An AV and integration-focused podcast broadcast weekly

This week's episode of Automation Unplugged owe’re bringing you a webinar we recorded in March 2025 giving a product overview of One Firefly’s hiring division for the CI space: Amplify People.

About this episode:

Finding the right talent is the key to unlocking growth — but casting the net and vetting resumes can eat up hundreds of hours of your time, and thousands of dollars if you’re working with a recruiter. In this session, we’ll show you how Amplify People applies a proven, industry-specific approach — built on our own One Firefly hiring machine — to deliver A-Player candidates faster, more affordably, and with a focus on long-term fit.

You’ll hear from myself and Samantha Hodz, Director of Talent Acquisition Services at Amplify People, as we walk through our end-to-end process for sourcing, screening, and presenting top candidates for roles in the AV and custom integration industry.

n this webinar, we’ll cover:

• Why we created Amplify People and how we differ from traditional recruiters.
• The components of our service offering — what’s included, our flat-fee pricing, and ongoing partnership guarantees.
• What it’s like to work with us: client responsibilities, communication expectations, and ensuring a smooth, collaborative process.

SEE ALSO: #318: David Frangioni on Building Studios, Systems, and Iconic Sound

Transcript

Ron:

Let's go ahead and get started. We are here to talk about Amplify People. This is going to be a product specific webinar, whereas a lot of the times Amplify People and One Firefly will do general education webinars where we're teaching on a theme or a subject. Today we're going to go super specific about our services launched originally back in September of 2023. And we've been growing that business and we realized, despite all of our ramped up marketing and attending trade shows, we're like, oh my goodness, we need to get a good, product specific webinar produced and out there. So that's what we're going to do today. So if that's what you're here for, you're in the right place. Rebecca, I'm, actually, I know the next slides. We're going to do intro, but Rebecca, you're going to help us along here. Do you want to get yourself introduced?

Rebecca:

Hi everyone, my name is Rebecca. I'm the corporate marketing lead over here at One Firefly and help with Amplify People's marketing as well. I'm going to be watching throughout this webinar for questions. Please drop them in the Q and A if you have them, and I'll be collecting those and we'll do a Q and A session at the end.

Ron:

Awesome. Thank you Rebecca. Folks, we're going to try to get you outta here in 30 minutes or so, so we're going to try to make this super tight and efficient. My name's Ron Callis, CEO and Founder at One Firefly, and we launched Amplify People, as I said, as a service under One Firefly back in September of 2023. We'll go into a little bit of more of those logistics as to why, but I'm happy to be here with all of you and happy to be here with Sam.

Samantha:

Thanks Ron. Yeah, I'm happy to be here with all of you as well and really excited for the opportunity to speak about Amplify People. My name is Sam Hodz and I am the Director of Talent Acquisition Services here at Amplify People. I joined the team at the end of April of last year, so coming up on a year, very exciting. But I really came with about 15 years of experience in the talent space and really excited to bring it into this vertical.

Ron:

Awesome. So our agenda is that we're going to help you understand why did we create this, this set of services. We want you to understand Amplify People's unique approach to serving all of you, our valued customers out in the AV and custom integration industry. And then we're going to tell you specifically what our offering is and what the prices and fees are, and what's included and what are guarantees. So that's what we're going to dive into. And Sam, remind me, are you jumping in here or am I.

Samantha:

I'd love for you to talk about, yeah. Why this whole thing even is here.

Ron:

There we go. So if what we are always doing here at One Firefly, and many of you that are longtime clients, you know this, is we are always designing and building services to help our customers grow. The mission at One Firefly is to serve the technology integration space and aid their growth, aid the growth of the businesses in that space. And through surveying our clients over the last several years at this point, two or three years, it was surfaced that one of the number one bottlenecks to growth and number one pain points in our industry has been around people. Specifically the sourcing of new people. I.E. you can't do more work unless you have the right people. Notice I said the right people, not just warm bodies, 'cause you can actually get the wrong warm bodies on your team and that could be toxic and actually destructive to your business. But if you get the right people that are a blend of the talent, the skills, willing to accept the compensation that you're offering, and they are in alignment with your culture, then you really have magic and you're able to get that flywheel. Which is your business's success, you're able to get that thing turning faster. So we identified that was a pain point, and at the same time, at One Firefly, we've really been able to continue to grow our business because of our attention to people. And specifically us growing our own team at One Firefly and us practicing certain belief systems, learning a lot along the way, reading the books, attending the seminars, hiring the consultants, and ultimately really getting a fantastic hiring machine built here at One Firefly. And we said, heck, why don't we just connect the dots and take those methodologies that work for us, that work for many different businesses and many different industries around the country, and why don't we apply those capabilities to help integrators? And thus, Amplify People was born and we've been able to continue to scale this business. And again, we'll, we're going to tell you all about it. So that, that resulted in over the spring and the summer of 2023, us inventing that business, ultimately launching the business at CEDIA. We launched press releases, we came out of the gate and actually garnered some attention by winning Best of Show from Residential Systems, which was pretty cool. And the business has continued to accelerate. The amount of demand immediately for this service was in the dozens of integrators raising their hand for help. And you'll learn why here in a moment, because our services are pretty comprehensive and our fee structures are, by design, are a fraction of what the recruiting world out there at large would charge you. So we understand you could either do it yourself or you could hire somebody to do it. And we wanted to offer you a higher quality, consistent process that would cost a fraction of what it would cost you to do yourself and or to hire another recruitment firm. And that's what you're going to learn about the in detail here, over the next few minutes.

Samantha:

Yeah, thank you Ron, and very excited. I echo everything he said. We really want to be a solution for this industry and thinking about that solution we had to craft the approach. And so our approach really starts by this foundation of the right fit. It's not just a warm body, to what Ron said earlier, it's really finding somebody that has these skills and experience. Along with that right work ethic, personality, compensation that they're expecting, and cultural alignment that creates that perfect fit. And there's a lot of different ways that we go about uncovering the right fit for not just integrators, but also for the candidates that foster those long-term, healthy, sustainable partnerships. And one of the ways is we actually do something a little bit different. The foundation of everything we do really starts with understanding the three Cs. And the three Cs are really commute, compensation, and culture, and you'll see when those things align and how people are placing value on those things, that's really a key contributing factor to establishing that right fit. A candidate who maybe feels like they're tired of being in the car, their drive is too long, the travel's too extensive, may take a cut on compensation to get a better commute. But a candidate that's felt undervalued, they've reached the ceiling, they don't have a place to grow, they don't feel like they're part of the long-term team of the organization they're currently with, may travel a little bit longer and take less on compensation to find that perfect culture fit. So really understanding the why using these three Cs is what allows us to really determine that right fit. The other way that we really go about this is understanding the types of team players that are out there. There are different personality types, there are different work ethics, different types of employees. For us, understanding productivity and core values is what really drives us to find those A players. Those A players are going to be the top 10% of talent in the workforce. A players are highly productive performers who always demonstrate the core values of the organization that they are a part of. So imagine your team, if you had a team full of A players, people that were bought into your process, bought into the company culture, created a positive work environment, really wanted the success of everyone around them, not just themselves, and were able to back it up with the skillset. That is what we try to target for the integrators that we partner with. That's an A player. And so for us, just to reinforce this a little bit, it goes to that understanding of the entire talent lifecycle. And the talent lifecycle isn't just about talent sourcing. The talent lifecycle covers all aspects of an employee from them engaging with an organization, being developed by that organization, and ultimately being retained by that organization. So right now, Amplify People is really focused on talent sourcing, identifying and attracting top talent to the organizations that we partner with. But we have on our roadmap, because we understand the necessity of not just finding great people, but training them the right way, getting them integrated into your organization, and ultimately managing them throughout their careers so they are encouraged, feel fulfilled in their roles and want to stay with you is really a win-win scenario for everybody. So like I said, right now we're focused on that talent sourcing, but our roadmap does include the talent onboarding and talent management. We also understand that you have options, so why partner with us here at Amplify People? We're going to take a look at a couple of the reasons why partnering with Amplify People is a little bit different than what you might be used to. First off, when you work with a traditional recruiter, they are not industry specific. They don't understand the nuances of the CI space. They also don't really understand the roles, inherently. You know, going beyond that resume and identifying transferable skill sets. It's not in their wheelhouse so much. They also are incentivized to drive candidates' salaries higher because they're taking a portion of that first year salary. They guarantee placement for a set period of time, but once you get beyond that placement period, they're really not incentivized to get it right long term. They've already made their money, they can place that person again, so their job is done. Now, there's also the option of doing it yourself. Doing it yourself is something that we've seen a lot of integrators do, but they also understand that it's not your main priority. You've got a lot of hats that you wear. You can be distracted by anything that comes up at any moment. A client has an emergency, you've got a new sale coming through, a technician has a problem on a job site. Those are all things that integrators need to deal with. And they need to have the time to deal with those things. It is very time consuming to have to go out there and not just review resumes that come into a job ad, but really proactively try to engage people and attract them to your positions. You've got limited access to those resources as well. So at Amplify People, that's what really sets us apart. We understand the nuances of the industry. Ron and One Firefly have been in this space since 2007. We also cost a fraction of the cost per hire. We are able to find the perfect fit faster because we've got access to resources that others do not. In terms of doing it yourself, especially, we are able to implement a consistent process that focuses on skills and culture-driven processes to find that perfect fit. We have the ability to customize the approach to fit the organizations that we partner with. And because this is the only space we work in, we are incentivized to get it right long term. And so we really focus on building long-term relationships. And how that translates to each of you is first off, significant cost savings. If you take a traditional recruiter versus Amplify People, you're looking at about $9,000 based on a $50,000 a year annual salary of a hire with a traditional recruiter, and $3894 with a hire with us. So a little bit different, in terms of cost savings. There's also a huge time savings associated with this. And so when you look at time savings, especially if you're doing it yourself, you've gotta take a look at the amount of time or what it would cost you if you charged yourself the hours you spent on hiring. If you take 40 hours as the average time to find, select, interview, go through the entire process of sorting, sourcing talent, and multiply that by what you would charge per hour for your time. And look at 4.5 hours as the average for us. We're doing the heavy lifting, we are doing the screening, the in-depth culture and career fit interviews. And so what you are presented with is a total package where you just need to go in and make sure it's the right fit, having a large amount of information. You can save yourself a significant amount of time by going through this process.

Ron:

That's great. Great job, Sam. So what is it like to work with Amplify People? What is it like to work with us? This is actually Johann, one of our repeat clients out of Texas for Amplify People. And he's been on Automation Unplugged. So if you want to hear that interview and learn more about Johan and his awesome business tune into Automation Unplugged. So here's the types of businesses that we are going to be a great fit for, and we already accept in advance that we're not a great fit for everybody, and that's okay. We want you to know who you are. Why are you in business? What do you stand for? What makes your business different than those in your marketplace? We want you to be a great place to work, right? It makes us, it makes our job easier. When we are out there finding talent and placing them in great businesses, not only does it make our job easier, it also feels better for us. Do you want, would we want to place people in rotten workplaces or in great workplaces? We want to place them in great workplaces. It's going to be good for your business and it's going to be great for the candidates. It is all about reputation, and that's how our reputation's going to continue to grow. We want you to be flexible. Meaning that you might think you are willing to pay X or you might think that this person needs to have, I'm going to give a scenario. Maybe you think they need to be in the office, but maybe it actually could work where they could be hybrid, some in the office, some at home. There's a whole plethora of scenarios that we're going to use our experience and the fact that we're talking to candidates every single day, and we are doing hiring every single day, and we're going to want you to be willing to maybe sometimes meet in the middle if necessary, to get that great next placement for you if you're more flexible and willing. It's going to make you a better customer for us and a better partner. 'Cause we ultimately want to work with you for the long term. We want you to be able to commit to the process. So for example, in an effective hiring modality you cast a very wide net. You get a lot of candidates in. We then filter through resumes, conduct phone screens, there's a filtering process. Think of it as a funnel and as we go through the phone screening, go through the long form interviews, go through the culture fit interviews, ultimately we're going to land at final candidates. That does not happen overnight. Sometimes it takes weeks. There's some occasions it takes months, but it is better for your business to hire slow and hire right than to hire quickly and bring the wrong type of hires onto your business. I can tell you, I've been in business 17 years and I think we do it right today, but there's plenty of time in my past where we didn't do it right. And we would hire fast to put a warm body in place and if it wasn't a great culture fit, it can be toxic to your organization. We're looking for people that want to partner. Again, we're looking for a long-term partnership. There aren't exactly big dollars in these transactions, at least between us and you. So this is really about a long-term relationship. We want to be valuable. We want to aid your growth and we want to help you for many years to come. We need you to be great communicators. Meaning if we email you or call you, we need you to either take that call or respond to that email. If we make a meeting with you, we need you to attend that meeting. So it, it really breaks down when we've got great candidates, we're ready to deliver them, and then we get ghosted or get silence from you. We will fire clients that fall into that category, we can't operate on your behalf and help you with hiring if you aren't equally responsive back to us. So again, we're looking for equal and bilateral communication. And we're looking for transparency. If there are some challenges going on in your company or if you've had challenges filling this role, we want you to talk to us about that. Tell us transparently so that ultimately we can consult and advise to help you find that next best fit. This is really about us having mutual success here. And the folks that we are not a good fit for. By the way, we had to learn the hard way. 'Cause we said yes initially to some folks that were in these categories. So we've been learning as we go. We can't have you operate with unrealistic salary expectations. If the market rate for a position is $80,000 and you're telling us you're willing to pay $40,000 and it's a competitive marketplace, today we actually would not accept the partnership. We would not accept you as an Amplify People client. But there was a point where that was not true and we tried. It doesn't work. So we need you to advise on what's within the constraints of your ability to pay fair rates for roles and then that positions us to go out there and find you the absolute best talent that's a great fit for your company. Impractical job responsibilities. We've heard scenarios where people have come to us and said they wanted a payroll person slash operations manager slash project manager slash technician. And by the way, they need to know how to program Crestron and Savant. That person does not exist. Or if they do exist, they're a needle in a haystack. So sometimes we need to segment out roles and responsibilities to provide more scalability and frankly, ease of getting the right talent into your business. And then let those people be experts in their areas of domain. And then if you want to cross-functionally train them into other capabilities, have at it. But it's really a matter of being reasonable there. And then if you have a high turnover rate today, it means there might be something going on in your company. Maybe it's not your fault, maybe it is your fault. A lot of times, problems within organizations start at the top. So we'd really want you to take a good look at your company. Are you having turnover issues? We'd want those to be addressed and resolved. And only then would you really be a good fit. 'Cause remember, we're going out there working hard to find talent, and we want to place them into great businesses. So the package with One Firefly and Amplify People includes bringing you on, that's client onboarding. The job description and optimization, if you don't have a great job description, we'll help you refine that. Posting the job ad, which is in addition to the job description. So a job ad is a variance on how to language that out to make it attractive. We're going to post that. We're ultimately going to do all the filtering of candidates. We're going to do all the phone screening, the in depth career history and culture fit interviews, and then we will package up our finalist and present them to you. We are going to give you weekly updates, either in written form or video form from Sam and her team, letting you know the progress of that role. And then we're going to give you insights and dialogue on what we're seeing in terms of trends in the marketplace related to the hiring for your role. So what you're going to get is a great partner. You're going to get consistent support. So our guarantees for you are that we're going to tailor the hiring for your company, for your role, for your culture, right? Every company, you're all similar but you're all different. We understand that. And so it's a tailored approach. The fees are the fees. There's no more fees. So there's no surprise fees. There's no hidden fees. You're going to get a consistent process. We often will get, Ron, do you guarantee the candidate? And the reality is we do not guarantee the candidate 'cause we are charging you a fraction of what the recruiting world charges you. So what you are guaranteed to receive is the Amplify People team consistently executing this process on your behalf and presenting you with excellent finalists for the roles that you have open. That is our guarantee. And the scalability is that we frankly want to be your hiring partner now, every month, every quarter, years into the future. So you can scale as you need to take your business up or down in size, we're going to be right there beside you. And from the point where we decide mutually that we're going to be great partners for each other, then we can turn you on, we can get you onboarded pretty quick and we can get a role active pretty swiftly. Now I would love you to go over and check out the Amplify People website. This expanded website actually just launched in the last few weeks, so amppeople.com. That's AMP people dot com. It's fairly comprehensive in describing how we support both companies like yours and the candidates that are going to go through this process with us. And there's a great fun video on the hiring page that we just produced that tries to help you understand our value prop within 60 seconds or so. All of the forms and the methods for you to reach out to us and tell us you want to take a next step, everything is on that site and described in detail. So I think with that, Rebecca, if you want to jump back in and are there any questions for Sam or I?

Rebecca:

Yeah. Thanks team. Someone did ask, how do you find candidates?

Ron:

Sam?

Samantha:

That's a great question. So we have a three-pronged approach to everything that we do in terms of talent sourcing. So one is, one you're very familiar with, and that is we are going to manage a job ad on your behalf. So it's going to go out in the world and people are going to respond to that job ad. And we're going to filter through all of those applicants to try to find talent. But then we take a remarkably proactive approach and we go out and we've got access to the backend of all of these job boards, where people have raised their hand and said, I'm open to hearing about new opportunities. And we're able to filter through a variety of resumes for people who may or may not have seen the job ad for one reason or another, and we're able to go out and message them to try to see if they would be interested in having a conversation. And the third way is because we're having conversations every day with people in this space, we are building up our own kind of database and referral network within Amp People. And so we are able to reach out to individuals that are in your area that we know may still be looking, or that we know are great referral sources, and try to come up with some additional candidates.

Rebecca:

Thank you. And then it looks like a follow up to this question. Somebody is asking, how do I know you won't poach my people?

Samantha:

It's an excellent question and, I know especially those that have worked with recruiters in the past, there's definitely some things that are done in kind of that staffing world that is not... It's not the One Firefly way, it's not the Amp People way. And so what I will say is we don't call what I call the shell game. We don't take from company A and move to B, B to C, and just C to A and just go in a circle. Again, this is the only space that we work in, and so if we were to do that, this would be a very short-term service. We would have a lot of frustrated people, and we could not be a partner to any of you that way. So the only people that we engage with are people who have raised their hand and said we want to hear about new opportunities.

Rebecca:

Thank you. And then we have one more question. Could you just go over again how you're different from a recruiter or are you different from a traditional recruiter?

Samantha:

Yeah, no worries. Some of our big differentiators are really the fact that this is the industry that we work in, so we understand the nuances of this space. And we can do not only a skills match, but also that culture match. Understanding, working with, and partnering with different integrators throughout the years. We really understand the industry differently than just a traditional recruiter would. We also are different because it is a flat rate, so we're not incentivized to drive the cost of the market up because we're getting more money out of it. We are simply charging a flat fee and then giving you what the candidates are giving us, what it is that they are looking for in terms of cost without any sort of influence. Go ahead.

Ron:

Yeah, I wanted to jump in. I'm actually going to jump back over to our pricing. So if you look here for a role, if we hire for a technician or even a salesperson, it's going to cost around, I'll round up, around five grand. And that gets you two credits. So you might say, but Ron, that doesn't guarantee a hire. Today around 95% of our clients are actually hiring one of the two finalists that we're presenting them. So I'm going to venture to say it actually is closer to around 5K per role, and then you all can do the math on what you're currently paying your recruiters. Typically, recruiters are charging you anywhere from 10 to 20% flat rate of the salary, and they have an incentive to drive that salary up. So we have no such incentive to drive a salary up, and we aren't tied to that compensation from you to that employee at all. So we're really purely focused on advising you around what is a fair wage for that level of experience and skillsets within the marketplace. So we're going to conduct that research and give you that dialogue. And if we aren't, ultimately, seeing the candidate flow we'd want, we're going to help you understand that. So maybe we need to adjust that either salary or compensation package. But it is a fraction of what really is out there in the marketplace. So we love the approach we're taking. We received that feedback from our clients and the fact that we can do this at a fraction of the expense. The reality is, I hope everyone sees this, this is not a money grab from Amplify People to the industry. Frankly, One Firefly has subsidized this thing being brought to market for the last several years. Why? Because we know the people portion of your business is a pain point, and we really sincerely want to help. And so that's why we're doing it the way we're doing it. And if you're listening and you think we should do it even a different way, tell Sam and myself that, give us that feedback. We're not trying to act like we know, necessarily, the perfect way. We're doing a lot of listening, far more listening than we are directing, and that's why you see us packaged the way we are today. Because there's been a tremendous amount of research to make sure that what we're bringing to market is valuable and appreciated.

Rebecca:

Awesome. Thank you guys. That's all the questions we've gotten in. Again, if anybody has any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We're happy to provide answers. And everyone will see this recording again. Look for it in your inboxes tomorrow. And thank you everyone for coming.

Ron:

Thanks everybody.

Samantha:

Thank y'all.

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Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

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Resources and links from the interview:

• Amplify People Website


• Amplify People LinkedIn


• Samantha Hodz LinkedIn

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