How AI-First Recruiting Could Save Your Business Or Kill It, with Manan Shah

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. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: 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 introduces "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 who aren't recruiters but keep the business running tight. 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: that person was probably interviewing 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. 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. This means your team can run sophisticated, persistent BD campaigns that would normally require hiring a dedicated BD person. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: How Manan accidentally discovered the recruiting agency market and why one client signed a 3-year contract after less than a year in business What "RecOps" means and why recruitment firms need to adopt SaaS-style business intelligence AI-first vs. AI-bolted-on and why your ATS needs to be rebuilt from the ground up The three categories of AI adoption: AI-native, AI-assisted, and AI-augmented How AI note-taking captures tribal knowledge and turns it into searchable intelligence Data enrichment built in: contact finder, job change alerts, executive appointment monitoring Why it's a triple opportunity when someone changes jobs MPC automation with branded landing pages and client interaction tracking What's next: 40+ AI agents in development and the ability to build your own custom agents Why AI doesn't just lift the average but widens the gap between top and bottom performers ABOUT MANAN SHAH: Manan Shah is CEO and co-founder of Recruiter Flow, serving thousands of customers globally, from solo practitioners to firms generating over $100M in annual revenue. Before founding Recruiter Flow in 2015, Manan built his first AI company in 2013, long before AI became mainstream. Connect with Manan on LinkedIn or visit recruiterflow.com CONNECT WITH MARK WHITBY: Get your free 30-minute strategy call: recruitmentcoach.com/strategy-session LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mwhitby Twitter: @MarkWhitby Instagram: @RecruitmentCoach Subscribe to The Resilient Recruiter for weekly insights on building a scalable, profitable recruitment business.