One of the first people to get in touch about Aldous was the owner of a recruitment agency. That surprised me for about five minutes, and then it made complete sense: recruitment is a relationship business twice over. Every placement has a client side and a candidate side, and the owners who build agencies worth owning are the ones who keep both warm for years, not weeks.
The problem is that almost everything in an agency is organised around the live role. And business development, the work that decides what your agency looks like in three years, happens between the roles.
The feast-and-famine trap
You know the cycle. A client briefs you, and for six weeks they hear from you constantly: shortlists, interview feedback, offer management. The placement lands, the invoice goes out, and then… silence. Not deliberate neglect, but you’re delivering the next brief for someone else, and there’s no live reason to call.
Eighteen months later their next role goes to whoever happened to be in touch that month. You did excellent work and lost the relationship anyway, because excellent work isn’t a keep-in-touch system.
The agencies that convert contingency into retained work, and get onto PSLs and stay there, are running a different rhythm: contact that continues when there’s nothing to sell. A market update. A note when you see their competitor hiring. A call that’s about their year, not your shortlist.
Recruitment’s compounding asset
Here’s what makes BD in recruitment different from most industries: your relationships multiply if you let them.
- Hiring managers move. The client contact you looked after properly takes you with them to their next company. That’s a new logo for the price of staying in touch.
- Candidates become clients. The marketing director you placed two years ago is hiring her own team now. Whether she calls you depends entirely on what the relationship felt like after the deal was done: the check-in at probation, the note when her company was in the news.
- Every search generates intelligence. Who’s building a team, who’s unhappy, which company’s culture is leaking people. That’s BD raw material, and most of it evaporates in the gap between the call and the ATS.
None of this compounds on its own. It compounds if someone holds the threads.
A BD system that survives a busy desk
The owners doing this well run something like this, whether they’d call it a system or not:
- Map the accounts that matter to your year. Current clients, lapsed clients, and the ten companies you want. For each: who are the people, and when did you last speak?
- Capture after every conversation. The hiring manager mentioned a restructure coming in Q4. The candidate you placed is finding the new CFO hard work. Thirty seconds of capture, or it’s gone by Friday.
- Keep-warm on a cadence. Every important client relationship gets touched between briefs, with something useful: market data, a relevant candidate, congratulations on the funding round. Placed candidates get the probation-end call.
- Set BD goals and protect the time. “2 retained briefs this quarter” and “every lapsed client contacted this month” are goals. Without them, delivery eats every week, because delivery is urgent and BD never is.
None of that is clever. The catch is that it’s all memory and timing, done in the gaps between interviews, and that’s exactly the work that slips when the desk is busy.
Where Aldous fits
I built Aldous to be the colleague who holds those threads: an AI assistant focused on your relationships and your growth. For an agency owner it works like this:
- Capture is a voice note. Walking out of a client meeting: “Sarah’s restructuring in Q4, expects two senior roles, daughter off to Bristol in September.” Aldous files all of it against Sarah, and it’s in your brief the morning you next see her. You show up remembering, and remembering is what being a trusted adviser feels like from the client’s side.
- Aldous connects to your inbox, calendar, and meeting notes, fusing intelligence with the data your desk already generates. The result is superhuman recall on every client and candidate relationship, without you typing into a system between calls.
- The quiet ones get flagged. The client you placed with in January and haven’t spoken to since. The candidate whose probation ends next week. Aldous raises them in your morning plan before the gap becomes a lost account.
- Your BD goals stay in view. Set 7, 30, and 90-day goals with Aldous (retained mix, lapsed-client contact, new logos), and they plan your day around the conversations that move them, then review each week what moved and what stalled. It’s the BD discipline of a good sales director, without hiring one.
Your ATS keeps running the placements. That’s its job, and I’ve written separately about why the ATS was never going to do this work.
Aldous is in invite-only alpha, and recruitment owners are exactly who we want to hear from. Tell us about your agency and we’ll be in touch.