Sector 03 / Five

Recruitment.

Email and form intensity is the operational signature of a recruitment agency. A large share of headcount sits in the back office, and almost every step is compliance-sensitive. When a candidate submits a form twice, the agency has already lost.

Mid-market agencies - 80 to 400 staff, high desk churn, MD-owned decisions - live on ATS data, onboarding paperwork and IR35 status work. The stack is already paid for: Bullhorn or Vincere or Mercury, Microsoft 365, a payroll bureau, an accounting ledger. What is missing is a layer on top that does one workflow all the way through, with audit logs the finance director can show HMRC.

AWorkflows we build here

01
Candidate compliance intake

Self-serve onboarding portal: Right to Work check via a specialist vendor, structured questionnaire, contract generation from templates, status triage. High-risk routes to a named consultant; low-risk auto-progresses.
02
SOW risk assessment

Statement-of-Work review against a codified test battery - genuine project boundaries, deliverables, fee structure, working practices. A defensible PDF with citations back to the exact SOW clauses.
03
CV-to-brief parsing

Incoming CVs matched against the live role brief, strengths and gaps surfaced against the client's actual ask, a pre-formatted submission pack produced for the consultant to sanity-check and send.
04
Referral & inbound routing

Inbound enquiries classified by sector, stage and urgency; routed to the right desk with the right pre-brief attached. Partner time stops getting burned on first-touch triage.

Crofter Build · Candidate compliance intake Specimen · v1

Role Senior data engineer · contract-via-umbrella Hiring client: [Company · compliance-redacted] · SOW attached

Candidate [Candidate name · compliance-redacted] Right to Work: cleared · ID evidence cited §2 · umbrella: [name]

Intake opened 05 March 2026 · 14:06 GMT Self-serve portal complete · 11 form fields validated

Supervising consultant [Consultant name · sign-off field] Low-risk path: auto-progress · high-risk routed to a named human

Compliance checks 12/12

cleared, audit-logged, cited to evidence

IR35 SDS status Outside

SDS generated · partner sign-off pending

Queries to clarify 1

flagged for candidate response

Produced in-firm by Crofter Build · wired into the ATS + umbrella + RTW vendor Specimen – not from a live deployment

Fig. 01 · Compliance intake cover, typeset in the Crofter house style. Reference numbers and names are placeholders.

First published case study in Recruitment expected Q3 2026. Named client, measured numbers, or nothing.

Candidate data is the liability. A recruitment firm's intake inbox is a dense mix of CVs, right-to-work evidence, referees and compliance forms - some of it data you should never have had in the first place. We build minimisation into the ingest step, not as a report at the end. Conduct of Employment Agencies Regulations, IR35/off-payroll rules and Right to Work checking run as codified tests with a named human queue for exceptions. Full posture →

Adjacent: Accountancy & Tax · Law.

Recruitment.

Contractor vetting – placement-ready pack