Specialized recruiting firm brings real-world recruiting, operational, and AI-development use cases to OpenAI’s limited research program
Land O’ Lakes, Fla. — September 3, 2026 — DAVRON, a nationally recognized executive search and recruiting firm specializing in the engineering, architecture, construction, and manufacturing industries, has been selected to participate in OpenAI’s ChatGPT Business Research Partner Program.
The limited program brings together selected ChatGPT Business customers to help OpenAI better understand how organizations are using artificial intelligence across real-world business and technical workflows. Participating organizations have opportunities to interact with OpenAI product and research teams, share feedback and practical use cases, and access optional training and best-practice resources.
DAVRON President David Coreen called the company’s selection both an honor and an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the continued development of business-focused AI.
“We are extremely excited to participate in the ChatGPT Business Research Partner Program,” Coreen said. “What makes this opportunity particularly meaningful is the ability to share actual use cases, measurable outcomes, and direct feedback with OpenAI’s product and research teams. We are not simply experimenting with AI. We are deploying it throughout our organization and seeing it create meaningful business results.”
In correspondence inviting DAVRON to participate, OpenAI’s Matthew van den Berg described the company as “exactly the kind of business we’d love to learn from through this program,” citing the breadth of DAVRON’s internally developed technology and its application of AI across recruiting, software development, sales, marketing, operations, and human resources.
An Unusual Technology Model for a Specialized Recruiting Firm
Unlike many staffing firms that rely primarily on off-the-shelf recruiting technology or outside consultants, DAVRON designs and develops its software, search agents, workflow automations, and outreach systems internally.
The company maintains its own software engineering team and builds technology around the specific needs of DAVRON’s recruiters, account managers, clients, and candidates. That capability is particularly uncommon for an approximately 40-person specialized staffing organization.
DAVRON attributes a meaningful portion of its recruiter productivity and profitability to the systems it has developed over many years. Its recruiters consistently produce at more than twice the staffing-industry average, according to the company.
Artificial intelligence has accelerated that work by improving candidate discovery, skills matching, recruiter decision-making, personalized communication, internal reporting, and administrative efficiency.
“Because we develop these systems around the way our people actually work, we can move quickly from an idea to company-wide adoption,” Coreen said. “Our size gives us the ability to innovate rapidly, while the volume and complexity of our recruiting operations provide a genuine real-world environment in which to evaluate what AI can accomplish.”
From Natural-Language Search to Personalized Outreach
One of DAVRON’s most significant recent developments is Apex, an AI-powered recruiting system created entirely by the company’s internal development team.
Apex uses ChatGPT as a unified interface connecting two previously separate DAVRON systems:
- ElijahSearch, DAVRON’s applicant tracking system, containing the company’s extensive candidate and recruiting data.
- Hermes, DAVRON’s proprietary outreach platform, which initiates personalized email and text communications with recruiter-selected candidates.
Through Apex, a recruiter can describe the qualifications needed for an open position in natural language. ChatGPT searches DAVRON’s internal candidate information and helps identify individuals whose documented experience appears relevant to the position. The recruiter reviews the results, exercises human judgment, and selects the candidates who should receive outreach.
Those selections can then be sent directly from ChatGPT to Hermes, where individualized email and text outreach is created and initiated using OpenAI technology.
The recruiter remains central to the entire process. AI helps organize information, identify potentially relevant experience, and reduce time-consuming administrative work, while DAVRON’s recruiters make the decisions and conduct the personal conversations that ultimately drive successful placements.
Early Adoption Produces Measurable Results
DAVRON officially launched Apex company-wide on August 17, 2026. During its first 10 days of operation, the system achieved substantial adoption and measurable recruiting outcomes:
- Recruiters generated 130 candidate profiles for submission to clients.
- Those submissions produced 41 client interviews.
- The company recorded four placements within the initial 10-day period, with additional candidates continuing through the interview process.
While Apex remains in its early stages, DAVRON believes the initial results demonstrate the potential of connecting conversational AI with internal business systems and established human workflows.
“What is particularly compelling is that ChatGPT has become the common interface connecting our candidate database, AI-assisted search, recruiter decision-making, and outreach technology,” Coreen said. “Most businesses have valuable information spread across systems that were never designed to communicate with one another. Our work demonstrates how ChatGPT can help bring those systems together in a practical and highly accessible way.”
Contributing Real-World Feedback
As part of the program, DAVRON plans to provide OpenAI with feedback concerning which tools and workflows are most effective, who benefits from them, where limitations exist, and how ChatGPT Business can be improved for applied business use.
The company will also share broader use cases involving recruiting operations, candidate communication, client development, software engineering, marketing, training, reporting, and organizational management—without disclosing confidential candidate, client, or proprietary information.
OpenAI has also granted DAVRON $5,000 in ChatGPT Business usage credits for a one-year period to support its participation and continued exploration of these technologies.
“For DAVRON, this program represents much more than access to technology or usage credits,” Coreen said. “It gives our team an opportunity to participate in a genuine exchange of ideas with one of the organizations shaping the future of artificial intelligence. We are honored to have been selected, and we are excited to contribute what we are learning from deploying AI in a demanding, results-driven business environment.”
About DAVRON
DAVRON is an executive search, recruiting, and outplacement firm specializing in the engineering, architecture, construction, and manufacturing industries. Headquartered in Land O’ Lakes, Florida, DAVRON serves employers and professionals throughout the United States.
The company combines specialized industry knowledge, experienced recruiters, and internally developed technology to help organizations identify highly qualified professionals for difficult-to-fill positions.
For additional information, visit www.davron.net.