Engines

The Engine Room

Built on what your team already runs. Measured before we call any of it working.

Nine engines, three tiers

Everyone has a bunch of tools. Almost nobody has a system of future-proof engines.

Brief A role brief that knows what it's looking for.
Sourcing Candidates who went quiet, brought back.
Screening Screen before the first call.
Shortlist One page a client reads on a phone.
Pipeline Every search, every stage, one view.
Compliance Who is waiting, on what, for how long.
New business A reason to call, ready first.
Intelligence Every interview and call, searchable in plain English.
Operations What you already run, made reliable and watched.

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Each tool does a job. None of them talks to the others.

Every tool is another login, another invoice, another place the work can stall.
The hand-offs between tools are done by hand. That is where the hours go and where the mistakes live.
Nobody can say what the tools return for the business, so nobody can say which to keep.
The work your team already does well sits in seventeen tabs and three heads. When someone leaves, it leaves with them.

The gaps between them are filled by people, after hours.

Your CRM is only as good as what people put into it.

The MD, education staffing group

The problem

An engine is a system built to a spec, used by your team every day, and improved over time.

It gets you somewhere quicker than the process it replaced.

Not another app. Not a chain of clever tools passing the work along. One shape: the work goes in, one finished thing comes out, on the right desk, in the format that person reads, at the moment they need it. Nobody learns a new screen.

An engine works. It is also never finished. We write down what it has to do, measure what your team does now, build it, and keep improving it from what it gets wrong.

What an engine is

How we fix it, in order

In order

Fix what you already run The forms, the CRM and the checks you depend on today, made reliable and watched before anything new is added. A green tick is a claim, so we check it.
Keep what you already know Every interview, call and note your business produces, in a database you own, joined to the people and organisations it is about. Anyone can clone an app in an afternoon. What your team has heard over the years is the one thing a competitor cannot buy.
Build the engines One per job your team does every day: finding candidates, tracking live work, presenting shortlists, winning business, clearing compliance. Built to a spec, measured from where you start, improved from what they get wrong.

That order is the whole method. Skip step one and you automate a mess. Skip step two and every engine starts from nothing.

Operations

Operations Engine

Your forms, CRM, background checks and integrations already run your business. We make them reliable: every automation moved onto a monitored stack, every failure routed to a person, every integration watched for the run that reports success and writes nothing. Your team learns nothing new. The work they do stops breaking.

SpecEvery automation on a monitored stack with error routing, plus a heartbeat on each integration so a green run that wrote nothing gets caught.

ProofLive at one education staffing group.

Intelligence

Intelligence Engine

Every interview, sales call and candidate record your business produces, stored in a database you own, joined to your CRM, and searchable in plain English. Ask who said they would do personal care in an interview two years ago and get the answer with its source. Nothing is uploaded wholesale to a model provider.

SpecRecordings and records flow into your own store, joined to the CRM record, with a plain-English search on top and a source link on every answer.

ProofFoundations at two clients. One in team testing. Almost 5,000 interviews searchable.

Desk engines

Brief Engine

Why the role exists, what good looks like and what the last person got wrong, agreed before anyone searches. The brief that comes out of it knows what it is looking for, so the search starts with a target rather than a job title, and every engine after it reads from the same page.

SpecA structured brief built from the client call and your notes, with the gaps named, signed off by the consultant before the search opens.

ProofProposed. Not yet live at a client. The gap read on one live role is the audit's week-one deliverable.

Sourcing Engine

Finding candidates you already have and candidates you have never met. We reactivate the pool that registered and went quiet, route inbound from job boards straight into the CRM without a multi-poster, and for search firms, pull years of cut documents and networks into one place the whole team can search.

SpecReactivation in waves to your dormant pool, inbound routed into the CRM, outbound research consolidated where everyone can find it.

ProofOne live reactivation campaign. One prototype, idea to working version in 11 days. 107 of 5,651 dormant candidates re-engaged; 49 placed or booked.

Screening Engine

The candidates you would actually hire, seen before anyone's time is spent. Every candidate is read against the brief, with the evidence beside the score, so the consultant's first call is with someone worth the call. What is heard goes into the intelligence database, not into a head.

SpecReads the brief and the candidate record, scores fit with the evidence shown, and writes the result back to the CRM for a consultant to act on.

ProofProposed. Not yet live at a Sittin' Pretty client; in pilot elsewhere. Held until a named client and a verified number.

Shortlist Engine

How you present candidates to a client. Interview evidence and your consultant's take, turned into a card a client reads in minutes and decides on in hours. Built to your house format, generated from the conversations you already record, and approved by a consultant before it goes anywhere.

SpecDraws on recorded interviews and your notes, produces a client-ready card in your house format, and a consultant signs off every one.

ProofIn daily use at one executive search firm since March 2026. Two major versions since. 50 or more live searches carried at peak this quarter, against a normal peak of about 25.

Pipeline Engine

The live work in one view. Every open search or vacancy, every candidate's stage, every status change, read from the spreadsheet or CRM your team keeps and shown as queues you can act on. Consultants see where everyone is without asking. Managers see what has stopped moving.

SpecReads the system of record you keep, presents it as queues sorted by readiness or arrival, and flags what has not moved.

ProofIn daily use at one executive search firm since June 2026.

Compliance Engine

Clearance as a queue, inside your CRM. Candidates sorted by readiness, documents uploaded direct by the people who chase them, background checks polled and posted without anyone logging in, and a baseline measured before launch so you know what changed. Built for temp and supply, where clearance is the bottleneck.

SpecTwo queues (readiness-sorted and first-in-first-out), direct document upload, an hourly background-check poll with notifications, and a clearance baseline taken from historic CRM dates.

ProofLive at one education staffing group since May 2026.

New Business Engine

A reason to call. For staffing, live vacancies gathered from public sources and matched to the schools and organisations in your CRM, so a consultant rings with something useful. For executive search, prospect material assembled from your own past searches in an afternoon instead of a week.

SpecPublic vacancy sources matched to CRM accounts, prospect material generated from your own history, both refreshed on a schedule.

ProofBuilt and used live at one executive search firm since August 2026: four built, two pitched live. Prototype at one staffing group.

We start with one.

The job your team complains about most, small enough to prove in weeks, not quarters.

The first engine does two jobs. It pays for itself. And it shows you what to build next, because once one part of the work runs properly, the next bottleneck is obvious. The database, the CRM, the pitch: you cannot see which from a plan. You can see it from an engine that is running.

Short-term implementation, long-term return.

The first engine

Book a call about the job your team complains about most.

Thirty minutes. No deck. You leave with a written note of which engine we would build first, and what it would cost.

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See what the engines have done. The work