Recruiting & Staffing
A recruiting desk is a throughput machine disguised as a relationship business. AI doubles the throughput; the winners will spend the surplus moving from contingent to retained.
Desk economics ruled by hours: sourcing, screening, scheduling, and submission. Systems now carry the structure; the recruiter keeps the judgment calls and the relationships — which were always the actual product.
Industry research
The economics
FIGURES FROM THE FIRM’S PUBLISHED RESEARCH · SOURCES ON REQUEST · THE 2× PLAYBOOK
Growth opportunities
Where the 2× lives
Desk automation
Sourcing, enrichment, screening, and scheduling run unattended until a recruiter has to decide something — every hour released is a submission the firm didn’t make last quarter.
Requisition manufacturing
Demand-side outreach run as a system: hiring signals monitored, prospects enriched, conversations opened — the desk fed from both ends.
The retained migration
Surplus capacity spent on service depth that justifies retained terms — the shift that converts throughput into durable margin.
Key-person de-risking
Relationships, methods, and pipeline moved from heads into systems the firm owns — the difference between selling a business and selling a person’s calendar.
Our perspective
What most firms get wrong
Candidate tooling, requisition famine
The sector’s tooling obsession is candidate-side. But desks rarely die of candidate shortage; they die of requisition famine and key-person departure. The machinery matters on both sides — and the valuation problem is the second one.
Where we’d start
Two recruiters’ desks, timed: hours by activity, the automatable share priced in placements, and the requisition-manufacturing pipeline specified — with the retained-migration math to spend the surplus against.
Put it to us