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Company: Just In Time Staffing
Industry: Light Industrial & Skilled Staffing
Locations: Three offices, based in Bensenville, IL
Contact: Maggie Fox, Senior Skilled Recruiter
Just In Time Staffing is a light industrial staffing agency based near Chicago's O'Hare airport. About eight recruiters work alongside four salespeople across direct hire, temp-to-hire, and general labor orders. On the skilled side, the team recruits CNC programmers, maintenance technicians, advanced assemblers, and warehouse and shipping staff, along with the occasional niche role like laser technician.
In staffing, the search for candidates never ends. Every new client order needs a fresh slate, and the sources that worked last quarter don't always work this one.
"We're always looking for the next good source of candidates," says Maggie Fox, Senior Skilled Recruiter at Just In Time Staffing. "It never ends."
The sources Just In Time already paid for were getting worse. At the start of the year, one of the agency's major job boards pushed it into paid campaigns, with pricing Maggie describes as opaque. Just In Time spent more and saw the same results.
"We were paying a lot for job board seats and getting nothing back," Maggie says.
Meanwhile, the team was stretched. This spring Just In Time was down a recruiter, and the orders kept coming. Sourcing and screening fell on the recruiters who were left, and the proactive work Maggie planned for each day kept getting pushed aside.
Just In Time first came across FactoryFix at the Illinois Search and Staffing Association (ISSA) conference in April and chose it for its AI recruiter. The AI reaches out to passive candidates in FactoryFix's manufacturing talent pool on the agency's behalf and screens them against the job before a recruiter steps in. About a month ago, Maggie added AI scheduling, so qualified candidates now book calls straight onto her calendar.
"The AI qualifies candidates before they get to me, so a lot of the pre-screening is already done," she says.
Maggie has shaped the AI around how she works. She blocks out her time off and sets her hours, and the scheduler books around them. She also added her own rule to the AI's instructions: if she misses a scheduled call, the candidate should call her back. A booked call tells her the candidate is worth the follow-up.
"If I miss a scheduled call, I can still call that candidate back," she says. "I already know they're interested."
She uses the AI's candidate scores to decide who to call first. When she has extra time, she works back through engaged candidates who never replied and reaches out to them directly, turning each job into a bench she can draw from later.
"Even the candidates who don't respond give me a pool I can keep adding to."
A staffing agency might fill an order for welders on Monday and chemical blenders on Tuesday, and what makes a good candidate changes with every role. Just In Time handles that by building a separate AI recruiter for each role family: welding and fabrication, mechanical assembly and electrical work, customer service in manufacturing, and chemical and food blending.
Each recruiter screens the way Just In Time's own recruiters would for that trade. On the welding side, Maggie told the AI what a strong candidate looks like at the pay rate the client is offering. Entry level works with a certificate and six months of experience, and the best fits live nearby with one to two years in. She also told it which strengths can make up for gaps, like a stable work history, a short commute, or a welding certificate, and which signals rule a candidate out, like a history of job hopping or no welding experience at all.
That puts the agency's own judgment into every screening conversation. By the time a candidate lands on Maggie's calendar, they've already been measured against the same bar she'd use herself.
Each recruiter is built once and reused across orders. Just In Time has seven active jobs running across its four recruiters, and every new order in a trade starts with a screen that's already tuned for it.
Every recruiter also carries the agency's company context, so the AI introduces Just In Time the way the agency describes itself: family-operated and focused on skilled manufacturing across the greater Chicago area. Jobs go out white-labeled, so candidates only ever see Just In Time.
Here's how that plays out. When Art, Just In Time's welding recruiter, evaluated a candidate for a MIG welder order, it scored the candidate a 4.3 and laid out why. The candidate had held the same metal fabrication job since 2017, matching the stable work history Maggie asked for. A 2021 certificate covering MIG, TIG, and stick welding met the certificate requirement. He was also open to second shift and had engaged with roles paying $21 to $22 an hour, which fit the order's pay and schedule.
Maggie sees all of that before she ever picks up the phone.
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Every candidate is scored against the job. Maggie uses the scores to set her call order, then works back through lower-priority engaged candidates when she has time.
Recruiters connect their calendars, and qualified candidates book interviews directly. Each recruiter sets their own working hours and blocks off time away. They can also add custom instructions, like Maggie's rule that candidates call her back if she misses a scheduled call due to an overlap.
When Just In Time onboards a new client, Maggie requests a labor market report for the role. For a recent class C delivery driver order, the report gave her the evidence to show the client its pay rate was below what the market would bear.
Since signing on with FactoryFix in April 2026, Just In Time's recruiting team has:
For Maggie, the biggest change is the sourcing she no longer has to do by hand. The AI brings in passive candidates and qualifies them, and she calls the ones who look like a fit.
"The AI brings in passive candidates I'd never have time to find," she says. "I just call the ones who look like a fit."
Maggie started with AI scheduling on her own orders. After it worked for her, she started bringing it to the rest of the team. When she posts jobs for Just In Time's general labor recruiters, she connects their calendars to the scheduler, so their candidates go through the same process: qualified by the AI first, then booked straight onto a recruiter's calendar.
"Scheduling worked so well for me that I set it up for the other recruiters too," she says.
For each recruiter it connects, the scheduler handles the back-and-forth of setting up calls and takes part of the pre-screen off their plate. Every call that lands on the calendar is with a candidate who has already said yes.
Just In Time came to FactoryFix looking for another candidate source during a stretch when the team was a recruiter short. Five months later, custom AI recruiters handle the first screen for each trade, and scheduling is rolling out to every desk. The results have warranted expanding the agency's FactoryFix plan five times since April. Its recruiters now spend their time on candidates who are already qualified and already interested.
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