On Friday, October 16, our teams at Integrated Staffing, Accountant Staffing, and Administrative Staffing spent the day together in Halifax. Gear Up is our annual conference, where all three sister companies come together to look at the year we had and plan for the year ahead. Our teams came in from offices across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Everyone together
We place thousands of workers a year from across five offices, and for most of the year those offices work in different cities, for different clients, with their own habits. Gear Up is where we look back at the year together, talk plainly about what worked and what didn’t, and agree on the next year’s priorities. It’s always a delight to have a face-to-face conversation with someone from another office who you usually only communicate with via Slack or Microsoft Teams.
The shape of the day
Guest speaker Gary Cox opened the morning with a session called Alignment to Purpose. It centred on a question that resonated with many on our team: is our busyness creating real value? We looked at the difference between value-adding and value-enabling work, reacting versus proactive thinking, and building a workplace culture where each of us understands the totality of our roles and how they contribute to the goals of the organization at large.
Is our busyness creating real value?
Two guests from BF&M came up next to walk us through what a staffing request looks like from their side of the desk: the operational pressure behind it, the timeline they’re working against, and what changes when a staffing partner understands their business well enough to act before a gap hits the schedule. Our recruiters ask clients about their needs every day, but they rarely get to hear a client walk through the whole picture while the entire company listens. This kind of insider perspective helps us align what we do on the recruitment side with the needs of our clients, ensuring we are acting proactively as a strategic partner in business.
The afternoon started with an icebreaker, then moved into A Year in Review, where we looked at what our team had accomplished in the past year and had discussions in breakout groups. The day closed with sessions we call Looking Ahead and Focus Forward, where each of our three companies set out its 2027 priorities and each branch took ownership of its share of the work.
What we brought home
The client session with BF&M came up more than anything else in conversations afterward, because it described our job the way clients live it. A business that calls us has a role to fill, a project to deliver, or a team stretched thin. How useful we are as a partner relies on us having a deep understanding of their side of the equation. Our 2027 priorities are built around being the partner a client calls while they’re still in the planning phases of a project or expansion.
Every office left Halifax with the same priorities, applied to its own market. A client working with our St. John’s team and a client working with our Halifax team should be dealing with the same company, and a day in one room is a big part of how we stay aligned and stay focused on our collective goals.
The AI of it all
One thing that came up repeatedly during the day was, of course, AI: how it’s transforming the field of recruiting, and how it can, and can’t, be used as a tool to lighten the workload of our recruiters.
We always strive to be ahead of the curve rather than playing catch up, so it’s important for us to be having these conversations now and to have a clear plan in place for how AI shapes our work in the coming months and years.
The technology is here to stay. It’s not a passing fad, which makes an organization’s response and attitude towards it even more important. In recruiting, AI is now being used to help write job descriptions, screen resumes, automate candidate sourcing, customize job postings, and communicate details with applicants, among other tasks. In other words, much of the busy, tedious work that used to come with recruiting will increasingly be taken over by this technology. That leaves recruiters with more time for interviews and for being the human connection between employer and candidate, ensuring quality of experience is never sacrificed in the name of speed or efficiency.
Looking towards the future
Shortly after Gear Up ended, the Halifax Chamber of Commerce named Integrated Staffing a finalist for Business of the Year at the 2027 Halifax Business Awards. This is a great demonstration of why we do the work we do and why it’s so important for us to take time together to keep building on our successes and overcome challenges.
Plan your 2027 workforce with us.
If your business is planning its 2027 workforce, now is a good time to talk, while the planning is still happening.
Talk to a recruiterSources: SHRM, 2025 Talent Trends: AI in HR; Bullhorn, GRID 2025 Industry Trends Report; World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025.