How OmniForce Solutions Reaches Field and Shop-Floor Talent With Alex

Rob Trevino is Vice President at OmniForce Solutions, a Houston talent solutions agency that has staffed the energy and industrial economy since 2018: field service technicians, heavy equipment mechanics, yard and warehouse crews, the people who fly out to service the natural gas engines behind the US power grid. When OmniForce brought in Alex at the start of 2026, Rob's sharpest doubt was about exactly that population. Would a blue collar candidate talk to an AI recruiter at all? 1,037 completed AI interviews later, the answer surprised him in the opposite direction: "That's been a surprisingly engaged population."

At a Glance

• 1 in 7 interviews completed outside 9-to-6, including 2am, 4am and 5am
• 414 candidates gave their experience 5 stars
• 218 roles run through Alex, from Field Service Technician to Systems Administrator
• 0 new systems, Alex results land in the Tracker ATS recruiters already work in

The Customer

OmniForce Solutions is a talent solutions agency out of Houston, Texas, founded in 2018 and a three-time Inc. 5000 honoree. It delivers across four quadrants: direct hire and contingent staffing, executive search, and RPO for small and mid-sized companies without an internal talent function. Its lane runs through the energy economy, starting in the oil fields of West Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota, moving into specialized manufacturing, and now into the data center infrastructure build-out pulling those sectors together. Rob shared, "We never wanted recruiting or staffing in our name. It was always about the solution. Our job is to help you solve your problem."

Rob Trevino owns how delivery actually happens: how candidates are recruited, what technology the team uses, and how people get in front of clients. A meaningful share of the work they do is what Rob calls blue collar and gray collar: everything outside the office, from the warehouse to the well site.‍

The Challenge

The hard part of industrial recruiting is not finding people. It is reaching them and proving what you found.

The candidates work when recruiters do not

Field and shop-floor candidates work 24/7 operations and rotation schedules. A recruiter confined to a standard working day catches them at the margins, if at all. The people most worth talking to are frequently the people least available between nine and five.

Three thousand applicants a month, and roughly ten percent worth a conversation

Applicant flow across Indeed, LinkedIn and the OmniForce site runs about 3,000 a month. The internal rule of thumb is that roughly ten percent are actually applicable. That leaves about 300 real candidates spread across six recruiters, arriving unevenly: one role draws twelve applicants, another draws 120 in two days. The volatility, not the average, is what left good people unread.

Clients want more proof per candidate than a resume provides

Path to placement, from opening a search to a start date, has stretched from four and a half weeks toward six. Clients increasingly ask for comparison candidates, which Rob reads as a confidence problem. More evidence per candidate is the answer, and for hourly and field roles a resume is the thinnest evidence there is.

"Applying to jobs online has not been the best way to go find a job. It's kind of what our society has as its main medium. Alex is disrupting this!"
Rob Trevino, Vice President, OmniForce Solutions

The Solution

OmniForce's implementation rule was credibility before scale. Prove the function on a narrow set of roles, earn the recruiting team's trust, then open the volume. That sequence is why Rob spent close to a year evaluating before implementing at the start of 2026, and why the first roles he pointed Alex at were not the ones he actually needed it for.

Let candidates answer on their own clock

Alex can talk any day or time. Candidates take their interviews overnight, before a shift, or mid-workout. One candidate completed his from the gym and went on to a client interview.

Put results where recruiters already live

Recruiters at OmniForce work in Tracker ATS, and switching tools carries real friction. Status updates made in Alex sync back to the ATS, so Alex-interviewed candidates surface on the shortlist recruiters already read, and a dashboard shows every candidate Alex interviewed in the last 30 days.

Prove it first

The pilot ran on technical roles first, including a Service Desk Analyst III requisition. The logic was that technologists would at least recognize what they were talking to. The field and shop-floor population came after.

The Results

Rob came in expecting the technical population to be the easy win and the field population to be the risk. Both surprised him.

1,037 completed interviews across 218 roles, and many outside business hours

Roughly 200 interviews a month, on requisitions running from Field Service Technician and Mechanic, Heavy Equipment through Yard and Warehouse Associate to Systems Administrator II. One in seven is completed outside 9am-6pm, including interviews logged at 2am, 4am and 5am, hours no recruiting team covers.

The population Rob worried about turned out to be the most engaged

The feedback coming back from field and hourly candidates was not tolerance, it was enthusiasm. Rob attributes it to availability. Alex has no closing time, and the way a standard recruiting day was structured typically excluded these candidates.

The technical candidates stress-tested it, and it held

Early in the pilot, Rob called a system administrator whose day job included training AI models for other companies. The candidate had left strong feedback, and Rob wanted to know why. Months later, on a highly technical engineering interview, he listened to an openly skeptical candidate realize Alex actually followed the material. The candidate started deliberately pushing it into deep technical ground. Alex kept pace, and the assessment that came back read like an expert's. Rob shared, "I remember listening to an Alex interview and I realized Alex can talk about the opportunity, and intuitively it doesn't need to be told what to do. Every conversation is different. It's not a script."

The system administrator who trains AI models shared this feedback with Rob: "This was the most interactive AI model I've interviewed with. Like, I train models. That was really good."

Every applicant gets a real look

Alex reviews the full inbound flow before a recruiter opens anything, surfacing the candidates a resume would have buried. Rob's team calls it an advanced top funnel assessment view.

What's Next

OmniForce is pushing talent rematch against its existing candidate database next, and after keeping Alex on the delivery side while the integration proved itself, is working the capability into how the firm sells in 2027.

"Interview with it. Do an interview. You realize it's paying full attention, and this thing has more capacity to extract meaningful information than anything else out there."
Rob Trevino, Vice President, OmniForce Solutions