Conversation from a YouTube video exploring why experienced recruiters should adopt automation—especially automating candidate search, the most time-consuming task. Speakers address common unease among long-tenured recruiters about losing control, explain benefits (less manual sourcing, more consistent candidate flow, business that runs without the owner, time freedom), and recommend leading with a niche (e.g., software engineers) while using automation and sourcing/marketing teams to expand into adjacent roles (BAs, PMs, infrastructure). The discussion emphasizes building automation before losing key clients, and treating automation as insurance to stabilize and scale revenue.
Knowing that I need to make a switch to automation, particularly for candidate search. Right. Automating candidate search because that's the most time consuming thing. But have you worked with folks like this, you know, 15 years, successful, probably pretty good, feelings a little uneasy about the switch to automating things and having less control over the processes.
Yeah, great question. Yeah, you're our ideal avatar. Like most of the people we've worked with have been in recruitment for 10, 15 years and it's not just about generating revenue. It's like, are you working for the business or is the business working for you? So the difference is that you're going to have to turn up for work every day and generate candidates manually and clients manually and keep doing the billings. So everyone will get to a point where you just don't want to do that anymore. Because for me personally I just haven't spoke to candidate for probably five or six years and I don't want to. I would rather have my business where it's at now. I could probably make an extra million a year by spoke with candidates, but I've got no freedom, I've got no time and it's not a business that I want. I want a business that runs without me to give me a better life. So yeah, I mean we've helped a lot of people in your scenario just because you will get burnt out and you get tired of doing it and it's not consistent because it's reliant on you. So you want to leverage yourself where you've got, maybe even if you've got a marketing source and team and automation. So at least you're not doing the source and element of candidates. Just speaking of the highly qualified ones. So you free your time up more so you can probably do more with less and probably work three, four days a week as opposed to five days a week. Pretty much everyone in here that's joined. These are just the welcome emails. But yeah, Gary set his business up over 10 years ago. They could do 1.5 to 2 million. So similar to you, but you wanted more freedom. So he's actually in the mastermind now. 14 years experience. Frederick. Zach, this is the guy I was telling you, nine years experience before, but pretty much most people have been like in the recruitment game quite a long time. 1988. Okay, so they know, it's just, it comes to a point where you've got a light bulb and think, do I, should I be leveraging like a different solution now? Because time changes. Look, look what's been happening in the world, but also with technology, it's advanced and so is the recruitment space. So it's going to get harder and harder for you to do the same amount of deals next year, the year before, because you've got your competition that is using systems and automation and sourcing teams. So if you haven't got that obviously 20 years he's been in recruitment, then you need to create these unfair advantages because it'll just give you more time to work on the business, not in it and not just be not a slave to the business, but it's just 100 reliant on you. But that's okay, you could just keep, I'm not there to say do it my way. You could just keep doing what you're doing and if you're happy working hours that you're working and getting the inputs that you are without building a business that not necessarily you want to sell, but at least having something that runs without you. When you take holidays off, for example, that's the time when you want to start changing or you start to see that you're losing some deals or placements. So your competition sneaking in a little bit like all of those little warning signs that might be triggering you to look at the change. But yeah, you're in the right place because you're pretty much exactly the type of person that we help. Yeah.
It just seems, you know, it's a risk. It can be. We don't, we don't not going to manually. Right. You lose if two clients are 40% of my business. Right. There's a downturn in the economy like and of course you can live off that. But yeah, I think this is, you know, it's more of an insurance policy. Right. To automate things and have more consistent flow.
But yeah, especially when you've got two clients that are generating a lot of revenue. I've seen it so many times you want to do it now before you lose one. Because the reason they're using you is because they've used you for a long time and they know like and trust you. So imagine you're going to have to build that equity up and sweat equity in a new client and that's going to take a long time because the game's changed now so you're not going to be able to do that again. However you got that client last time, the same time next time and that's when you're going to come really stuck. Is like shit like auto do now to win new clients and get the mixes of return and get all Those multiple jobs, it's not going to be as easy as that. So you want to start building this in the background so you're not just relying on those two. But that's not, that's just on the client side. But again, on candidate delivery, if you could build on something where you've got more calls booked into your diary consistently so you're not doing the manual stuff, you could either do more revenue or you could just have more time off and more freedom. Like we don't get our time back. Yeah, that's the most expensive currency. Like once we're dead, we're dead.
And so then you recommend like finding one. So I'm in tech, but it can be anything from infrastructure to software engineering to CIOs, CTO, same as us. You go across the spectrum of infrastructure systems, software engineering up and down the ladder of leadership. Or do you recommend like, hey, just focus on software engineers. I mean there's some firms I know that all they do are node js, like full stack software engineers.
Yeah, I would walk you through it a little bit more detail, but on a granular level. But you want to lead with a niche, but within that you could service the clients with other needs. The only way you can do that, for instance, we do, we lead with software engineers as our niche, but then we do business analysts, infrastructure support, project managers. The only way we can do that is because we can leverage automation and a virtual and marketing and sourcing team that's going to generate more candidates for our delivery consultants. So then when the calls are booked in, they can do a BA and then put the phone down to a PM for the phone because the skills the same testers, for example. Whereas if you don't have them, then you should just be one niche because you need to build all those kind of relationships just yourself. And you can't be a master of everything. But with the automation and the sourcing team, you can be a master of a little bit more because you've got one pods in each different sector within it. And then the delivery consultant, you with the recruiter sitting on top of the.
