Growth beyond headcount: nine lessons for recruitment leaders
Based on the 8 October 2026 panel with The Satori Partnership and Sonovate.
For decades, recruitment growth followed one formula: hire more consultants, open more desks, push more activity. If you sit on a board or back a recruitment business, you have probably funded that formula more than once.
On 8 October 2026, Satori and Sonovate brought together a live panel to take it apart: Steve Carter, Tracey O'Neill and Alex Lockey from Satori, and Mark Thompson, Chief Revenue Officer at Sonovate. Mark summed up the central message early on:
"We're definitely seeing a shift from growth through headcount to growth through productivity. Adding more cost before improving productivity can dilute EBITDA rather than create value." Mark Thompson, Sonovate
Here are nine lessons for leaders and boards
1. Count productivity, not activity
Calls, meetings and CV sends tell you how busy a team is. They don't tell you what it earns. Steve has seen it first-hand: "A £120,000 biller is now a £180,000 to £200,000 biller without doing much more." Better measures are NFI per head, time to hire, the unit cost of a fill, and how much of an expensive consultant's day goes on low-value tasks.
2. Have a plan before you buy
"There are two sorts of agency: the ones that enter this transformation with a plan, and those that don't. And there's a big difference in the outcome." Steve Carter, The Satori Partnership
One of our clients is spending three months planning before it changes anything.
3. AI's job is more good conversations
"So much of the rhetoric is about replacing recruiters with AI. I'd reframe it: how many more good conversations, how many more magic moments, can each recruiter have in a week?" Alex Lockey, The Satori Partnership
Much of a recruiter's week goes on the work around those conversations: call notes, CRM updates, CV formatting and specs. That is where AI is most reliable. But the time saved only counts if leaders redeploy it into revenue work. One client is saving four to seven hours per consultant per week, and without direction, that time simply evaporates.
4. Pick the workflow before the tool
Start with the processes that leak the most time and money, then test any tool by taking the AI label off it. If the business case still stands for a plain new tool, it is worth considering. Don't rip out a CRM just because newer ones ship with AI. The data inside it is the real asset, and a capability layer or a smaller workflow tool is usually the quicker win.
The panel had seen the cost of skipping this step. One business bought five separate AI tools without mapping the handoffs between them. "The AI wasn't talking to the AI," said Steve. "It just unearthed problems faster." A 20-person agency was spending over £45,000 a month on disconnected technology, most of it producing nothing. Mark added a warning: front-office tools can hide a back-office problem, which unravels quickly once a large client arrives across multiple countries and currencies.
5. Measure AI the way you would measure a new hire
"If you were hiring a trainee recruiter, you wouldn't put them in the seat and say 'go and see what you can do to make my business better'. Exactly the same principles should apply to AI." Tracey O'Neill, The Satori Partnership
Be directive, set a baseline before you buy, then judge speed, quality and above all usage. Look for return on effort as well as return on investment. Watch for shadow IT, where consultants use tools that never connect to placements, finance or marketing, because that makes any return impossible to measure.
6. Valuable is not the same as bigger
Tracey put it plainly: most leaders know which consultants bill the most and which clients are most profitable, but "few can tell me which clients have churned". Find value in what an agency already holds before chasing more.
Buyers look past headline revenue to the quality of EBITDA: recurring NFI, productivity per FTE, margin concentration, management depth and cash conversion. Increasingly they ask whether technology and AI are genuinely embedded in the operating model.
"Your line is either 'we buy the same off-the-shelf stack as the ten agencies down the road', or 'our data is an asset, and we've built tools on it that no one else has'. That narrative is far stronger, and so is the valuation." Alex Lockey
Expect token cost per deal, Alex's proposed KPI for what you spend on AI to win each placement, to become something investors ask about. As Mark warned, spending a fortune on tokens to avoid hiring two people is not a win.
7. Scale by plugging leaks
Steve estimates that most agencies fill only around a third of the opportunities they receive, so two-thirds go unfilled. Reducing the jobs you don't fill is worth more than chasing volume. When productivity rises, the only cost on each extra pound is commission and National Insurance, so most of it drops to profit.
Contract and annuity revenue still matters, because a contract recruiter has far more capacity to build margin over time, and a trusted database means the right candidate is often already on file. Tracey suggests using predictive analytics to grade the pipeline rather than relying on consultants' gut feel, alongside a founder dashboard built on ratios such as fill rate, client concentration and contractor redeployment.
8. Remember the other side has AI too
"Your clients have AI, and your candidates have AI, and they're trying to find ways to use it so they don't have to pay you." Steve Carter
Agencies need to add value in enough ways that the fee still feels worth it.
9. Ask the doubling question
Mark shared the test Sonovate puts to agencies: if revenue doubled over the next 12 months, could the business and its infrastructure support it without doubling the cost base? "It's an incredibly simple question, but it flushes out some really interesting conversations." It is a good one to take into your next board meeting.
Insights from the audience Q&A
How can smaller agencies compete with bigger players on technology without big budgets?
Build practitioner capability in-house, said Alex. "When you're smaller, you're more agile. If it's easy to buy and easy to access, it has diminishing value in the market." Steve agreed: if he started an agency tomorrow, the team would spend its first week learning the technology before ringing a single client.
We're a 20 to 30 person agency and haven't done much of this yet. Where do we start on Monday morning?
Start with the outcome you want and work backwards, said Steve. A 25-person agency he works with has seen a 50% increase in productivity per consultant after adopting a RevOps structure that connects marketing, sales and customer experience.
Tracey suggested starting low-tech: get a whiteboard and map the customer journey. Keep people on the high-touch moments, then decide what can be automated. People, process, data and technology have to line up.
I'm launching a new agency and building the CRM from scratch. How would you build AI in from day one?
Start by capturing context, said Alex: calls, emails and messages, with governance of personal data built in from the outset. "The sum of all your activity is something a competitor will never have." A 100-person agency struggles to capture that across every consultant, so this is where being small helps most.
What's the biggest mistake agencies make when they scale?
Reacting too late, said Mark. Agencies often know months in advance that a major contract is coming, yet delay putting the funding and infrastructure in place. "Chase the value rather than the volume." Steve added: "Make it insight-led, not fashion-led."
If you could fund only one: people, tech or data?
The final audience question asked each panellist to pick one.
Alex: people and technology together. Nominate one person, give them a £150-a-month AI subscription and task them with special projects that can grow the business.
Tracey: data, always. Great AI depends on the quality of the data behind it.
Steve: leadership. "You can have a great plan, great technology and great data, and with poor leadership it's not going to make it out of the garage."
Mark: all three. He argued they aren't mutually exclusive, and you'll get caught out if you pick only one.
Where to start?
Every lesson above starts with knowing where your agency is losing time, margin and value today. The Satori index benchmarks your agency against peers across the areas that drive growth and value, and shows you where to focus first.
About the panel
Steve Carter is Principal and Co-Founder of The Satori Partnership, with 35 years in talent acquisition leadership.
Tracey O'Neill is Principal and Data Specialist at The Satori Partnership, helping staffing firms turn their data into commercial decisions.
Alex Lockey is Principal, Technology Solutions at The Satori Partnership. He helps recruitment businesses that get more done with fewer people.
Mark Thompson is Chief Revenue Officer at Sonovate, which combines funding, payments and back-office technology for recruitment businesses.
