbour:

I am a very big proponent of talking about nuanced things to your niche, to your niche. One of the things that I absolutely hate with content these days from recruiters that are doing it is the weekly post of why it's a bad idea to lowball offer candidates or why it's important to give quick feedback after an interview to your recruiter, these types of talking points. I can assure you that there's not a hiring manager out there that needs to be reminded of these things and you're not adding any value to their life whatsoever. By posting that once a week, you really aren't. Another really easy way to differentiate yourself from other recruiters is by not talking about that stuff and talking about other problems that those folks are experiencing, ideally upstream of working with someone like yourself and offering solutions, insights, opinions, perspectives on how to solve for those things.

Pete Newsome:

And yeah, and sharing your experiences right, that's something everyone can do. Even if you haven't been doing it a long time, and I think that's a missed opportunity, and we know you know this better than most. I'm sure that in this world of AI, llm, seo, if you will having personal experience is one of the few differentiators. You can have Everyone's creating chat, gpt content and post it right, which I think is a credibility killer, but that's a different story.

Pete Newsome:

I get a kick out of everyone latching onto that now, but unfortunately, linkedin rewards the wrong kind of content, in my opinion, right. So if you bash an employer, you're going to get a million likes. If you give a candidate bad advice, we joke about this internally. There's some big accounts that will say things like I had a candidate show up 30 minutes late for an interview and I hired them on the spot because if they were still willing to show up, that shows that they're dedicated to the job, whatever kind of BS it is. You know who I'm talking about. Probably because this person will post the same kind of message every month, get a million likes and shares or making money off of it, and it's the polar opposite message that we should be sending. Someone needs to be willing to share honest information, even though it's not going to be popular, and unfortunately, that platform continues to reward the wrong kind of content. So I agree 100% with what you're saying. I also have to acknowledge that most people aren't going to get much satisfaction from posting that information and it's going to be difficult to do, and maybe I'll say that as someone who is.

Pete Newsome:

We post a lot of content, we create a lot of content. Not all of it gets likes and views, but it's the body of work over time that matters. And even though some of our content is generic, some of it's highly specific. What matters is someone is going to see that we've been doing it to a point where they can't really question whether we're experienced or have knowledge in the space. Right, and that's as much as anything. What is worth doing it? For that reason alone. Right, people are going to find you and then the question is what do they see when they do? And we all have the ability to control that for ourselves. That's right.

Patrick Barbour:

The other thing to consider is vanity metrics. I don't want to be cliche. They're great, but that doesn't necessarily translate to revenue. The other thing that a lot of recruiters don't realize is that your target persona that you're trying to reach, the audience that you're trying to reach are typically senior business leaders, whether they're a departmental manager or a C-suite executive, vp, et cetera. Those folks are not publicly engaging and interacting with content for obvious reasons.

Pete Newsome:

Right, they have eyeballs on them.

Patrick Barbour:

So don't expect I tell people don't. And our content very rarely just goes viral. Not, that's a bad thing. I think that there's obviously a lot of juice to going viral and having a broad reach, but I don't get super excited when I see a post from a recruiter and it has a hundred likes. And I look at those likes and they're all other recruiters, right? Those aren't the people that I'm selling to.

Patrick Barbour:

I do think that there is a little bit of an advantage of that. If there was someone else, like a decision maker, looking at that and saying, wow, this person got 100 likes, that definitely could help add credibility, and I do see that and agree that it probably does help quite a bit. But those are not the people that are buying from you, right? Those are not the people that are buying from you, right? Those are not the people that are paying your bills. So that's important to keep in mind.

Patrick Barbour:

And the other thing, strategically and what you're creating in terms of content and how you're allowing people to opt into moving forward with you, you need to give them a private channel to do that from, and so that's where lead magnets really come in and crush it for us in terms of being able to pass that through a DM where they can say, I can say, hey, pete, I've got this training that I did two weeks ago on how we load level engineering departments in the petrochemical industry Would you be interested in it?

Patrick Barbour:

And they can privately say, yeah, I would be interested in that, which is them privately raising their hand indicating that, hey, we might be doing some load leveling in this and so on, and so we pass that off. And then now we've got a conversation that we can then mature into a book call and so on, and we're giving them something for free, ideally, something high value that they would otherwise pay for ideally. So these are things that, as they're consuming, that you're also continuing to put out content, nurturing them there, social proof, right, your previous wins, other clients like them that you've helped, so on and so forth.

Pete Newsome:

Great message Extremely powerful, I think anyone here is that I hope they put it into practice and you have to trust it because you say that from experience. You say that because you've benefited from it. I say the same thing because we've benefited from it. And just the last thing I'll share with you on that is you were talking. It reminded me of a story from a few months ago.

Pete Newsome:

I was at lunch, or went to lunch, with some guys who were in town for a conference I worked with 25 years ago, so I'm old and they're in different industries, they're senior leaders in their respective businesses, and they mentioned the content that I put out and that Four Corner puts out and they said man, it's so great, I love seeing what you do. Or they referenced an article I shared last week. But they both see my content. And I said I asked him why do you never like it? I've never seen either one of you like my content. They're like we don't do that and I'm like, okay, and I realized that happens a lot, right, not always so blatantly, but people reference something that I posted. I'm like where the can you like it publicly please? I would appreciate that feedback.

Pete Newsome:

But you said it so, and I'm so glad you did. They're not going to, but it doesn't mean they don't see it and it is certainly not a reason you shouldn't keep doing it. Look at the views that you get. That shows that people are seeing it. We all want the satisfaction of likes and shares and all that of course, makes us feel good, right, but it's not necessary to be impactful. So thank you, patrick, for sharing that. But back to Rackstack. What else do we need to know about it? Go ahead and I know I haven't asked all the right questions here. Go ahead and fill in the blanks before I let you go today.

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, so we went in fairly deep detail on the outbound motion In terms of content. The way that Rackstack helps to solve for that is, we have a social what we call a social planner feature, where the tool will integrate with your social media accounts, whether it be LinkedIn, youtube. Both of those, ideally, would be mandatory, in my opinion.

Patrick Barbour:

But we also integrate, if you have audiences on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok? I don't, but that integration is available and the idea is that you create content in bulk, you load it into the social planner and schedule it into the future. That way, the system will post that content for you, so that you're not becoming a full-time content creator every day, and the way we have a private school community for our users, where we have trainings and frameworks on how to do this and as well as like custom GPTs to up with nuanced talking points and lead magnet ideas and this sort of thing. But what I recommend people do is you pick one day a month and that is your content day, and that all you were doing that day is you were creating content for the entire month, you were getting it loaded into the social planner and scheduled out, and then you're not thinking you're talking about content for the next 29 days. That way again, the whole point of all this is so that you have more time in your day to go and do the actual stuff that you get paid to do. Right, and that's that's. That's the advantage of using tools like this.

Patrick Barbour:

The other thing in terms of triggers that we didn't touch on were persona level triggers. So we talked about company level triggers, persona or like when the at the people level, so like the C-suite person, the VP, et cetera, when they are doing stuff that indicate that there's relative intent for your offer with you specifically. So lead magnet opt-ins. So we have a funnel builder inside of Rackstack where you can build these lead magnets that they have to opt into before they get the thing that triggers an outreach campaign, right To say, hey, what's up? Et cetera, et cetera. Website traffic through your outbound, through your content you should be generating. If you're targeting the right people and everything your message is dialed in and so on and so forth, you should be generating some significant traffic to your website. We run that through a leads. We run those visitors through a lead scoring process so that we can pick the ones that are actually your ICP persona and then we reach out to those folks are super high intent leads, people that are engaging with your content. Even though we just talked about, most of the time they're not going to, sometimes they do and so when they like something, when they visit your profile, this sort of thing, those are persona level triggers as well as if they are engaging with content and webinars of your competitors. So if you have competitors in your space who are doing content and their ICP leads that are engaging with their content well, your offer is relevant to them, and so we want to definitely try to get in front of them as well. So at the persona level, we're also running those motions as well.

Patrick Barbour:

And then, outside of marketing, recstack has, as I said at the beginning, it's positioned as a recruitment business in a box, and so the idea is that we don't want you to have to pay for 50 different platforms. We have business process type stuff as well built into the system. So, for example, calendar booking link integration so that you can create calendar Calendly links that you can share, similar to what you would use with a tool like Calendly E-signature document feature, like what you would have with DocuSign. There's a CRM and ATS built into it, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, there's quite a few different things that we got going on there.

Pete Newsome:

That's a lot.

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah.

Pete Newsome:

It's a lot. Now, if someone wants to see it, I know you have a great video. That's right on your homepage that I watched after initially connecting with you. That's right on your homepage that I watched after initially connecting with you Very informative. It really is eye-opening to see all that you're doing. It's impressive. So I recommend that everyone watch that at recstackai and we'll put the link in the show notes, of course. But what about demos? Is that something you guys offer, or how do you recommend people really dig in to find out more?

Patrick Barbour:

Absolutely, our website is a great place to start. Dig in to find out more. Absolutely, our website is a great place to start. Wwwrecstackai. There's a lot of information, as you've pointed out. You can book a demo with us directly from our website or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to do a live demo with you. We don't offer free trials. I get this question all the time. I'll head that off immediately as an FAQ. We don't offer free trials and the main reason is because, as I've talked about, all of what we're doing is custom built to your niche. There's a lot of labor and cost on our end to get people up and running, and so we don't offer free trials. Although our service, the platform itself, is month to month, there are no long-term contracts, so you can cancel whenever if you're not happy.

Pete Newsome:

So yeah, that's important to offer right now because I caution everyone who's looking into AI tools that I share our approach internally, which is we're dating, we are not going to marry anyone because things are evolving too rapidly. I hate changing. We all know we don't want to do that. It's painful. We'd like to stick with a solution that's working and everyone will, as long as it works, but that's a really attractive advantage for you guys. So I'm glad to hear you say that. Is there a ideal sweet spot you have? We mentioned individual operators, but is there a kind of a sweet spot that you guys have?

Patrick Barbour:

Yeah, I would say any recruitment agency. We definitely work with a lot of solopreneurs, but we also work with folks that have teams as well. Our solution is really a fit for any recruitment agency owner who sees the value in leveraging technology like AI and automation and running marketing motions that I just described in our conversation here here, but don't have the time, the desire, the know-how, what have you to become experts in that thing and just want to pay a one, one time monthly subscription fee of right now, it's 695. We are planning to raise prices soon, but you right now, 700 bucks a month to have that done for you. Is that? That's who we're for? So that's.

Pete Newsome:

That's a lot of value.

Patrick Barbour:

I think so. We're biased, but we think so yeah.

Pete Newsome:

It is If you can do what you say Now. I haven't used it firsthand, but I look at what you're doing and, understanding enough about the technology and what we're doing ourselves internally, I know we're using it more than AI, more than most of some of the different tools out there. What you've put together as an offering is really compelling. I look forward to staying in touch, man. I know this is going to evolve a lot for you and for all of us, so, if you're willing, let's get back together in six months and have you share an update on where you are with that Absolutely.

Patrick Barbour:

I'd love that. I'd love that. Awesome. Yeah, that'd be great.

Pete Newsome:

Great Patrick. Thank you so much for all your time today. This has been wonderful, as expected, and I look forward to staying in.