Twenty years ago I was the recruitment marketer at an agency, sitting at a desk surrounded by billers.
I built the careers pages. Ran the ad campaigns. Wrote the job posts. They worked the phones. We rarely got in each other’s way.
What I had that they didn’t was time to watch. And every quarter, I watched the same conversation.
The £500k+ billers asked for help. Not a CRM. Not a sourcing tool. A person.
It’s often described as a PA. In my experience, it was almost always an apprentice. There was rarely a PA budget for an individual contributor — there was an apprentice, willing to learn the desk by running it for someone else first.
The maths worked. An apprentice on £9,000 taking forty minutes of admin off a £500k biller’s plate every day was an obvious trade. The biller’s hour was worth more than the apprentice’s day.
Why they wanted one
Not because they were lazy. Because they were sharp.
They knew their value sat in conversations. In meetings. In the calls that moved a deal from “maybe” to done.
Everything else was the tax on those calls. Diary management. Prospect research. Call lists. Follow-up emails. Interview scheduling. Reformatting candidate CVs onto agency letterhead before they went out to clients. Necessary work, all of it. None of it where the fee came from.
So they asked for someone to handle it. The good ones got one.
The £500k biller is a rarer animal now
Twenty years on, that level of consistent billing is much harder to find. Margins compressed. LinkedIn flattened the relationship moat. Clients learned to do more in-house. The patient apprenticing of a junior alongside a senior is harder to staff and harder to justify when the senior themselves isn’t billing what they used to.
But the maths the £500k billers were running hasn’t changed. Time on the phone produces fees. Time on admin doesn’t. The recruiter who reclaims the most hours for the right activity still wins the most work.
What’s changed is who’s available to take the admin off your desk.
An assistant for £149 a month
You don’t need a budget approval. You don’t need to interview anyone. You don’t need to train them for six months and hope they stay.
And unlike the apprentices I worked alongside, it doesn’t call in sick on a Monday or come in foggy after a Friday session. The output at 11pm on a Sunday is the output at 9am on a Tuesday.
Every recruiter now has access to one. The one I’ve spent the last six months building is called SetpointHQ Studio — seventeen tools designed specifically to absorb the admin that surrounds a recruitment desk. The Solo Recruiter tier, where most consultants land, is £149 a month. Less per month than a team lunch.
It will draft your job ads. Write your LinkedIn outreach. Build your candidate personas. Research your prospects. Sift the CV pile waiting for you on Monday morning. Turn the ones worth sending into branded, anonymised candidate packs in two minutes — the apprentice’s old CV job, done in the time it takes to make a coffee. Brief your hiring managers properly, so the search starts in the right place.
The reclaim is consistent across customers — eight to ten hours a week, once the workflow beds in. Against a fully-loaded recruiter cost of around £28 an hour, that’s £224–£280 of time reclaimed every week. £149 of Solo is about five hours of that. Pays for itself before Friday of week one. The other three weeks of the month are profit.
The trap
I want to be straight about something I keep watching happen.
For a lot of recruiters, tech has become displacement activity. A tab to flick to. A dashboard to refresh. Another tool to configure but never quite use.
It isn’t being used to make more calls. It’s being used to avoid them.
The £500k billers I worked alongside didn’t ask for an apprentice so they could hide behind a tidier admin pile. They got one so they had no excuse not to pick up the phone.
If your assistant gives you two hours back on a Monday morning and you spend those two hours configuring another tool, you’re not £500k biller-shaped. You’re admin-shaped with better software.
Your assistant is ready
That part hasn’t changed since I was watching the billers across the office twenty years ago. The work that pays you is the work that requires you. Everything else is a candidate for delegation.
The assistant is ready. The question is what you do with the time it gives you.