You do not lose placements because your consultants are bad at recruiting. You lose them because the good candidate sat unread for two days.
In a ten to fifty person agency there is rarely an operations team, so the CV sorting, scheduling, timesheet chasing and compliance paperwork lands on the people who should be billing. We automate that work so the desk gets its week back.
You will not need all six. Most agencies start with the one that hurts most on a Friday afternoon and add from there.
01
A vacancy attracts eighty applications and forty are irrelevant. Someone still opens all eighty. We parse incoming CVs, extract the things you actually screen on — right to work, sector experience, tickets and certifications, notice period, location — and put a ranked shortlist in front of the consultant with the reasoning attached.
A human still decides. The bot never rejects anyone on its own.
02
Candidate records go stale the moment a consultant is busy, which is exactly when the pipeline matters most. Emails, calls and replies get logged against the record automatically, stages move themselves when something happens, and anyone sitting untouched for a fortnight surfaces before they go cold.
Works with the CRM or ATS you already run.
03
Three-way scheduling between a client, a candidate and a consultant is where days disappear. Candidates self-book into slots the client has actually confirmed, everyone gets reminders, and reschedules update all three calendars without a single "does Thursday still work?" email.
No-shows drop when the reminder is automatic rather than remembered.
04
For temp and contract desks this is the weekly tax: chasing contractors on Friday, chasing managers for approval on Monday, then re-keying it all into payroll and invoicing. The reminder, the escalation and the hand-off to payroll all run without anyone driving them.
Usually the single biggest week-on-week saving on a contract desk.
05
Right to work, DBS, insurance, qualifications, ticket renewals. The risk is never that you decided to skip one, it is that nobody noticed it lapsed. Documents get requested, chased, filed against the record and flagged ahead of expiry automatically.
An audit trail that exists whether or not somebody kept a spreadsheet.
06
Weekly submission and placement reports assembled by hand, usually by a manager on a Friday afternoon. Pulled from your own data, formatted the way each client likes it, and sent on schedule.
The report goes out even in the week everyone forgets.
Large agencies hire resourcers and compliance administrators to absorb this work. At your size, that overhead would eat the margin — so it gets absorbed by consultants instead, in the gaps between calls, at the cost of the calls.
The result is familiar: the pipeline is accurate on Monday and fiction by Thursday, the best candidate for a role is in an inbox nobody has reached, and Friday is timesheets.
Automating this is not about replacing consultants. It is about making sure the hour they spend is the hour that earns a fee.
Worth costing if
Work out the number yourself with the arithmetic on the cost guide, or let us do it on a call.
Almost certainly. We build around Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Recruit CRM, HubSpot and in-house systems — anything with an API, which is nearly everything. Replacing the system your consultants already know is usually more disruptive than the automation is worth, so we do not start there. If what you have genuinely cannot trigger or receive anything, we will tell you that before you spend a penny.
We build screening to extract and rank against the criteria you define — sector experience, certifications, right to work, notice period — rather than letting a model form its own opinion of a person. Every shortlist shows the reasoning, a consultant makes the actual decision, and nobody is auto-rejected. Candidate data stays in your systems, and we set retention and deletion rules as part of the build so records do not quietly accumulate past what you can justify.
A single automation — timesheet chasing, or CV parsing into your ATS — starts at £350 fixed price. A full desk-wide build joining your ATS, calendars, compliance documents and payroll typically runs £3,000 to £8,000 and delivers in two to six weeks. Everything is quoted as one fixed number before work starts, and we are not VAT registered, so the quoted price is what you pay.
It depends on the desk. Contract and temp desks usually see the most, because timesheet and compliance chasing is weekly and relentless. Perm desks tend to gain most from scheduling and pipeline hygiene. As a rule, if a consultant is spending more than half a day a week on admin that is not talking to candidates or clients, there is a case worth costing — and the arithmetic is on our cost guide.
No. Small agencies often get the fastest payback, because there is no operations team absorbing the admin — it lands on the consultants who should be billing. The starting point is usually one automation on the most repetitive job, not a platform rebuild.
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. We'll work out which of the six is costing you most and what removing it would cost — including when the honest answer is to leave it alone.
Prefer to talk now? 01246 923041 — Mon–Fri, 9am–5.30pm.
So we can come to the call with something useful rather than spending the first ten minutes working out who you are.