I’ll be honest.
I’ll be honest.
I did not want an AI recruiter.
We’re in the people business.
Our reputation is built on relationships.
And I’ve spent 20+ years telling clients that great recruiting is instinct, judgment, and nuance.
So the idea of introducing a digital, agentic recruiter into Tier4 Group?
It felt… risky.
What if candidates hated it?
What if it diluted our brand?
What if it made us feel transactional?
But here’s what leadership really is:
It’s not protecting what’s comfortable.
It’s testing what’s possible.
So we built Taylor, powered by AlexAI.
And we measured everything.
Here’s what actually happened in our first 12 months:
11,500+ completed interviews
38,000+ invitations sent
30% completion rate
84% of candidates rate the experience 4/5 or higher
That 84% stat stopped me in my tracks.
Because I care deeply about candidate experience. It’s personal. Our name is on it.
What I’ve learned:
Taylor (AI) doesn’t replace our recruiters.
It replaces friction.
It doesn’t remove humanity.
It removes back-and-forth scheduling emails at 9:30 at night.
It doesn’t make decisions.
It creates structured insight faster so our humans can make better ones.
And here’s the part no one talks about enough...
Sometimes as founders, we resist change not because it’s wrong… but because it challenges our identity.
I built my career on being the person in the room reading between the lines.
But scaling that instinct requires tools.
Taylor hasn’t made us less human.
It’s made our humans sharper.
More time advising.
More time closing.
More time building trust.
We’re still learning. We’re still refining.
But I’m glad I didn’t let fear win.
Oh, and here are some stats I asked our team to pull on the time it would have taken a human to complete all of those interviews and the tasks associated with them. Go ahead and tell me we made the wrong move... I'll wait.
10,650 hours = about 266 full-time weeks of work (at 40 hrs/week)
That’s about 5.1 FTE-years (assuming ~2,080 hrs per year per person)