How Orange Tree Staffing Turned Recruiters from AI Skeptics to AI Advocates

At a Glance

• 100% of open jobs use Alex for first-round interviews.
• 0 new systems recruiters had to learn.
• 20–30% of recruiter time reclaimed for higher-value work
• 80–90% candidate interview rating.

The Customer

Orange Tree Staffing is a family-owned staffing firm headquartered in Maitland, Florida. Founded to address the growing shortage of school-based therapy professionals, the company recruits highly specialized clinicians and educators including speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and school psychologists, for school districts nationwide.

Today, Orange Tree Staffing staffs approximately 30 specialized job categories across nearly 500 school districts in 30 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. As a certified Minority/Women Business Enterprise and an eight-time Inc. 5000 honoree, the company has consistently achieved a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40-50% since 2013.

Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, oversees operations alongside his son, Tanner, Director of Recruiting. While Craig quickly recognized AI’s potential to transform recruiting, he also understood that successful adoption would depend on earning the confidence of his team.

“We like to be transformative in our thought process. If we’re standing still, we’re going to get run over. There’s no doubt that Alex is that type of transformative technology, and we believe it’s going to play a pivotal role in our long-term success.”
Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, Orange Tree Staffing

The Challenge

The technology itself wasn’t the biggest obstacle, people were.

Recruiters initially feared that AI would replace their jobs. At the same time, leadership recognized that recruiters spent nearly their entire day inside Tracker, their applicant tracking system. Introducing another application would create friction, reduce transparency, and make it difficult for recruiters to trust AI-driven decisions.

Orange Tree Staffing identified two critical adoption challenges:

1. Address recruiter concerns. Team members needed to see AI as a tool that enhanced their work rather than threatened it.
2. Integrate AI into existing workflows. Recruiters needed complete visibility into Alex’s activity without changing the systems they already used.

“If you want to accelerate adoption of new technologies which impact people and process, you need to optimize all three components (people, process, and technology) around the use cases that mean the most to the business.  Too many cases, we have seen the wrong use cases be focused on leading to poor adoption of the technologies”
Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, Orange Tree Staffing

The Solution

Instead of forcing adoption, Orange Tree Staffing focused on building confidence through transparency.

1. Alex works inside Tracker, not beside it. Every interview, score, and status is written back into Tracker with notifications, so recruiters see everything Alex does without logging into a second system. 
2. Alex is held to the standard of a human teammate. If a person sat next to them helping fill job orders, recruiters would expect constant communication about every candidate. Alex meets that standard around the clock.
3. Recruiters make informed hiring decisions with confidence. Every Alex interview includes a resume-fit score, an interview-fit score, and the complete interview recording and transcript, empowering recruiters with the evidence they need to confidently evaluate candidates and determine the best next steps.
4. The rollout was deliberate. Alex started on candidates gated by resume-fit score rather than every applicant at once, so the team's understanding of Alex kept pace with what it could do, and nothing about OTS’s existing process had to change.

"I may not be logging into Alex, but I always know what she's up to. Communication builds trust, and without the integration between Alex and Tracker, I think we'd still be struggling to get that adoption."
Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, Orange Tree Staffing

The Results

A year in, the fear is gone, and Alex adoption is accelerating:

• Recruiters have won back 20 to 30 percent of their time, redirected into client conversations and proactive outreach to districts OTS is under contract with but rarely hears from.
• Alex is turned on across 100 percent of OTS’s open jobs, more than 400 active roles, with interviews triggered by each candidate's resume-fit score.
• Recruiters listen to Alex's interviews as part of their daily workflow. The screens run about ten minutes, versus the 20 to 30 a human interview took.
• The business continues to a 40-50% CAGR without having to add additional recruiters. The goal is to increase the number of weekly billable hours being managed by an individual recruiter by more than 200%
• Candidates adopted Alex too: 80 to 90 percent of interviewed candidates leave a rating, with Craig saying he has not seen a rating below five out of five stars in a long time.
• One in four interviews happens outside 9 to 5, capturing candidates and revenue that a closed office would have lost.

This resulted in recruiters spending less time on mundane tasks, not working late to screen candidate’s after-hours, and not feeling guilty that a sick day means candidates falls through the cracks.

"They've been listening to the interviews Alex does, and while not every candidate is qualified, they will agree Alex is a heck of an interviewer."
Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, Orange Tree Staffing

The advocacy now runs outward. Craig plays Alex's interviews for executives at other partners of Orange Tree Staffing, for friends who invest large parts of their personal wealth in AI companies.  The reaction, he says, is always the same: they can’t believe how fast AI solutions are delivering business value, especially when it comes to the recruitment and placement vertical.

"Anybody who tells me there aren't solid business use cases for AI, I'm going to say you're flat out wrong. You need to listen to Alex, our AI Recruiter."
Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, Orange Tree Staffing

And to staffing leaders whose teams are where his was a year ago, his advice is direct.

"Know what your competition is doing. You can't be scared of this stuff. You have to know it's only going to help the business, as long as you choose the right partner."
Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, Orange Tree Staffing

What's Next

Orange Tree Staffing is widening Alex's reach by deploying Coordinator, Alex's AI-to-human handoff, with a small group of recruiters on high-volume jobs. Coordinator keeps the momentum going the moment an interview ends: it books the candidate's next round with a recruiter on the spot, then joins that conversation and writes the notes and transcript straight into their ATS, Tracker. No copy-paste, no forgotten notes, no candidate left wondering what happens next.

"We look forward to many years to come. I can't wait to get Coordinator deployed and tested. We're so excited about that."
Craig Smith, Chief Operations Manager, Orange Tree Staffing