Working Smarter:
How Covenant Technologies Developed Innovative Staffing Tech to Improve Their Business
We sat down with clients Casey Marquette and Joe Quinn of Covenant HR to talk innovation in staffing technology and how their proprietary recruiting platform, Scout™, is changing the game for their business.
Casey Marquette, Founder and CEO of Covenant HR, has spent his career filling in the gaps. As a Chief Information Security Officer for a Fortune 100 company and then COO of a consulting firm for staffing, he saw firsthand how failing to innovate was holding these companies back.
“And I thought, I can do it better. When I got into staffing, there were a lot of gaps we recognized, and the way to address them is through technology. I launched my company three years ago, and the first year we made over $5 million. And it’s only going up from there.”
Covenant HR, founded in 2022, is a Florida-based provider of IT and cybersecurity staffing, recruiting, and talent solutions. Their real differentiator is Scout™, a proprietary AI assisted recruiting tool that consistently delivers high quality candidates and improve their business.
And the recent addition of his former colleague and former Covenant board member Joe Quinn as COO has only improved the outlook. Joe has worked as a CHRO for global companies and brings a unique perspective to the company.
“The reason I came aboard is that I knew and understood the business and I saw how it was growing. And a large part of that is because Scout is a total game changer.”
“I am a firm believer in working smarter and not harder, leveraging technology, and sharing what’s working with each other.”
For Staffing, By Staffing
Marquette has always been driven by the power of innovation and being on the cutting edge of tech like AI and automation.
“I am a firm believer in working smarter and not harder, leveraging technology, and sharing what’s working with each other. That’s why we built Scout. Using technology is the only way to close those gaps and take it to the next level in this industry.”
The platform is ‘designed to solve hiring challenges across industries by blending human intuition with AI-driven precision.’ And the reason that Scout is superior to other tools, according to Marquette, is because it was built by a staffing firm.
“You have all these tech companies coming out with solutions and they don’t hit the mark. We are a staffing company, we know staffing, and we knew what it needed to do. We are further along than any other solution because of our background. And it also doesn’t hurt that a former CHRO (Quinn) is providing feedback.”
And according to Quinn, part of what makes their tool unique – and fun to sell – is that it is customizable to their customer’s preferences.
“Our developers can make it better both for our internal needs and our customers needs. They ask, ‘hey, can Scout do this?’ I’ll give you an example. We always interview our hiring managers and ask, what are 3-5 must haves? One of our customers asks, can we have 7 must haves? Within a day, our developer updated the software. We iterate weekly and constantly improve.”
Finding Talent
Marquette says that for most jobs they post, they receive between 300-500 applications. While a recruiter might go through 50 that were “good enough”, that still left the majority of applications never touched.
“We weren’t getting our clients the best talent possible because a human could not look through all of them efficiently, and we couldn’t have hired that many recruiters.”
With Scout, within 2.2 seconds, a candidate is evaluated against job criteria. If they score above a certain range, they get a text and an email within 5 minutes asking them to interview. The tool also knows 32 languages, extending the talent pool even further. The platform also offers specific feedback to each candidate on what they could improve to get a higher score.
“Scout does a couple thing for us,” adds Marquette. “Of course there is the speed of evaluation and speed to hire, of course. But beyond that, it also gives us better quality candidates because it is trained on multiple LLM models across industries. It knows more about these tech roles than any human recruiter could.”
But that’s not to say that Scout entirely replaces human interaction. In fact, Marquette says that their recruiters love the tool because they are making more money. A recruiter can come in and see a dashboard that has 600 applications all sorted by relevance to the role. It allows for one-click interviewing, integrates with Teams and Google, and the platform itself goes back and forth with the candidate to find a time that works, allowing recruiters to use their time more efficiently.
“Scout allows us to have technology with human interaction,” says Quinn. “Let me give you a quick example. Last week I was about to fill a job at a healthcare company. When I did a second interview with the candidate, I asked about location because that was impacting her score. Turns out she was moving to the city where they are located, so I updated her account. That took her from a D score to B in location and increased her total score in Scout. The power is amazing and you can see it working in real time.”
“Before Scout, we specialized in cyber security and IT,” says Marquette. “Now, we fill all kinds of roles. It doesn’t get sick, it works 24/7 365 days a year, it understands every role. We set a record last month, all due to this tool.”
Future Vision
Marquette says his 10-year vision has always been to be the trendsetters in AI and automation in staffing. And this goes for internal processes as well. Covenant just hired someone to automate financial processes including commissions, leaving the work to an AI agent.
It all comes down to optimizing time and resources, and tech is the way to get there.
“I had lunch with a staffing owner the other day. I have 8 people on my team, he has 26. We have the same revenue. The reason we are making more money with less people is because we leverage technology. If you aren’t on top of it, you will never make it.”
And that feeds right into what success means for Covenant.
“Do I want nice things for myself? Sure,” says Marquette. “But the thing I absolutely love is, because we are using tech and working smart, my staff is getting bigger bonuses and their lives are improved. To me, that’s way better than having a bunch of houses.”
And their partnership with Advance Partners helps. When they started and grew faster than Marquette could have imagined, he realized he couldn’t pay the contractors.
“It was a great problem to have, but not making payroll would not be a great problem. We partnered with AP and that stress was eliminated.”