Reinventing the Middle and Back Office: The Secret to Increased Profits

Welcome to Reinventing the Middle and Back Office: The Secret of Increased Profits and thanks for coming to today's webinar. Staffing specific front office software is now the industry standard for managing recruiting operations but for many firms middle and back office processes they're still manual, fragmented and inefficient. It's a patchwork of legacy systems typically with costly work around slow growth and increased risk.

In this webinar you'll discover how leading staffing companies are using modern staffing specific middle and back office solutions to improve efficiency, enhance the worker experience and drive revenue growth. Automating onboarding, payroll and billing allows them to do much more with less and faster payments help attract and retain top talent while unlocking new revenue opportunities. Streamline compliance reduces risk and enables expansion into new markets. Whether your goal is to cut costs, grow faster, deliver a better experience for both workers and clients this session hopefully will show you how the right middle and back office technology can be your secret weapon to increase profits. Before we get started we will have questions at the end and we'll go through anything that you've registered on the Q &A and previously.

We will also, if we don't get to all questions, we will send out a copy of the slides and we'll answer any questions within 48 hours.

Just a quick reminder about SIA, we make the world of work work better and we inform, connect and elevate the workforce solutions ecosystem and we're the global advisor for staffing and workforce solutions. This particular webinar, it's open to everyone, however, just a reminder that only members will have access to the SIA research that is mentioned today. We have a vast range of events, research and editorial products for staffing firms and buyer members and these are laser focused specifically on staffing and the solutions.

And as an SIA member you enjoy access to SIA's objective research and analysts, editorial publications, advisory services and event discounts on CCWP certification courses and our conferences. And just to mention conferences, we've got several coming up. We've got a CCPWP workshop, RISC workshop on the 28th to the 10th.

But more importantly, or not more importantly, but a larger event is the Healthcare Staffing Summit. The Healthcare Staffing Summit is the preeminent destination for staffing leaders serving the healthcare industry. And it's a, from nursing to local tenants to allied health and more, the summit provides deep dive discussions into key healthcare segments. So registered today is still plenty of time. I think it's the 5th 7th of November and it's in

Red Rock Resort, Las Vegas. And just on to today's speakers, I should introduce myself. I'm Kevin O'Neill, the SIA's Technology Research Director. I've been 30 plus years in the staffing industry, much of that time as a CIO in the APAC region for Ranstad. I've been involved with designing and building middle and back office applications and implementing those also.

and I've had the privilege at one point of managing payroll and billing teams. So I've had quite a lot of experience in the industry and have a passion for this particular topic. Kirti Shenoy is the CEO and co-founder of Zeal, a leading staffing operations platform that makes it faster, easier and better for staffing companies to onboard pay and bill. And under her leadership, Zeal has raised over 30 million from investors like Spark Capital and Y Combinator.

So, Kirti also serves on the, interested on the American Payroll Association's Digital Payments Committee, where she works with policy makers on innovative initiatives such as EWA and digital payment legislation. And prior to Zeal, Kirti developed white label banking products at Bankmobile. Kirti, just looking at your background, I'm curious about where you got your passion for the middle and back office processes and particularly as it relates to staffing.

Thanks so much, Kevin. Super excited to be here.

Yeah, mean, I don't think anyone wakes up one day and thinks, you know, I really want to focus on building software for the middle and back office. But I really fell into the world of staffing similar to a lot of the staffing companies on this call. I owned and operated my own staffing business that was really focused on event staffing. And as I scaled that business, I ran into tons of problems, staying compliant and paying out my workers effectively, which really led me to create this platform. So really building for the use case that I wish I

when I have my own staffing business.

Yeah, I think if we all look back a few years ago, if we had all the stuff available that's available today, we'd probably make a lot of different decisions, wouldn't we?

Yes, absolutely.

Right, on to the main topic in staffing technology, the rising value proposition of middle and back office. we always like to, in these webinars, we always like to set the scene so that we're all talking the same language. So what do we mean when we talk about the middle and back office? And this particular slide is from our staffing.

tech stack report and of course in 2025 the whole staffing tech stack is very complex. So we're really talking about the areas in blue and green, so onboarding compliance, payrolls, workforce scheduling, time and attendance, rates management and assignment and contract management and of course the kind core payroll and billing functions. Financials and HR, put in there also, although we don't deal with those so much because they typically are pretty generic and less staffing specific. Mobile apps and portals are becoming way more important, particularly in the middle and back office. And of course there are other things that play into the stack integration and workflow tools as well. So that's really the topic area that we're that we're viewing in this particular webinar.

And what does it look like in terms of the market? Well, we did a staffing company survey in 2024 and we asked staffing firms what are their popular back office software vendors? And this is the results, the slide shows that there's a fragmented market with a lot of different vendors. It's not really dominated by anybody but notice that many of these vendors do not have staffing specific functionality. are generic and used across a number of industries but certainly this particular market looks very very ripe for innovation.

And if you look at the front office software vendors, we also ask which primary and secondary front office software vendors that staffing firms used. You'll see that almost all of these vendors have staffing related functionality. They're designed for the industry. And you'll see Bullhorn at 32 % is the market leader by quite a way. But it's still a fragmented market but I think innovation is happening in this market probably unlike the back office. Currie, why do you think there's a difference between the way that kind of market plays out between front and middle and back office?

Yeah, Kevin, I think it's really interesting that we see a lot more front office solutions for staffing in particular. I know when I go to staffing conferences, it seems like most of the people boothing and showing off their solutions are really focused on the front office.

My hunch is that this is really because for most staffing companies, their largest headcount is really dedicated towards recruiters. So because their largest headcount is there, they want to really optimize that process, continue to grow with the same existing headcount, which is why they're probably investing in the front of office. So that's probably one reason. Another reason is it's actually quite hard to build back office, especially for staffing. There are so many nuances of what staffing companies need to get right across payroll compliance, HR compliance, and more. So it's kind of hard for software vendors to understand all the nuances of those particular use cases in the middle and back office. But that's exactly what we like to focus on at Zeal because we think that not enough people are working on solving that problem for these businesses.

Yeah, interesting. I'd certainly agree with that. It's, you know, all the focus and a lot of the head count is in recruiters in the front office. As the business is scaled though, there's always a requirement to throw more people at the problem in the back office. That's exactly what's occurred. So we also asked respondents, we wanted to gauge their satisfaction for both front office and back office software and we found it was just lukewarm. So front office software scored a net promoter score of minus 13 and back office a net promoter score of minus 17. you know, people are only lukewarm about the technology that they have available to them in the industry. So a little bit of dissatisfaction there.

Does this say something about the tech itself or the staffing firm's approach to the technology or both?

A little bit of both. I think for back office in particular, I typically see that staffing companies are in two buckets of companies. Either one, a staffing company is using a very legacy back office stack and they haven't really upgraded their software over the past two to three decades. Maybe that's because two to three decades ago, there were only a couple vendors out there and they've stuck to that process and kept their entire system on there and haven't really looked at any of the new vendors. Or it's just because they're in the second bucket and they actually haven't figured out how to stitch all the elements of their back office processing together in a way that seems really seamless. So I think a lot of people are frustrated with their back office software systems, either because they're using a solution that seems so stuck in the past, or because they're using five to 15 different solutions and trying to piece them all together, but feel frustrated that it's not seamless and there's a lot of manual intervention that has to happen to keep it going.

Certainly in some of my reports and the feedback that I've had, that integration, whether it's in the front, middle or back, but typically between the middle and back office is problematic and it does reduce people's view of how well that software and those processes work.

Interesting, another kind of interesting point here that's come out of the report. So we looked at whether they're using the same vendor in the front office and middle and back or different vendors and many staffing firms, I think that's over 70%, use different vendors for primary and front office and primary back office software. So about 30 % are using the same vendor, so that's that end to end. why do think so many vendors are using different, so many staffing companies are using vendors from, different vendors from front, middle and back office software?

Well, first off, I think there's very few vendors out there in the market that kind of do the front middle and back office. So I think more and more companies as they continue to scale, join the market, especially the companies that have really started their staffing business in the past five, 10 years, really are looking at the plethora of solutions out there. I know, again, I go to these staffing conference and I feel like there's all these new ATS solutions that continue popping out. And staffing companies are really excited to sort of invest in new, innovative front of office companies and sort of move away from those all-in-one solutions. So I think this is a track in the right direction. And again, I think the expertise of software vendors that build for the front of office is very different from the middle and back office. With the front of office, again, you're building for that recruiter persona. You're trying to think about how you can make them as efficient as possible, which is why we've seen a lot of these AI recruitment sort of tools come out into the market. With the middle and back office, it's all about how do we keep the motion going.

And how do we keep these businesses compliant and how do we get these workers paid as quickly and efficiently as possible. So think it's a different expertise building for a different persona for the front and middle and back office. And I think this same vendor for front and back office is going to continue to reduce in percentage points year over year.

Yeah, great point there about the different personas. I think also the amount of effort that goes into building some of those middle and back office processes is enormous. And so when all the focus has gone into the front office, it's really difficult to get something in the middle and back office that's really kind of enterprise grade and the same sort of solution standard to run right through the stacks. That's probably why you don't get so many end-to-end solutions that are really top quality.

So just jumping on to a recent report that we did, which was the end of 2024 on the global staffing middle and back office software landscape. And what we do roughly yearly is look at all the solutions that are available in this particular area.

And it would be fair to say it's starting to become front of mind for many staffing firms. Much of the focus, as Kirti mentioned, has been on front office capabilities, candidate attraction, ATS, and of course AI tools taking up most of the interest and spend. it's certainly enhancing, upgrading, and innovating in the middle and back office in the AI age is key to keeping up with the expectations of clients and candidates.

It's a very, very large report, well over 100 pages and goes into quite a lot of depth. So I can't go through all of it today. But one area that I'd like to point out is we're certainly getting innovation coming in to the area. And what we noticed is there's no real global payroll because of the wide range of jurisdiction and the effort needed to cover these. But there's certainly

there's certainly new companies coming in to the mix that are bringing a kind of modern payroll view into the staffing area. Some of these companies are not in the US, 2Cloud9, FindU, Astute Payroll for example, are Australian based companies, which is a very complex environment. Access is the UK and Europe, but as you know, we have Zeal from the US.

Kirti, could I just ask you, much of the focus as we mentioned has gone into the front office with applying these emerging technologies, but there is sort of a grind swell of innovation starting to come in to the middle and back office, which obviously you're part of. And I just wanted to ask, why do you think it's taken so long for the focus to change to the middle and back office? What are the drivers for bringing the innovation in there in only the recent few years?

Yeah, I think, you know, we've seen a bunch of new vendors come up on the staffing operations side just in the past couple of years. So I think a lot of folks have tried it and have felt excited about the automations that those bring to their businesses. So I think certainly I owe the credit to a lot of new vendors, including Zeal coming into the market for more and more companies being interested in this space. But again, I think so much time has been spent on the front of office and I think companies are starting to see real results from the front of office, right? The tech investment that they're making in the front of office is paying dividends, either they're scaling without adding too much headcount or they're able to sort of recruit and do their day-to-day workflows in the most efficient way possible. And I think now business owners are taking the rest of organization into consideration, thinking about the payroll admins, the finance team, the invoicing and billing team, and thinking about how can we get that functionality as quickly as possible? How can we keep our team lean as we continue to scale our revenue?

And yeah, I'm really excited to see and dive into a couple of these nuances on middle and back office because I think so many people are just primed and ready to have that same excitement that they have for the front of office but apply that to the middle and back office.

That's an interesting perspective. you're saying that they're realizing the benefits of technology in the front office and saying, well, we then need to turn the focus to the middle and back office to apply some of those same sorts of technology here.

It feels like we're living in the future with these robo-callers and all these fun and interesting things on the recruiting side, you can't tell me that in this day and age, I talk to hundreds of staffing companies each and every year, and companies will innovate with AI on the front of office and then still upload manual bank files on the middle and back office operation side. And we really need to get the rest of the stack caught up from a tech perspective, because I think companies are starting to see, yeah, it actually can be applied to multiple parts of my system.

Excellent. We'll talk a little bit about getting the infrastructure right, I think a little bit later in the webinar. I think it's a great point, a great view of what's happening. So just summarizing the findings there. So I think the emerging solutions, what we found is emerging solutions are capturing market share by addressing the back office functions and particularly payroll of digitally native staffing firms.

What's happened is there's been platforms and digitally native staffing firms, they needed to automate the end to end. And so new solutions are coming in to deliver that. And then those solutions then have applications around the traditional staffing firms, which kind of tend to sit side by side. And there's also a whole kind of wave of white label mobile apps for timekeeping, attendance and other payroll functions and they can be plugged in. so, you know, really getting, you know, kind of dual pressure to bring in the availability of much better technology to the middle and back office.

And it would be remiss of us not to talk about the importance of compliance in this whole area. The accuracy and completeness of data is essential and particularly so when we're talking about payroll and the processing of pay transactions, often time-limited and the need to source extra information or correct errors can have significant impact. And of course we've seen

In various jurisdictions, governments becoming much more prescriptive about what staffing firms and other firms do in terms of payroll, making sure that people are paid correctly and the penalties for inaccurate payments can be harsh. we've just noted here that Hudson Global Resources in Australia was required to pay back 3.2 million US dollars to underpaid workers and also apologize publicly for not paying people properly between 2014 and 2020. And I think the US has had many similar instances. So compliance is absolutely vital in this whole thing. So we shouldn't be ignoring that. It's worth keeping that in the back of the mind.

Why is it really important? I think efficiency and profitability, AI readiness and maintaining compliance are the three key components of our key reasons why a focus on the middle and back office should be a top priority for staffing firms today.

Jumping again back to the diagram that you saw earlier, this is one way of looking at the tech stack and it's through the eyes of I guess the goggles of a CIO. So we like to put things in boxes and like to group functions together and it's primarily from a technology perspective. Kiri, your background is clearly operations as well as technology and you've managed a staffing firm.

How do you look at the tech stack differently to the way that say just a pure technologist would look at it?

I think these terms get thrown off the front, middle, and back office. What do those words even mean these days? I think most staffing companies don't know. So I really like to look at the staffing tech stack in three columns. The first column is recruiting operations. This is your ATS tool, the tool that you're using to sort through candidates, interview candidates, and sort of assign them to different types of jobs.

The second is staffing operations. That's the pillar that we're going to focus a lot of our time today on. And this is the pillar of the middle and back office. So onboarding, benefits administration, timekeeping, payroll, invoicing and billing, and generally keeping the business compliant. This is what I like to call the middle and back office. And in the staffing operations column, there's so much important work that's being done. And this work is being done in very, very tight timelines. I know for most staffing businesses,

From the time that they are approving time sheets to when they're invoicing their clients, that time frame is anywhere between 24 to 48 hours. So there is an enormous amount of responsibility on the admins and finance teams to get so many things right in such a tight time frame. So we have to continue thinking about our investment there and how we can help staffing companies to stay efficient there.

And then the last pillar is business operations. This is your CRM, your business intelligence, and in your general profit and loss analysis. And I think, again, that last pillar is pretty important, sort of happens in the background. But for today's presentation, we're going to focus most of our time on staffing operations. And to sort of dive in, I think now more than ever is the best time to sort of invest in rethinking your staffing operations tech stack, because

There are so many recruiting operations platforms that have made a significant investment in closely partnering up with staffing operations companies. So if you take Bullhorn, I know we looked at that slide earlier, but around 30%-40% of the market is still using Bullhorn for their front office. And our platform, Zeal, which focuses on onboard pay and bill solutions for the staffing market, is 100% integrated with Bullhorn.

And again, in the case with Bullhorn, every piece of information from Bullhorn directly sinks directly into our platform. All the information and processing that happens on our platform goes directly into Bullhorn. And it works this way for a lot of other recruiting operations companies that we work with. But it's a beautiful time to now reevaluate staffing operations because there's so many ways for you to now have that seamless transition between recruiting ops and staffing ops and to again, make that front to middle and back office transition smoother than ever before.

The first thing I want to dive into is two customer examples of why I think we should care a lot about the middle and back office. I want to share two stories with you. The first story is with our customer work genius. This company is awesome. They actually scaled from $7 million to $100 million in revenue in under three years, which is pretty much the dream for almost any staffing company. And they really owe a lot of their success to the fact that they were able to partner with a staffing operations company like Zeal that allowed them to expand across 35 plus states in under three years. So WorkGenius leverages a lot of parts of our platform, staffing payroll, our automated compliance engine that helps them to calculate overtime minimum wage and sick leave accrual nuances across all these jurisdictions. And again, they owe a lot of their success to partnering with a staffing operations company that really helped them to have that peace of mind as they were scaling state to state. And I think this is a great example of how the middle and back office can really be a revenue driver for you. What you really want to do as a staffing company is continue to expand, expand by working with trickier clients, expand by working in trickier states, and work with tools that are going to make it easier for your demand team to really say that yes. So I love this example. think middle and back office is going to be a game changer and quite frankly is going to be a requirement for anyone that wants to scale like a WorkGenius.

In the other bucket, I want to share a customer example with our customer LawTrades. This company is also a really amazing company, growing year over year significantly. And Jerry, who's the head of operations at LawTrades, is sort of the persona that I think a lot of staffing companies have, where he's a one-stop shop. He does everything from onboarding, answering worker questions, processing payroll, handling, invoicing, and billing, and everything in between.

And by investing in a staffing operations tool like Zeal and really focusing on automating their middle and back office, they've been able to scale their business and grow year over year without adding any additional headcount. And I know that resonates with a lot of staffing companies here. You don't wanna scale your headcount or maybe you are a team member at a staffing company and you know that you are wearing 10 to 20 hats and you're not getting an additional headcount from your leadership. And again, this is where automation can really help you because it's gonna help you to automate your workflows so that you're really only spending minutes of time reviewing information before submitting it. And again, for staffing companies that have to do so many tasks within 24 to 48 hours, automation in the middle and back office is going to be super essential for you all. I want to kind of transition into helping staffing companies to identify which bucket they're in currently for staffing operations in the middle and back office.

So the first bucket that I think a lot of staffing companies are in is all-in-one platforms. So these are companies like Avionte and TempWorks, companies that are pretty legacy in the market, and they offer solutions like ATS, payroll, and billing, all intertwined in one particular product. So if you're a staffing company in this sort of bucket of, yep, I use one of these all-in-one platforms today, something for you to just consider is, and ask yourself really is, am I sacrificing quality for the convenience? Am I on this tool because somebody has been using this tool for 20, 30 years and we haven't poked the bear a little bit. Am I using this tool because I haven't really had the chance to look at new vendors in the market? But what I often find when I talk to staffing companies that are using these all-in-one platforms is really that the tools that they're using are kind jack of all, master of none tools. Yes, they have maybe the bare bones functionality for some parts of the staffing tech stack, but again, there are nuances of a platform that aren't really great and not as automated as some of the more modern providers out there in the market. And then another thing that I typically see with staffing companies that are using these all-in-one solutions is that these solutions typically aren't truly complete. Maybe some of these solutions offer you ATS payroll and billing, but do they really do all the in-between tasks? Are they helping you to onboard your workers effectively? Are they helping you to collect payments on invoices? Are they helping you to pay out those payroll paychecks to those workers? Are they helping you to pay those tax filings and tax payments due to those agencies? Typically what I find when I dig in with these staffing companies that tell me I'm using an all-in-one is actually there's five or six other manual workflows or tools being used to sort of get that tool to work. And again, this is just something to think about as a team to think about, you know, is there a way for us to innovate on those staffing operations and are we ready to kind of take that leap off of that all-in-one platform stack?

The second bucket of tools that I typically see staffing companies invest in is general purpose tools. So this is where a staffing company is sort of using different solutions for the front, middle, and back office, but they're using sort of name brand tools that are generally applicable to any business. So these are tools like bill.com, QuickBooks, Nets. We all know that those companies are tools that are applicable to more than just staffing businesses. They're applicable to small businesses. They're applicable to large businesses. They say they're really built for any business.

But what I find with staffing companies that are using tools like this is that those tools are really missing a lot of the nuances that staffing companies have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. mean, working as a temp staffing company, we pretty much have the highest level of compliance and rigor that we have to deal with. We also deal with such a large volume of worker payouts, worker onboarding, worker terminations, and more. And you might be at a disadvantage if you're just investing in these general purpose tools because you're missing on what it feels like to work with a vendor that's really built for your particular category and use case. So that might be something for you to consider. Are you using a general purpose tool in one area of your business? And is there a staffing provider, software provider on the market that you can chat with and chat with about your use cases to see if maybe they've already built and solved some of the problems that you're experiencing with these general purpose tools?

And then the last category of staffing companies is really staffing companies that already are investing in staffing specific tools across the front, middle, and back office. And with these staffing specific tools, I think they're great because you're really working with tools that are built for your particular use case. You could sort of plug and play different combinations of solutions depending on your industry, depending on your size of company, depending on your revenue. And I think that often makes staffing companies the most effective in getting the best product and also having the optionality to build the tech stack that works best for their particular use case. Now, a lot of staffing companies are here and they're like, yes, I wanna use staffing specific tools, but I'm confused. How do I hook them together? And what are some recommendations of things I should think of across those categories? So the first recommendation is something that I already chatted about, which is, your recruiting operations tech stack, your ATS might already be partnered with awesome staffing operations companies where they have built-in integrations like we do with Bullhorn, which would make it super easy for you to get started. But there's specific advice that I have for a couple elements of this staffing operations tech stack. The first is onboarding. So onboarding is something that I think so many software vendors have innovated on. A lot of staffing companies, if you are doing paper, onboarding or you're emailing workers onboarding packages, you are stuck in the old ages and there's so many better ways for you to onboard your workers more effectively. At our company we do tons of things like mobile friendly worker onboarding. We do remote I-9 with e-Verify which is the way for you to fully qualify a worker to work in the U.S. completely remotely without them needing to come into a branch.

We also have awesome features like the ability for staffing companies to create dynamic paperwork templates. our logic sort of knows, okay, if this worker is in this state and they're working for this particular client, they need to get this particular set of documents and surveys. And we automatically show that to the worker without the staffing company needing to manually check boxes and manually send multiple packages to the worker, which I think is really awesome.

On the timekeeping side, again, staffing companies can really innovate on timekeeping. think a lot of staffing companies deal with multiple time clock vendors, multiple time sheets. It's really frustrating and there are a lot of timekeeping tools that are specifically built for staffing. One tool that I love is Nowsta. I think it makes it super easy for admins to view exactly who's working when and for those workers to swap shifts and to reschedule those workers really efficiently. So if you are stuck with those old time clocks or really looking for a new vendor, highly recommend kind of opening the door to some of these staffing specific timekeeping vendors who have already built for your use case. Another category is payroll and faster payments. This is something that my company really specializes in. We do staffing specific payroll, which means not only are we a full service payroll product, so we're doing the gross to nets, we're doing ACH net pay to the workers, we're doing your tax filings, we're doing your tax payments, and we're doing that all automated without a lot of manual intervention on your part, but we actually take it one step further and help staffing companies with automated compliance. So these are things like automated overtime compliance, automated minimum wage compliance, and sick leave accruals. And in the United States where we have around 11,000 tax jurisdictions and especially in temp staffing, where we have workers working in so many different locations in a given week. This tool is going to give you the peace of mind to make sure that you are staying compliant in all territories, especially as you scale. And then the last nuance in the pay widget is really how can we pay our workers faster? We know that in the contingent workforce, our workers really value faster payments and they also might be underbanked. So thinking about ways to provide items like pay cards and instant pay is going to help you to stand out as a staffing company help you to retain your workers. And again, so many products like ourselves that are offering solutions here for you to pay these workers faster. The last sort of widget underneath the staffing operations tech stack that I think staffing companies should really take a look at is invoicing and billing. And invoicing and billing is such a crucial part of the business. It's quite frankly, the most important part of your business because it's how you get paid from your customers. And as we know in the staffing business,

This is a really tight market. We're paying out the workers. We want to immediately send out those invoices to the customers. And we have to collect that money often, net 14, net 30, net 45 on the dot. Otherwise, we're not going to have enough money on our balance sheet to sort of make the next payroll. So so much innovation has happened sort of in the market, especially with tools like Zeal, with investing in both automation and AI tools for invoicing and billing. So some things that we've really invested in are automated invoice generation. How can you give us a contract? And how can we automatically create invoices so that you can close the books faster than ever before? How can we remind your customers to sort of pay those invoices? How can we give you visibility into when those invoices are going to clear so that you know when you can expect that cash? And last but not least, thinking about things like integrated payroll funding. A lot of staffing companies are either already working with the working capital or factoring company or interested in scaling their business but can't because they can't figure out how to send those invoices to the factoring company fast enough. And I think our integrated payroll funding sort of tool makes it easier than ever before for staffing companies to start experimenting with factoring and seeing if that can be the huge unlock that helps them to sort of scale into the next revenue tranche. And Kevin, I'll pass it back on to you to sort of dive into AI. I know we have some ideas on AI, but would love to kind of hear your thoughts and for you to set the stage to all the staffing companies on what it means to be AI ready.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Kirti. There's some great examples of in your case studies there and I like your points around, particularly around using generic tools. There's things that are quite specific about staffing, the kind of multiple entities that we have, the relationships, people working in different locations for different companies almost every day. So the level of complexity that's needed to be dealt with in a staffing specific software is much more suited to that, the level of intricacy in a lot of it and the T&A side of things also you're right that's come out quite a bit in our research. people are not using streamlined time and attendance tools very well. I just have one quick question for you. You mentioned the kind of automation end to end of onboarding through to pay and bill. Do you see examples of the full process being automated or do you see touch points where there's still people or there needs to be people in the loop?

Yeah, absolutely. know, with our company, we've really focused on onboard pay bill because we truly think that onboard pay bill can be fully automated and the information can flow across the platform. So I absolutely do think that onboard pay bill can be automated. I also think that the front, middle and back office can be automated. And obviously, the goal with all of these software tools is to do as much as possible automated such that the people that are really reviewing things before they hit that final submit button have everything prepped up, so they just have to do that final review. So I think when we're dealing with middle and back office products like payroll and invoicing and billing, they're tricky, they're compliant. We're going to want a human being in the loop to kind of look into those things before we send things out. But there's no reason why all of that information can't be prepped up for that person. So they just have to do that last approval and move on with their day.

So the heavy lifting basically is done and then there's some optional things around where you have people in the loop would be a reasonable summary of that. Excellent. Okay. Thank you. So yes. Exactly.

I think it would be remiss of us not to talk about AI in this webinar. It's sort of the topic of the decade or the century. I'm not quite sure which, but it's certainly changing things. you know, as I mentioned, a lot of the solutions are built for digitally native staffing firms. The traditional staffing firms then need to implement these typically, digitally native staff and firms are going to be more AI ready. Their infrastructure is ready to accommodate a much more contemporary way of doing business. So we started to take a look at what AI ready means. So what does a staffing firm need to do in the context of their infrastructure to make sure that they have everything in place to be able to get the benefit of this new emerging technology coming in. So, a definition to have an AI ready tech stack. A company has the data, compute tools, integrations and governance in place to develop and deploy and scale AI and automation responsibly and effectively. And probably one of the important things here is the ability to scale. So, it's probably not too difficult to put AI at a point solution in a very small place and see it work.

What's much more difficult is to scale the technology right across the business in an end-to-end scenario.

We took a look at from a lot of our research the enablers of AI adoption and staffing tech stacks and we pulled this from our global tech landscape reports. got a lot of feedback from very knowledgeable vendors such as Kearney and Zulu but across front, middle and back office. we asked the people what enables staffing companies to grab the products that you have or the emerging technology and use them well. So one of the first things is understanding the difference between cloud native infrastructure. So any tools that are built specifically for the cloud typically are much more ready to enable emerging a new technology to be deployed. Some tools have actually been ported to the cloud, they seem to be software, they're sold as software as a service, but in fact they're really not designed specifically for the cloud. And cloud-native infrastructure tends to be API first, so they are developed with integration in mind.

So modular systems, they're also modular in many cases. So if you've got modular infrastructure, that means you can swap in and out various components without having to replace the full stack. having a much more contemporary infrastructure rather than legacy products there is probably one of the key steps.

I mentioned integration before and I just want to stress that integration is where AI agents go to die. So if you don't have good integration between your systems, then an AI agent will not really be able to grab information or deal with the intricacies very easily that are required from system to system. There are, I mentioned, Enhancer APIs that make this a lot easier, but there are also new tools, integration platforms as a service which kind of orchestrate the movement of data between various systems. And an API-first approach in many contemporary systems, as I mentioned, is enabling an easier layering of AI capabilities into the tools. So really look for seamless integration. If there's any gaps in the integration, then the infrastructure will become a lot more clunky and AI will be more difficult to implement. Data, so effective AI depends on very good data quality and good standardization of data. What happens is if there's errors in the AI and the data, it needs to go to multiple systems and those errors can pine from agent to agent and with all the different handoffs. So you can get very unreliable results from the use of agents in staffing if your data sources are not standardized. firms need to prioritize their data governance, the compliance, having data that's really available in real time and updated in real time means that the AI outputs are much more trusted and much more actionable.

We got information on AI use cases in the middle and back of us and these have been really interesting. This is 12 months ago and it will have changed a lot. So certainly AI agents are there to indicate errors and fix them, gather missing information, chat with data and give insights into the data, why it's changing and what it's telling you about the business, but you'll notice a lot of the use cases are internal and there certainly hasn't been too many use cases at the moment that are aimed from the middle and back office at that the client for example. And I think there's plenty of opportunities right across the board for use cases to be implemented in the middle and back office.

Kirti, I'll just hand it back to you to talk a little bit more about how AI is, how you view AI within Zeal and how you're applying it to the various problems that staffing firms have.

Absolutely, yeah, think first off, I'm so excited that staffing companies have really welcomed AI and welcomed all that AI can provide to their business. And I think quite frankly, this industry has to. Staffing is a very competitive industry where we are working and operating with very strict margins. And if you don't invest in automation, you don't invest in AI, your competitor is going to be able to do tons of things faster and more efficiently than you with less talent. And they're going to be able to offer better prices in the market. So I think the AI and the excitement that staffing companies have with AI should continue going and it's going to be a requirement in order for these businesses to stay efficient and profitable. For our business in particular, we have invested so much in automation, but also in AI because we know that we want to build a company that is going to work really well with agents in the future. We want to build a company that already starts to introduce staffing companies to these AI features. So AI is really built into the core of our ZL Staffing Operations Tech Stack. Two examples I'd love to give here. The first example is our AI importer.

We have a staffing customer and they and their clients pretty much use 10 to 20 different time clocking systems. Their clients require certain types of time clocking system. They're insistent on using them. And so the staffing company every week has 10, 20 different exports of time they then need to combine and get into payroll again in that very tight window of time.

So something that we have that is applicable to that company and so many other use cases is our AI importer. It allows staffing companies to upload time sheets, data in all these different formats, upload it into our system, and it'll automatically convert into the exact format that we need for payroll. So there's no work that the staffing company needs to do to combine spreadsheets, organize spreadsheets, filter spreadsheets, or build an integration to get the columns lined up exactly the way that our system needs it, the AI sort of takes care of it. And I love this feature because it helps the staffing company to sort of upload all their time and get payroll ready to go in under five minutes, which I think is super, super cool. Another AI feature that we have for our staffing businesses is our garnishment extractor. We know in temp staffing that we get so many garnishment requests across all different types of sectors. And we have a garnishment extractor where staffing companies can sort of upload those documents, our AI reads and scrapes through all that information, creates the garnishment templates, and starts applying those to all of the payroll. So these are two just very simple examples of AI features we've already built into our platform. We have so many more across other elements of our system. But again, these are the types of features that I love to see in the market because it's helping staffing operations teams to have all the information prepped up. So all they have to do is review and hit the Submit button and move on with their day.

I also think that, again, Kevin, you brought up so many great points on working with the right software vendors that are going to be able to collaborate really well with AI. And to your point, if you are a staffing company and you're using an on-premise solution, first off, it's super, super hard for other companies to integrate with that solution, which you've already probably experienced if you've tried to get one of your on-prem solutions to work with a new modern solution. But quite frankly, agents are not going to be able to pull data reports, run analysis on information if that information is not available to them. So, you know, our company, we are an API first company, which makes it super easy for us to collaborate with different companies, whether they want to build a custom solution in their own platform, whether we have to build an integration with another platform, or whether, you know, a company is using something really cool like our MCP in order to pull information that they need. So again, super excited for what's to come for the future of AI and how agents are going to help automate those workflows and don't get behind start investing in modern software providers otherwise it's going to take you one year to migrate one year to get used to the solution and then try to figure out how AI applies there and you're already going to be you know three years behind your leading competitor who might already be paying attention to this so invest in a software invest the automation in the AI now and you know last but not least you know we titled this presentation you know, the secret to your profits is really coming from your middle and back office. And again, I think so many staffing companies, you know that investing in AI and automation on the front of office is going to help you to be more profitable. But hopefully in this presentation, you've seen a couple examples of how middle and back office innovation can really help your company to be profitable. And again, I think this comes down to two pillars of profitability. It's increasing revenue and reducing expenses. On the revenue side, you know,

The customer examples I gave you are really crucial, but we wanna help you guys to make more revenue. And making more revenue might come from you scaling in different states. Making more revenue might come from you working with tricky clients that are like, I'm insistent on using this time clock, or I'm insistent that invoices need to be formatted in this particular way. Those tricky clients could be great revenue generators for you, and we wanna help you to say more yeses to those tricky clients. And you'll be able to say those yeses because you're working with a software tool that is dynamic and agile and automated and allows you to do those tricky things without doing manual work. So I think that's how the middle and back office really correlates to increasing revenue. And then on the flip side, lowering operational costs, we wanna make sure that you guys are closing timesheets, processing peril, processing onboarding and onboarding workers as quickly and efficiently as possible with as little head count as possible. And you're gonna be able to do that with the right software vendors and software automation. So again, we will always wanna keep the focus on profitability and really encourage you all to kind of reflect on some of these elements of the presentation and see if there's areas of your middle and back office that are so inefficient that you might be willing to take a chance in and see if we could automate it for you.

Thanks, Kirti. I think your points well made there. You need to get on to this because I think the gaps widening certainly from our research we're seeing the gap widening with the vendor technology when it comes to AI and now that certainly that gap is becoming much more distinct and I think that that will start to apply to staffing companies those that start to enable all of this new technology and use it are going to widen the gap between themselves and some of the competitors that may not so it's an interesting time for technology vendors themselves and it's an interesting time for staffing firms so we've got time for some questions. This is a really interesting question and it's about a starting point. So where do you suggest a company starts that is not using any of these tools currently?

I think that's a great question. Obviously, I'm biased. I'm going come to us because we sort of have so many of those bits and bobs of things that you might need. But I think it's really think and interview your team and really sit down with your team and watch their process of what they're doing on the operations side. Ask questions like, how long does it take for us to understand if this worker is onboarded and ready to work?

How long does it take for us to approve time sheets and get that process into peril? How long does it take for us to sort of review invoices and chase down those invoices? I think those are great questions that you can start having with your team to start identifying those points. And I think the second piece of advice is just go where the money is. If it's taking you guys a week to send out those invoices, that's just unacceptable. It's going to hurt your business line. So focus on those line items that are really important to your business, which I really think are invoicing and billing on those workers efficiently so they can actually go out and start generating revenue for you. And then of course processing the payroll and getting that closed out because without knowing the payroll you can't do your profit and loss analysis and adapt as a company. I really think that you know go where the money is and go where those inefficiencies are in your business because that's what every business owner should do.

Yeah, I really like that, go with the money is the perfect piece of advice when you're implementing technology. And just on the topic of money, so, I this may be difficult to answer, but people are concerned about the kind of cost structure of implementing AI and other new tools for a small business. So what is the costing structure for the small business that may have 50 or 60 employees? Is the return on investment for companies at that size?

Yeah, know, that's a great question. I think there are a lot of modern vendors that don't really charge hefty implementation fees in the markets. I certainly think the investment that you should be thinking of when you're going in the middle and back office is your time. Is your team ready to go into the future and invest the time that it's going to take to sort of document a new process, work with a new vendor, and transition? That's really the real cost.

I think there are lots of different vendors that some have implementation fees. Our company is not really an implementation fee type of company. So there's a lot of vendors, ask them for it, ask them for different types of packages, but you could certainly work with vendors, get right on board without having to pay a heavy implementation fee. That's sort of something that a lot of the old school vendors really do because they don't have the AI that can automate a lot of things internally. And that's why they charge a lot of implementation fees.

Alright, interesting. So another question, do most of the full service payroll providers include services for garnishments, tax services, annual W2s, or is that an add-on or another module from a different provider?

So in our company, and my definition of full service payroll is all of those things are included. So I view a full service payroll provider as a provider that can calculate your gross tax, do your tax filings, do your tax payments, pay out those garnishments, do your W-2s and all of the things in between. So that's my definition of full service payroll providers. There are some payroll providers on the market that don't do all of those things and you might have to layer on other vendors and that's.

Something that you have to consider, is it worth it for you to continue using a vendor that doesn't do all those things? And is it worth it for your team to sort of do those operations manually? Or is that something that you can pay a little more and upgrade to a new stack and have that peace of mind and continue scaling your business?

Great, thanks. The next question, I think it's a political question, but is Zeal Canadian friendly?

We're actually launching in Canada this quarter, so if you are operating in Canada, we'd love to support you and we have coverage in Canada in Q4, so let us know and we'd be happy to support you.

stuff. you. So there you go. Canadians is a hand across the border there and a hand of friendship across the border. Some of the more technical question on the payroll side of things. So how is section two of the I-9 completed in your tool? Remote alt procedure. Do you provide a service where section two is completed in-house if using alternative procedures?

Yep, absolutely. that totally makes sense. So, know, I-9 has evolved in the way of collecting I9s have really evolved, especially after the pandemic. So, you know, before you would really have a worker come in, finish their part one, you'd finish out the part two, you'd see their IDs in person and go on with your day. But now, obviously, we want to onboard workers faster and we may not have branches where these workers are being deployed such that we can do that, you know, in office.

So our innovation has really been remote I-9 with E-Verify where the full process end end for I-9 is remote. And the way that it works in our system is we showcase to the user part one of the I-9 where they enter the information, they upload their IDs, and then the end user sort of can put the phone number or email of a friend, a neighbor, someone that can review those IDs on behalf of the employer. So let's say an employee fills out part one, they can text their neighbor, hey, you're going to review my part two of I-9, that neighbor is going to get that text, they're going to review the IDs, they're going to review the worker's information, and then sign and finish that part two. So this is now allowed in the scope of remote I-9, and it completely takes off the responsibility for a staffing company to do part two, and it also puts the penalty and perjury risk on the person reviewing the IDs instead of yourself, which is a nice bonus.

And then obviously on top of that, more states have done E-Verify and then have required E-Verify for a certain size of employers. So if you're in that bucket, we do a part three, I would say, of I-9 where we're really reporting to E-Verify all the workers that you're sort of onboarding onto your system. So you have that last layer of protection in case anything comes back that the worker is not qualified to work in the US.

I think hopefully that answered that question. Andrew, we've got time for one more I think and it's probably good for a summary of what we've been talking about but, Kirti, how is your software, which is obviously a modern payroll and middle office software, different from Bullhorn or QuickBooks?

Yeah, great question. again, Bullhorn's our partner. Bullhorn does ATS. They do, they have on some of their modules, if you're on it, parts of invoicing and billing. They don't do the extensive onboarding that we do. They don't do full service payroll. They don't do payment collection on invoices on all of their modules. So some of those gaps are where you would use Zeal and you would really use Zeal in addition to Bullhorn to sort of complete your tech stack. And then QuickBooks.

So QuickBooks has a invoicing and billing product, but again, it's built for the small business. So some of those nuances in staffing, like we all know in staffing, it's net 30 invoices and how we track the cashflow is a little bit nuanced. So I think our invoicing product is AI friendly, more automated, more built for that staffing use case, which is where we differ. And same with our payroll, the QuickBooks payroll product is really a small business payroll product. It's not really built for a large and scaling staffing business module. So you might find that you use QuickBooks, but you're doing overtime and minimum wage and accruals and all those nuances in your head because the system isn't really built for it. So that's a reason why maybe you would try out Zeal on the payroll side. Maybe you would keep your bookkeeping on QuickBooks, but kind of move payroll and invoicing and billing to us or one of those modules to us.

Thanks very much. think, Kirti, good advice. You don't really want to be doing too much of the calculation of payroll in your head. think we're probably way past that, which is great. So thank you very much. That was the last question. Kirti, thanks so much for coming to the webinar and talking about this particular area. It's very topical and very interesting. And I think it's certainly going to be an area of focus for staffing firms today and in the coming years, particularly with AI coming through. And thank you very much everyone for turning up to the webinar. Thanks very much to Zeal for sponsoring the webinar and bringing us all this information and the details about their product also.

If you would like access to any of the reports that we've talked about, they're available to SIA members, as I mentioned, on the SIA website. those are global front and middle and back office software updates, the US healthcare staffing market growth assessment and the staffing industry forecast that comes out every month, which is eagerly awaited. There's also a report on digital transformation. And there are a number of other reports that you'll find interesting and that will have information about the topics we've talked about. So again, thank you very much.

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