The recruitment agencies scaling fastest right now aren't hiring more people. They're using their tech that's sitting idle.

During my latest recruitment leaders podcast I sat down with Jonathan Abraham from Bullhorn to talk about the question every recruitment agency owner is quietly asking right now:

How do you scale a recruitment agency without just throwing more headcount at the problem?

Recruitment agencies have always grown the same way.

• Win more clients

• Take on more jobs

• Hire more recruiters to cover it.

Jonathan's argument is that this model is breaking, and it's breaking because of who your competition actually is now.

Your competitors aren't just the agency down the road anymore, it's software. Candidates can now fire off a thousand applications in an hour, and none of them land the strongest relationships.

That's not a small shift for recruitment agency leaders to absorb. If a candidate can self-serve their entire application through a platform, the traditional recruiter advantage, being the one with access to the job, disappears.

What's left is the relationship, and Jonathan argues that's now the only genuine USP recruitment agencies have.

The four A's most recruitment agencies get wrong

We used my own framework for this conversation: ATS, analytics, automation and adoption, with AI sitting inside automation. Most recruitment agencies have all four. Very few are using all four properly - and they're often not bothering to connect them.

Take analytics.

Most recruitment agencies use it for one thing: a board report at the end of the month. Looking backwards at what already happened, rather than forwards at what a recruiter should do today.

So what's the biggest AI opportunity for recruitment agencies right now?

Jonathan points to two specific areas, and they're both about data your recruitment agency already owns.

Not new data you need to buy, data sitting in your CRM right now, under-used. How fast you can surface it, and how it flows into the everyday routines and candidate communications your consultants are already running. He walks through exactly where in the episode.

We're still meeting recruitment agency clients with automation that's barely doing 5% of what it's capable of doing.

Read that again. 5%!

I see this every day! Most recruitment agencies aren't short of technology. They're short of using the technology they've already paid for.

Do recruitment agencies need to hire less as they grow?

Not necessarily less, but growth doesn't have to mean headcount anymore.

Jonathan's view is that efficiency, not team size, is what now separates recruitment agencies that scale from recruitment agencies that just get busier and more stressed.

I call this Return on Effort (ROE), not just ROI. It's not only what a placement earns, it's how much effort, stress and time it cost to get there.

Jonathan shared a story about a recruitment agency client who wanted AI rebuilt from the ground up into their process, not bolted on as an afterthought. They built a virtual candidate manager into their workflow. It got so embedded that candidates now call the office and ask for it by name.

Is this about replacing recruiters with AI?

No, and Jonathan is blunt about it.

I share that view. Many recruiters, if they were honest about their day, are actually recruitment administrators, not recruitment consultants.

You're not going to earn money updating fields manually or chasing statuses. You earn money building relationships. And knowing exactly when to use them.

Jonathan adds...

Recruiters don't measure how much time they spend, but oh my God, are they spending it, and they're wasting it.

AI isn't there to replace the consultant role. It's there to remove the admin: the manual updates, the status chasing, the parts of the job that were never where the money or the value came from anyway. What that frees a recruiter up to do instead is the part Jonathan gets specific on in the full conversation.

We finish on something every recruitment agency leader should be asking their own database this week, not guessing at it internally, but literally asking your own candidates the question. What is it?

You'll have to watch.

Watch my vodcast on how recruitment agencies are using AI to scale

Watch the full 26 minute conversation with Jonathan from Bullhorn now. See exactly where AI is already helping recruitment agencies scale.

Bullhorn ATS / Analytics / Automation / AI ROI

We are Bullhorn experts obsessed with how recruiters can increase sales, reduce costs, speed up sourcing, and improve productivity.

We help you weaponise your people, data, time, and tech, so you can recruit and sell!

Our Bullhorn Vision and Buddy service helps generate best-in-class processes, adoption, head space, and ROI.

BOOK A FREE BULLHORN ROI CONSULTATION