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Weekly Newsletter Vol. 94 - June 18, 2025

Generating your Lead Story…

How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Pricing in Recruitment

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how AI is transforming recruitment operations from automating sourcing and screening to improving candidate matching and communication. But let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

AI isn’t just changing how we do the work. It’s changing how we price the work.

In 2025, pricing is no longer a back-office decision, it’s a strategic function that reflects the value you deliver, not just the hours you spend. And AI is now playing a pivotal role in how recruiters, staffing firms, and talent platforms think about value creation and value capture.

Let’s break it down.

1. Your Product Is Worth More: Services powered by AI are delivering better results, faster. Think of the time savings: what once took a recruiter six weeks—manual sourcing, resume review, back-and-forth scheduling—can now be done in under three weeks with the right tools. You’re placing candidates faster and with higher fit accuracy, which means clients experience less downtime, better productivity, and lower turnover.

The same goes for outplacement services. What used to be a highly manual process—career coaching, resume editing, interview prep—is now enhanced by AI-driven platforms that offer instant resume scoring, personalized job matching, and automated follow-up sequences.

This improvement in outcome changes the pricing conversation. You're no longer just a service provider, you’re a strategic advantage. And that means your product is now worth more.

Clients are open to higher fees when they see clear ROI. So if AI helps you deliver twice the value in half the time, it’s not just about saving time—it’s about charging appropriately for impact.

2. AI Helps You Price Smarter: AI isn’t a green light to just raise prices across the board. What it offers is precision. It helps you identify what parts of your service are driving value—and what parts might be holding you back.

For instance, AI can track how your clients interact with different features in your portal. Are they actively using your candidate shortlisting dashboard? Great—that’s a value anchor. Is no one touching your reporting tool? Maybe it’s time to cut it, streamline it, or move it into a premium tier.

Let’s say your data shows clients using your AI-driven screening tools fill roles 40% faster. That becomes a case study for upselling. If your analytics reveal that smaller clients are scaling their hiring efforts monthly, it’s a flag to proactively revisit their plan before they churn or get underserved.

Smarter pricing isn’t about guessing what a service is worth. It’s about responding to real usage data and client behavior to price based on what truly delivers value.

3. No More Guessing Games: Pricing Decisions Built on Data Historically, pricing in recruitment has been a mix of gut feeling, competitor stalking, and “what we’ve always charged.” But AI changes that. It brings you consistent, meaningful signals that validate your pricing strategies and help you stay ahead of the curve.

You can see which clients are actively using your tools, what features are sticky, and where bottlenecks exist in your process. This kind of insight allows you to shift from reactive pricing (adjusting when a client pushes back) to proactive pricing (crafting offers that match actual client usage and perceived value).

Whether you're a solo recruiter or leading a national RPO firm, pricing should reflect the current value you're delivering—not what the market accepted five years ago. AI gives you the confidence to adapt in real time.

4. AI as a Co-Pilot, Not a Replacement: AI isn’t here to replace pricing strategists or sales teams. It's here to make them better. Think of AI as your pricing co-pilot—surfacing opportunities, flagging risks, and giving your team the insights they need to make sharper, faster decisions.

Want to test a tiered pricing model based on candidate volume? AI can forecast client usage and potential churn. Want to know which clients might be ready to upgrade? AI can spot increased logins, usage spikes, or higher engagement levels.

5. Don’t Just Price the Product. Price the Outcome: AI is improving not only what we offer clients which means we need to evolve our pricing models to reflect the outcomes we now enable.

Whether you’re selling direct placements, retained search, coaching, career services, or productized hiring solutions, your value lies in the results—faster hires, lower attrition, better candidate fit—not just the tools you use or the time you spend.

So stop guessing. Stop undercharging because "that’s what the market does." Use the signals. Watch the trends. Lean on AI to help you listen better and price smarter.

Because in this new era of recruitment, pricing isn’t an afterthought. It’s part of the value you bring.

You can’t make this stuff up

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