Amplify Chat and four new AI skills unveiled at Bullhorn Engage 2026 to help staffing firms navigate rising market pressures
Bullhorn, the global leader in software for the staffing and recruitment industry, announced a major expansion of Bullhorn Amplify at Engage Boston 2026, the company’s flagship annual conference: Amplify Digital Workers, four new digital worker skills—Prospect, Verify, Audit and Transcribe—and Amplify Chat, a new conversational interface that lets users interact with their Bullhorn data using everyday language.
Bullhorn’s Founder and CEO, Art Papas, and Chief Innovation and Labs Officer, Jason Heilman, unveiled the Amplify Digital Worker expansion during the Engage keynote.
At the center of the announcement is a fundamental shift in how recruiters and salespeople interact with Bullhorn. Amplify Chat, the platform’s new conversational interface, acts as the command layer for the entire digital worker ecosystem, letting teams direct AI skills, query live data, and trigger complex, multi-step workflows through plain-language instructions, without switching tools or running reports.
Powered by AI that is purpose-built for the staffing industry, Amplify Digital Workers remove the grind, follow recruiters and salespeople everywhere they work, and help staffing firms drive growth and protect margins in an increasingly competitive market. By automating high-volume tasks, capturing context across conversations and systems, and surfacing the next best actions to take, Amplify transforms Bullhorn from a system of record into a system of action, creating superhuman teams.
Market force No. 1: AI-driven productivity and freeing recruiters from the grind
According to Bullhorn data, recruiter retention has only gotten worse. For the 2024 group of new hires, only 35 percent remained after two years, down from 41 percent in 2017. Each new recruiter takes about 180 days to become productive, and much of that time is spent on repetitive work: data entry, candidate outreach, screening and preparing submittals.
Amplify Digital Workers take those tasks off the table through five existing skills already in use by staffing firms:
- Enrich: Clean and complete data across the system with no manual effort
- Match: Automatically pair the best candidates in the system to open roles
- Screen: Run interviews by chat or voice and deliver candidate summaries
- Outreach: Launch and manage multi-step communication campaigns
- Present: Build and send client-ready candidate submission packets automatically
Amplify Chat gives staffing teams a faster way to get answers. Instead of pulling reports or digging through records, users can ask everyday questions like, “show me my most recently added candidates,” or “which clients have posted a new job this month,” and get results in seconds. It can also take action, whether that’s creating a note, building a list, or setting a follow-up task. The experience is conversational, intuitive, and built so teams can spend less time on manual work, and more time winning and closing business.
Staffing firms already employing Amplify Digital Workers are seeing it in their numbers. Procom achieved a 65 percent increase in its submission-to-placement rate. Employment Enterprises saw a 23 percent increase in weekly gross profit. IDR saved 200 hours per week. Tential handled 40 percent more submissions with the same size team. Across early adopters, placements-per-recruiter increased 39 percent, even as orders declined 20 percent and headcount remained steady.
Market force No. 2: Overwhelming volume and fraud
AI has created a problem on the other side of the desk, too. Job seekers and bots are now generating as many as 11,000 applications per minute, flooding recruiters with near-identical submissions and making it harder to find real, qualified candidates.
The new Verify skill detects and flags authenticity signals across the candidate lifecycle, from screening to onboarding, document verification, and ongoing assignment check-ins. Used with Screen, it helps recruiters quickly separate real candidates from potentially fraudulent ones so they can make better hiring decisions faster, rather than manually sorting through a growing pile of applications.
Market force No. 3: Margin and talent pipeline pressure
Staffing margins have compressed 10 percent in the past 12 months across both professional and light industrial segments. At the same time, companies are cutting junior roles to reduce costs, which shrinks the talent pool staffing firms recruit from.
Three new skills target this problem directly:
- Prospect: Identify and prioritize new business opportunities so firms can grow revenue without guessing where to focus
- Audit: Surface pay, bill and compliance errors across Bullhorn data, catching costly mistakes before they hit the bottom line
- Transcribe: Capture and summarize every conversation, turning meetings and calls into next steps that keep placements moving and revenue on track
“Staffing firms are facing pressure from every direction,” said Jason Heilman, chief innovation and labs officer at Bullhorn. “Candidate fraud is rising, margins are compressing, and clients expect faster, better results. Amplify lets firms scale their business with digital workers that automate work across recruiting and sales, from screening and outreach to prospecting, data enrichment and workflow validation. The result is a fundamental shift in how staffing firms operate, with recruiters and salespeople spending less time on manual work, and more time on the relationships and decisions that drive results.”
Amplify Chat and the four new Amplify Digital Worker skills are available now to Amplify customers. To learn more, click here.
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