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Admin scorecard for recruitment agencies: how many hours a week could AI prepare for a consultant to check, job by job
Enter the hours a week a consultant spends on CVs, scheduling, searches and compliance to see which jobs AI could prepare and what stays with them.
A recruitment consultant earns fees on the phone and loses hours everywhere else: reformatting a CV into the house template, confirming an interview twice, updating the CRM after a call, chasing a timesheet on a Friday. In a small agency there is no resourcer or administrator to pass that to, so billers do it themselves. This scorecard asks how many hours a week each job takes for one consultant and shows which could be prepared by a tool for the consultant to check, which stay theirs, and what the time is worth.
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Admin scorecard for a recruitment agency: the office hours a week that could be prepared by AI and checked by you, job by job
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The jobs it asks about
Six of the eight jobs are preparation from material the agency already has. A CV is reformatted and the contact details removed. Interview confirmations go to candidate and client from one set of facts, as our confirmation template does. A database search returns a longlist against the brief, with the reason for each name. Compliance is records and dates: the right-to-work check from the right-to-work checker, reference requests, and the 12-week clock that the AWR calculator counts. Timesheet chasing is a list of what is missing before payroll. Adverts are written from the brief and CRM entries from the consultant's call notes.
How the score is worked out
There is one assumption and you can change it. For every job a tool prepares, the scorecard keeps a share of the time for a person to read the draft and approve it. We set that at a quarter. So a job that takes four hours a week by hand is counted as three hours handed over and one hour kept. Jobs that stay with a person are counted in full on your side. The yearly figure is the handed-over hours multiplied by the hourly cost and the number of weeks you enter. It is a cost of time. It becomes money only if the hours go on paid work, or a role you were about to fill is not filled.
Where the line sits
Two jobs stay with the consultant. Calls are the first; the relationship with client and candidate is what the fee pays for. The second is deciding who is put forward, and here the line is drawn by a regulator as well as by common sense. The Information Commissioner's Office audited AI recruitment tools between August 2023 and May 2024, made almost 300 recommendations, and found tools that inferred gender or ethnicity from names. An agency that lets software reject candidates on its own takes on that risk. A longlist with reasons, read by a consultant who makes the choice, keeps the decision with a person and leaves a record of why. That is why the scorecard counts search as drafted and shortlisting as decided.
AI staff and workflows for recruitment agencies. Starting with cv screening and shortlist.See what we would set upA worked example
With the example hours left as they are, the scorecard shows 37 hours of office work a week, 22 of them on the six jobs a tool can prepare. Keeping a quarter for checking leaves 16.5 hours a week handed over, 45% of the total. At £15 an hour over 46 weeks that is £11,385 a year. The three largest are database searches and outreach drafts (4.5 of 6 hours), CV formatting (3 of 4) and adverts and CRM updates (3 of 4). What stays with a person: client and candidate calls, and deciding who is put forward, 15 hours. The example hours are ours, chosen to be plausible for a small recruitment agency; they are not survey figures, and the point of the tool is that you replace them with your own.
The three readiness questions
The hours say what could be handed over. The last three questions say whether it would work in your recruitment agency this month. First, are the rules written down? A tool follows a page that says what a good reply looks like, what must never be said and when to stop and ask; it cannot follow habits that live in one person's head. Second, does the work arrive in writing? Jobs that come by email, web form or from a system with an export can be drafted from. Jobs that come by phone or on paper have to be typed in first. Third, is there one named person who approves drafts every working day? Without one, drafts queue, and a queue of unapproved drafts is slower than doing the job by hand.
What to do with the result
Start with the job at the top of the list and no other. Write its rules on one page, run it with a person approving every draft for a fortnight, and count how many drafts went out unchanged. If most did, lower the checking share for that job and move to the second. If few did, the rules page is wrong, not the idea.
Overlyft sets up AI assistants for recruitment agencies built around drafted jobs like the six above; the work is priced after a fixed-price audit, and you pay the AI provider directly for any subscription. The scorecard works the same whichever tool you buy, or if you buy none and give the top job to a part-time administrator instead. Our comparison of the AI tools sold to recruitment agencies sets out what else is on the market and what each costs.
Short answers from this page
Can AI run the admin side of a recruitment agency?
The repeatable parts: formatting CVs, confirming interviews, tracking the 12-week clock and right-to-work expiry dates, chasing timesheets and references. It should not shortlist on its own or decide who is put forward. Overlyft can set up an AI assistant that does the first list and leaves the second to the consultant.
Where this comes from: Arithmetic on the hours entered; the checking share is our stated assumption and can be changed. Rules behind what stays with the consultant: ICO, AI tools in recruitment audit outcomes report, November 2024; Agency Workers Regulations 2010; Home Office right to work guidance
AEO Lookup editorial team
We write practical guides for people who run small UK firms, and we check every fact against its source on the date shown. Read how we review, or tell us if something has changed.
