# Sandra Kowalski, Director of Operations at Lakeshore Staffing Partners — read of StaffingAI, May 9 2026

> 14 years in light industrial staffing, currently managing 6 coordinators across two branches in metro Milwaukee. We run about 160 active workers on bench.

## How I got here

Brutal Monday. One of our warehouse clients called at 6:48 AM because a shift opened and nobody picked up. My coordinator had been dialing for an hour already. I typed "automate shift filling staffing agency" into Google during my drive in (parked at a light, I know) and this was the third result. I clicked it instead of the Bullhorn blog post because the title said "under 10 minutes" and I needed to believe that was possible before 9 AM.

## What I clicked first

The four stats at the top. "9 min Avg. time to fill a shift." That stopped me cold. Not because I believed it immediately but because someone had the nerve to put a number that specific on a homepage. I've seen "save hours of time" a hundred times and scrolled past all of them. Nine minutes made me read the next line.

The hero copy also didn't waste my time: "StaffingAI broadcasts shifts to your bench, screens for availability, handles confirmations, and updates clients automatically." That's a complete sentence that tells me what the product does. That's rarer than it should be.

## Where I paused

The two-stage confirmation section. "Confirmation requests fire at 24 hours and again at 2 hours before shift start. Workers who do not reconfirm get an automatic follow-up. If no response arrives within the window, the system reopens the shift and starts the next broadcast round without any coordinator touching it."

That's the thing we're actually terrible at. We get a verbal yes at 8 PM and then wonder at 5:30 AM why nobody showed. I paused there because if that part actually works the way they describe it, it solves a real thing. Not a demo-video thing. A Tuesday-morning-at-6-AM thing.

## What I distrusted

The testimonials bother me. "Marcus T., Owner, Tier One Industrial Staffing." Why not Marcus Torres? Why not a LinkedIn link, a company website, anything? Last-initial-only testimonials read like they were written in a conference room by someone who was nervous about legal review. "Priya K." could be anyone. I Googled "CarePlace Staffing" and nothing came up.

Also the stat "A worker who confirms verbally carries a 21 percent no-show rate industry-wide." That may be true. I'd believe it based on my own experience. But there's no source. If you have a citation, use it. If you made it up based on your own data, say that. "Industry-wide" with no footnote is the kind of thing that makes me quietly suspicious of all the other numbers.

"The matching engine learns from each placement" is doing a lot of work without explaining anything. Learns what, exactly, and in what time frame? After 10 placements? 500? That sentence is there to sound impressive, not to inform.

## What would convince me

Show me one real agency, named and linkable, with a coordinator on camera saying how their Monday morning changed. Not a founder testimonial. Not a case study PDF I have to fill out a form to download. A 90-second video with an actual coordinator's face and a specific client type that matches mine.

Also: show me what happens when a shift doesn't fill. What does the system do at the 8-minute mark if nobody's responded? Does it escalate to a coordinator? Does it call? Does it just sit there looking pretty on a dashboard while my client calls me? The page describes the happy path in detail and says almost nothing about failure modes.

And the ATS integration list says Bullhorn, JobDiva, TempWorks. We're on Bullhorn. I need to know if this is a real sync or a one-way push that creates duplicates I have to clean up by hand.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The confirmation rate stat says 94% within 15 minutes. What's the breakdown by industry vertical? Healthcare workers and light industrial day laborers behave very differently. I want to know what that number looks like for warehouse/manufacturing specifically.

2. If a shift opens and nobody confirms in the first broadcast round, what exactly triggers next? Walk me through the failure path in plain language.

3. We have a few clients with specific union rules about which workers can be offered which shifts. Is there a way to set hard exclusion rules at the client level, or is the filtering only by skill and certification?

## Verdict: curious-enough-to-reply

The page earns it, barely, because it speaks to the actual problem with enough specificity that I can tell someone has worked in or closely around a staffing operation. The testimonials and unsourced stats cost it real trust points, but the two-stage confirmation logic and the client portal description are real enough that I want to poke at them before I dismiss this.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-09. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*