The second session I attended at the TEAM conference was from Wendy McDougall of Firefish Software, and it tackled a topic that I suspect made a few recruitment business owners slightly uncomfortable.
For years we’ve all known what growth looks like in a recruitment agency. If you want to increase revenue, you hire another recruiter. If you want more delivery capability, you add a resourcer. If you need more management, you promote a team leader. It’s the model most of us have grown up with.
Wendy’s challenge to the audience was simple: what if that model no longer makes sense?
One of the questions she asked early on was how much our businesses have actually changed in the last three and a half years. Not how many AI webinars we’ve attended or how many LinkedIn posts we’ve read about ChatGPT, but how much we’ve genuinely changed the way we operate.
Many agencies are still measuring success using exactly the same KPIs, structures and assumptions that we were using before AI became part of everyday business life. Yet the tools available to us today are fundamentally different from anything we’ve had before.
Recruitment hasn’t actually changed that much. We still create demand, win clients, find candidates, make placements and build relationships. The workflow remains broadly the same. What is changing is how much of that workflow can now be supported, automated or accelerated by technology.
Rather than asking “which AI tool should I buy?”, Wendy encouraged agency owners to map out their workflows and ask a different question: which parts genuinely require a human and which parts don’t?
One example she gave was around the idea of the “one person company” – not literally one person doing everything, but one person orchestrating a collection of AI tools, automations and systems that previously might have required several employees. Whether we like it or not, we’re already seeing this happen.
Solo recruiters are running businesses that would have required support staff a few years ago. Agency owners are creating marketing content, proposals, reports and campaigns in a fraction of the time it once took. Tasks that used to absorb hours every week are increasingly being completed in minutes.
That doesn’t mean recruiters are becoming less important. If anything, it means we need to become clearer about where our value really sits.
One point Wendy made that I particularly liked was that not everything should be automated. Every agency has parts of its process that make it different. Parts that clients value. Parts that build trust. The challenge is identifying those areas and protecting them. Automate the admin, the repetitive tasks and the things that add little value. But be deliberate about the things that make your business unique.
Another theme that came through strongly was data. Wendy described recruitment businesses as data businesses and I think she’s right. The better AI becomes, the more valuable good data becomes. Agencies with clean, structured, accurate data will get far more value from AI than agencies with years of duplicated records, incomplete notes and inconsistent CRM usage.
It’s not the most exciting topic in the world, but it may turn out to be one of the biggest competitive advantages over the next few years.
Perhaps my biggest takeaway from Wendy’s session was that this isn’t really a conversation about AI at all it is a conversation about business design. The agencies that thrive over the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones that buy the most technology. They’ll be the ones that think carefully about how they operate, where they create value and how they use technology to support that.
As Wendy put it, this is a huge opportunity for smaller agencies. Large firms often struggle to move quickly because of layers of management, process and legacy ways of working. Smaller businesses can adapt far faster. The question is whether we’re willing to rethink some of the assumptions we’ve held for years about how recruitment businesses should grow.
So, the future may not belong to the agencies with the biggest teams it may belong to the agencies with the smartest workflows.
