Stop trialling AI tools. Build real AI capability inside your recruitment firm, with your own people, funded.
You have tried the tools, the training day, the deck. None of it stuck. This is different. Your consultants learn to build the workflows your desk actually runs on, fast, in your real stack, with the work funded by the apprenticeship levy.
Built for mid-market and SME recruitment businesses. Strategy first, then a funded build programme.
On the CRM side, Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Salesforce, Recruit CRM and more. On the AI side, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini. We build with whatever your firm already runs on.
Strategy without doers stalls. Doers without strategy drift.
Most firms have already tried one of these two routes and seen the result. This programme runs both at once, inside the business, and the funding pays for it.
Strategy without doers
A consultancy runs the diagnostic and 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.
Doers without strategy
The firm buys a generic AI course. People learn prompts and tools and build a few automations in their corners. None of it connects to a plan. Momentum dies after the certificates land.
Your people as the doers, with strategy steering
The strategy names the workflows that matter and the order to fix them. The funded apprenticeship turns your own consultants into the team who build them, coached by operators who have shipped this work inside real recruitment businesses.
Six workflows the strategy assessment usually surfaces
Every recruitment business has the same expensive workflows quietly breaking. Each one is fixable, each one compounds when fixed, and each one becomes a funded build and a piece of qualification evidence.
Revenue operations
Most firms cannot answer basic questions on demand: what is in pipeline, what is converting, where coverage is light, which roles are quietly dying. The directors fly blind on the levers that move billings.
The reporting rhythm
The MD spends Saturday morning building a slide on the week from memory and half-complete CRM data. Half the time the numbers are wrong, and the board pack repeats a chart everyone has stopped reading.
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, and the conversion rate shows it.
Longlist drafting
A senior consultant spends two to four hours building a longlist a researcher could draft in minutes if the brief was structured. The hours come out of fee-earning work.
Post-call write-up
After every call the consultant writes a slow note that captures half of what was said, or skips it. Either way the next person on the account starts from nothing.
Candidate engagement
Outreach response rates have drifted from a quarter to single digits over two years. Consultants compensate by sending more, which makes it worse.
Other workflows turn up in almost every firm: scheduling, scorecards, compliance, billing reconciliation, candidate hand-off. The strategy assessment surfaces the three to five that matter most for you, and the order to fix them in.
One front door, then a funded build programme
Every engagement starts the same way. The strategy decides who builds and in what order. The apprenticeship funds the building.
Strategy & readiness assessment
We map your workflows, score the opportunities, and name exactly which people to put on programme. A board-ready roadmap and a costed plan. Paid, and credited back against the places you commit.
Cohort & funding plan
We size the cohort from the strategy, confirm your funding route, and where useful source a levy-transfer donor so your training cost lands at or near zero.
Build from month one
Your people pick a real workflow in week one and ship it in your actual stack, coached by operators, supported by a 24/7 community. The portfolio writes itself as the work gets done.
Transform & measure
Over the programme your team ships real workflows with measured ROI. Optional leadership support keeps the strategy moving at the top of the business.
Funded, and we are explicit about it
The £18,000 funding band covers training and end-point assessment. How it is paid depends on your business, and we tell you the exact number before you commit.
Under £3m payroll. From August 2026, people under 25 are 100% government-funded. Those 25 and over are 95% funded, with a small co-investment of around £900 across the whole programme, or zero if we place a levy-transfer donor. New 16 to 24 starts can attract a £2,000 incentive from October 2026.
Over £3m payroll. The £18,000 is drawn from the digital levy account your business already funds, across the programme, with no additional training cost to enrol.
Not funded by the levy: the strategy assessment, any leadership transformation support, salaries and software licences. Said plainly, on the first call.
Four things that separate this from generic AI delivery
Built for your sector, not generic AI
Every workflow is built around how recruitment firms actually run: sourcing, candidate triage, outreach, scheduling, pipeline analytics, compliance. We speak recruiter language because we built recruitment businesses for over a decade before this.
Real work from month one
No curriculum-first theory. Your people pick a real workflow in week one and ship it in your actual operating stack, with an operator alongside them. The qualification evidence writes itself as the work gets done.
Tech-agnostic, on the tools you already pay for
We build around how your business runs, not around a single CRM or a single AI tool. Whatever you already pay for, we build with. The tool can be swapped later without losing the work.
A workflow library that compounds
Every cohort adds shipped, documented workflows to a shared library. Your business benefits from work done across the network, reusable from day one.
An operator's bench, not a lecturer's slide deck.
The workflows on this page are not a syllabus. They are the day job, written down. The programme is founded and led by Alex Lockey, who runs four lean businesses on the back of this exact work, and the coaching bench is operators cut from the same cloth, chosen on what they have actually shipped.
Behind the programme, a registered training provider carries the funding contract and the regulated end-point assessment, so what your people earn is a full Level 4 qualification. To you it is one programme and one point of contact.
Backed by The Satori Partnership
This programme does not stand alone. It is the build layer of a much bigger frame for recruitment leaders, delivered alongside the advisory group built for exactly this sector.
Alex Lockey is 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 works on the wider levers that drive enterprise value: data strategy, operating-model design, exit readiness and NED-level advisory.
Where this programme installs AI capability inside your firm with your own people, the Partnership is the bigger picture around it. For recruitment leaders thinking about growth, succession or exit, the apprenticeship builds the capability and the Partnership steers the transformation. The two run together, and they are commercially joined up.
Capability inside, strategy around
The funded apprenticeship builds the doers inside the firm. The Partnership brings the data strategy, operating-model and exit-readiness work around them.
A concrete joint bridge and partnership showcase, with sector-body alignment including APSCo, is in development and will be shown here.
Firms ready to build capability, not just talk about it
Right for you if
- ✓You run a recruitment firm with roughly 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 to build alongside the operator
- ✓You can commit time for the strategy assessment
Probably not if
- ×You want a strategy deck and no implementation
- ×You want a report handed over and nobody to own it
- ×You are not yet ready to commit to real change
- ×You need motivation rather than implementation
- ×You are looking for a contingent recruitment partner
What leaders ask before the first call
We are a recruitment business, so is this just an AI tool for our desks?
No. It develops your own consultants into people who can build and improve workflows across the agency, funded by the levy, with governance built in. The capability stays in the business and compounds.
What if we are not technical?
That is exactly who this is for. Our clients are managing partners, practice heads and founders, not developers. The programme handles the technical craft and your people learn it on real work.
Can we put existing staff on it, or does it have to be new hires?
Existing staff, in most cases. The standard is written for people whose roles are being reshaped by AI and automation, provided it is genuine new learning. Most first cohorts are existing employees.
We do not have time for people to be on a course.
The learning time is not time away from the job. It is your people solving your real problems, coached by an operator, and the solutions stay in the business. The first one ships in month one.
How does the strategy assessment work, and what does it cost?
A focused, paid engagement that maps how you run, names the workflows that matter, sizes the cohort and tests funding eligibility. The fee is credited back against the apprenticeship places you commit to, so the more of your team you develop, the more it pays for itself.
Is it really funded?
Yes. The £18,000 per person is covered by the apprenticeship levy or government funding. For under-25s at SMEs it is fully funded from August 2026; for others it is near zero or zero with a levy-transfer donor we can source. We tell you the exact number on the readout.
Start with the strategy. The roadmap tells you the rest.
A focused conversation about where AI will move your numbers, which of your people should build it, and what it will actually cost. No deck, no pressure.
See how we can work together