Two owners of an executive search firm were spending roughly seven work weeks a year on paperwork that a computer should have been doing. Not selling. Not recruiting. Reconciling commission statements, cutting invoices, and walking every new hire through the same thirteen days of training by hand.
The Third Group is an executive search firm with offices in New York, Charlotte and South Florida. Propelity had already rebuilt their website and wired it into the software they run on. This is what came next.
Where the 300 hours were going
Two processes, both owner-operated, both monthly or continuous.
- Commission and invoicing: an estimated 100 hours a year. Every placement had to be traced from the billing sheet to the commission schedule to an invoice, then reconciled against what had actually been paid. The figures existed. They just lived in three places and agreed with each other only after someone made them.
- Onboarding and training: an estimated 200 hours a year. A structured thirteen-day program, delivered personally, repeated for every hire. The curriculum was good. The delivery mechanism was two founders and a calendar.
Together: 300 hours a year, more than seven work weeks of owner time, spent on work that produced no new business.
What we built: two views of the same business
The obvious answer was a dashboard. The better answer turned out to be two, because leadership and recruiters need opposite things from the same data.
The leadership view
One place for both founders to check in. Team performance across the desk, reading live from the same ledgers the commission statements are generated from, so the dashboard and the payout can never disagree. Alongside it, the finance picture pulled from budget and billing records, and marketing performance from Google Analytics and LinkedIn.
Commission statements and invoices are generated from that same ledger. The 100 hours did not disappear because someone worked faster. They disappeared because the reconciliation step stopped existing.
The coach view
Every recruiter gets their own. It carries the thirteen-day onboarding program as a checklist with a knowledge check on each day, their own numbers against the rest of the desk, and a weekly action list: not a generic one, but a set of next moves computed from where that recruiter’s numbers actually stand this week.
That last part is the interesting one, and we will come back to it.
Three tools that came out of the build
- A contract reviewer. Upload an offer letter or employment agreement and it scans for non-competes, arbitration clauses, clawbacks and the other terms candidates most often skip, in plain English, with the questions worth asking. A recruiter can now answer “is this a good offer?” with something better than an opinion.
- Automated sourcing agent. Generates leads and candidate lists against the firm’s own criteria.
- A coaches corner agent. Provides dynamic curated action items and strategies to guide a recruiter toward a healthier more successful career.
What actually changed
The headline is 300 hours. The more interesting result is what the replacement does that the original never could.
Onboarding delivered by a founder is only as consistent as that founder’s week. Every hire got a slightly different version, and the founders’ time capped how many people could be brought on at once. The program as software is identical for everyone, available on day one, and costs nothing to run for the tenth hire that it did for the first.
The weekly action list is the same idea applied to coaching. Working out what a specific recruiter should do differently this week (based on their placements, their pipeline, their activity) is exactly the kind of attention a growing desk cannot buy enough of. Twelve recruiters now get it every week without anyone sitting down to produce it.
That is the pattern worth taking away: the automation freed the hours, and the system that replaced the manual work turned out to do something the manual work was never able to do.
Does this look like your business?
The tell is not the industry. It is the shape of the problem: numbers that live in more than one place and have to be made to agree; expertise that only exists in a founder’s head and gets delivered one conversation at a time; a process everyone follows that nobody has written down.
Recruiting firms have it. So do solar installers, agencies, professional-services practices, and most businesses that grew faster than their back office.
Tell us what your week looks like, or book a free consultation.