Real AI capability, built inside your recruitment firm.
The work most firms try to fix with another tool licence, another training day, or another deck. We install the workflows your team actually runs on, alongside the people who will own them. One operator inside your business, scoped from a paid Strategy Assessment.
Free 30-minute discovery conversation first. No proposal until we have spoken.
Tech-agnostic by design. The workflows are built around how recruitment firms run, not around a single CRM or a single AI tool. Whatever your firm already pays for, we build with. The tool can be swapped later without losing the work.
Strategy without doers stalls. Doers without strategy drift.
Most firms have already tried one of these two routes and seen the result. We run both at the same time, inside the business.
Strategy without doers
A consultancy comes in, runs the diagnostic, leaves a 60-slide deck. The board nods. Nobody inside the firm owns the actual work. Three months later the deck is in a drawer and nothing has changed.
Plan delivered. Nobody to execute it.
Doers without strategy
The firm buys a generic AI training programme. Team members learn prompts and tools. They build a few small automations in their corners. None of it connects to a real plan. Momentum dies after the first certificates land.
Skills delivered. No direction. Effort scattered.
An operator inside the firm, with a strategist steering the work.
A senior operator who already knows how to ship AI workflows, working alongside your team on the actual jobs. A strategist makes sure every workflow ladders up to the outcome you want. That is the model that delivers real AI capability inside a recruitment business. Everything else is theatre.
Eight workflows the Strategy Assessment usually surfaces.
Every recruitment business has the same expensive workflows quietly breaking. Most firms have lived with them long enough to think this is just how the work runs. It is not. Each one is fixable. Each one compounds when fixed. The eight below are not a checklist. They are eight examples of what life inside a fixed firm looks like, ordered by where firms most often see margin first.
Revenue operations
Most recruitment firms cannot answer basic questions on demand: what is in pipeline, what is converting, where are we light on coverage, which roles are quietly dying. The directors fly blind on the levers that move billings.
What gets installed: a weekly revenue-operations cadence that pulls pipeline, conversion ratios, role age, and consultant productivity into one trusted view. Decisions made on data, not gut feel. The first pull is usually where the lost month of revenue was hiding.
CEO dashboards and the reporting rhythm
The CEO or MD spends Saturday morning building a slide on what happened this week, from memory and incomplete CRM data. Half the time the numbers are wrong, and the board pack repeats the same trailing-three-months chart everyone has stopped reading.
What gets installed: an automated reporting workflow that produces the CEO dashboard before Monday. Billings YTD versus plan, consultant productivity, coverage, candidate flow, pipeline health. Saturday back. Board packs become a 15-minute review.
The sales engine
Most consultants walk into BD calls with five minutes of LinkedIn skim and a vague sense of the account. Outbound is generic. The call signals it, and so does the conversion rate.
What gets installed: a BD pre-call workflow that pulls company news, recent hires, exits, funding, and competitor moves into a one-page brief, paired with a personalised-outreach engine that uses the signals not just the job title. Five minutes of guess-work replaced with five minutes of real reading.
Longlist drafting
A senior consultant spends two to four hours building a longlist that a researcher could draft in 10 minutes if the brief was structured properly. The hours come out of revenue-generating work.
What gets installed: a brief-to-longlist workflow that produces a ranked draft from a structured intake form. Consultant reviews, edits, and signs off. Hours back per role.
CRM hygiene and the candidate-data graveyard
Half the database has not been touched in 18 months. Consultants do not trust it, so they re-source candidates already in the system. The cost is paid in time, not invoices.
What gets installed: a candidate refresh workflow that surfaces dormant records worth a touch, with the consultant in the loop. Run weekly. The database becomes a working asset again.
Post-call write-up
After every call, the consultant either writes a slow CRM note that captures half of what was said, or skips it entirely. Either way the next person picking up the account is starting from nothing.
What gets installed: a transcript-to-CRM workflow that turns a recorded call into a structured note, action items, and a follow-up draft. Consultant approves and ships. The account file actually compounds.
Candidate engagement and response rates
Outreach response rates have drifted from 25 percent to 8 percent over two years. Consultants compensate by sending more, which makes it worse.
What gets installed: a personalised-outreach workflow that uses the candidate's actual signals, not just job title. Quality up, volume down, response rate recovers without growing the team.
The marketing engine
Most recruitment firms have no marketing function. The MD or a junior posts on LinkedIn occasionally. There is no employer brand, no content cadence, no demand pipeline. Inbound, when it happens, is accidental.
What gets installed: a marketing-engine workflow that turns the firm's domain expertise into shippable content. LinkedIn cadence, BD-ready collateral, email list, point-of-view pieces from the consultants who actually know the market. Inbound becomes a system, not an accident.
Other workflows turn up in almost every engagement: scheduling, scorecards, compliance, billing reconciliation, candidate hand-off. The Strategy Assessment surfaces the three to five that matter most for your firm and the order to fix them in.
One front door, then an engagement scoped to your firm.
Every engagement starts the same way: a paid Strategy Assessment. It is the scoping deliverable that decides what comes next, short or long, narrow or wide, light or heavy on the operator's time.
Strategy Assessment
- One operator inside your firm for a week
- Workflow walkthrough with consultants and ops team
- C-level workshop with the decision-maker
- Impact quantified in hours, headcount, and margin
- Funding eligibility tested as part of the week
- Go or no-go on a longer engagement at the end
Fractional Chief AI Officer
- Phase 1: Strategy, months 1 to 2
- Phase 2: Transformation, months 2 to 6, overlapping
- Phase 3: Embedded Operations, month 6 onwards
- Workflows installed alongside your internal team
- Practitioners pair with the operator to learn what they will own
- Funded delivery layer underneath where eligible
Four things that separate this from generic AI delivery.
Built for recruitment, not generic AI
Every workflow we ship is built around how recruitment firms actually run. Sourcing, candidate triage, outreach, scheduling, scorecards, pipeline analytics, compliance. We speak recruiter language because we built recruitment businesses for 10 years before this. Bolt Search is our own recruitment business; the work is our own first.
Real work from week one
No curriculum-first training. Your team picks a real workflow in week one and ships it in your actual operating stack, with a senior operator alongside them. The portfolio writes itself as the work gets done.
Tech-agnostic. Built on the tools you already pay for.
On the CRM side: Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Mercury, Salesforce, Recruit CRM, idibu. On the AI side: Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Glean, internal LLM gateways. We work with whatever your firm already runs on. We install the workflow and the discipline. The tool can be swapped later without losing the work.
A library that grows with every engagement
Every engagement adds shipped, documented recruitment workflows to a shared library. Your firm benefits from work done with prior clients, anonymised and reusable from day one. The library compounds across the network.
An operator's bench, not a consultancy's slide deck.
I have been running recruitment businesses for over a decade. The workflows above are the ones I have rebuilt inside my own firm before installing them anywhere else.
I run four businesses with minimal headcount on the back of these workflows. Bolt Search is the recruitment one. The work above is not a hypothesis. It is the day job, written down, ready to install.
More on how I think and what I am building: About and Mission.
A principal at The Satori Partnership.
I am a principal at The Satori Partnership, a global advisory group of practitioners who have built, led, and transformed recruitment businesses across the UK, APAC, and North America. The Partnership runs alongside this work, focused on the wider strategic, commercial, and operational levers that drive enterprise value inside recruitment businesses, in-house talent functions, and the talent assets sitting inside private-equity portfolios.
Where the work on this page is about installing AI capability inside a recruitment firm, the Partnership is the bigger frame: data strategy, operating-model design, exit readiness, NED-level advisory. The two run together. If you are thinking about exit, succession, or how AI capability fits inside a broader transformation, the Satori Index is the right starting point. It is a free 15-minute diagnostic that benchmarks your business and surfaces where the next move sits.
Recruitment firms ready to build AI capability, not just talk about it.
Right for you if
- You run a recruitment firm with 30 to 150 people
- Owner-operated or founder-led, profitable, with a real operating model
- You have bought AI tools your team is not operationalising
- At least one internal champion who will work alongside the operator
- You can commit a week of operator and leadership time for the Assessment
- You want internal capability that lasts after the operator leaves
Probably not if
- You want a strategy deck and no implementation
- You want someone to hand over a report and leave
- You are not yet ready to commit to real change inside the business
- You need motivation rather than implementation
- You are looking for a contingent recruitment partner
Things recruitment leaders ask before the first call.
What if we are not technical?
That is exactly who this is for. Our clients are managing partners, practice heads, and founders, not developers. We handle the technical setup. Your team focuses on the recruitment work.
How does the Strategy Assessment work?
One week, paid, scoping deliverable. We look at how you actually run, name the workflows that matter, quantify the impact, and decide together what an engagement would look like. By the end we both know whether a longer engagement makes sense and what shape it should take. The fee deducts from implementation if you proceed.
What does a wider engagement actually look like?
Three phases. Strategy in months 1 to 2: workflow diagnostic, priorities mapped, KPIs set. Transformation in months 2 to 6: workflows installed alongside the internal team, build as you go. Embedded Operations from month 6 onwards: fractional-executive rhythm while the internal team takes over delivery. Total length depends on what the Assessment surfaces; expect 12 to 18 months for the full arc.
How much does it cost?
The Strategy Assessment is paid; pricing is shared on the discovery call. The Fractional CAIO engagement is scoped from what the Assessment surfaces, so cost depends on shape and length. We can source funding so the cost of this transformation is fully funded.
Is there a funded option?
Yes. For eligible UK businesses, we can source funding so the cost of this transformation is fully funded. Eligibility is tested as part of the Assessment week, and we tell you on the readout whether it applies and what it covers. The funded layer and the commercial engagement are operationally aligned and commercially distinct.
Which CRMs and tools do you work with?
Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Mercury, Salesforce, Recruit CRM, idibu, Bullhorn Automation, custom. On the AI side: Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Glean, internal LLM gateways. The workflows are designed around how recruitment firms run, not around a specific CRM. We install the workflow and the discipline. The tool can be swapped later without losing the work.
Why are you the right person to do this?
I have run recruitment businesses for over 10 years, including Bolt Search today. I currently run four businesses with minimal headcount on the back of the workflows above. The work is the day job, written down, ready to install. I am also a principal at The Satori Partnership, the global advisory group for recruitment leaders, sitting alongside Steve Carter, Jacky Carter, Mike Chapman, Christine, and a wider network of practitioners who have built, led, and exited recruitment businesses. The two practices reinforce each other: AI capability inside the firm, and the wider strategic and commercial transformation the firm needs around it.
Is this just about AI?
No. AI is one option. We also work on workflow redesign, process automation, operational systems, hiring decisions. Where a tool fits, we use it. Where a partner fits better, we bring one in. Sometimes the answer is simpler than technology.
If you are a solo recruiter, intrapreneur, or running a leaner shop than this page is built for, the Leanpreneur Community is the better front door. £129 per month, workshops, office hours, working skills library, cancel any time.
Book a Strategy Assessment.
Thirty-minute discovery conversation first. No deck. No follow-up sales pitch. An honest read on whether the Assessment is the right next move and what your best next step looks like either way.
Prefer email first? hello@alexlockey.com