Member Success Story AI Isn't Hype. How Simon Topps Got Hours Back
For recruitment leaders, the most useful question about AI is becoming less about what the technology can do and more about which problems in the business it can remove.
In this TRN World member session, James Osborne spoke with Simon Topps, Founder of Addition Solutions, about how his business has moved from experimenting with AI to using it across operations, business development and client delivery. The most significant impact has not come from one piece of technology. It has come from systematically removing the small tasks that consume people's time.
Start with the time that disappears between productive activities
Recruitment businesses contain countless small administrative tasks that individually seem insignificant.
A consultant finishes a call, writes up the notes and updates the CRM. A recruiter preparing for a business development session identifies vacancies, searches for the likely hiring manager and finds a telephone number. Information is copied from one platform to another.
Each task might only consume a few minutes. Added together across a team and across a working week, they represent substantial capacity.
This was the starting point for Addition. The objective was not simply to adopt AI. It was to identify where people were spending time on work that did not require their judgement, relationships or recruitment expertise.
As those activities were reduced, the business started seeing consultants working more vacancies and sending more CVs.
The principle is straightforward: give recruiters more time for the work that generates value.
Removing work is only useful if people use the time well
There is an important leadership challenge behind any productivity improvement.
Saving a consultant an hour does not automatically mean the business receives another hour of productive sales or delivery activity.
At Addition, the strongest performers responded quickly. When repetitive work disappeared, their output increased because they immediately found productive uses for the additional capacity.
For others, the change exposed differences in motivation and appetite.
That creates a different management conversation. Instead of accepting that administrative work is limiting performance, leaders can ask what people are doing with the capacity that technology has created.
AI can remove friction. It cannot replace the need for accountability, commercial motivation and effective management.
Business development research can move from hours to seconds
One of Addition's most heavily used internal tools was built around a familiar recruitment problem.
When consultants were asked to spend an afternoon on business development, they could lose a significant part of that time before making the first call. They needed to identify live jobs, understand which companies were hiring, find the likely hiring manager and source contact information.
Addition built a tool that brings those stages together.
A consultant can enter a role and location and receive companies currently recruiting alongside likely hiring contacts and available contact data.
The value is not that AI conducts the sales conversation. The consultant still needs to make the call, understand the opportunity and win the relationship.
The technology simply gets them to that point faster.
That distinction matters. The strongest use cases are often those that remove the work surrounding the human activity rather than attempting to replace it.
Look beyond obvious data signals
Recruitment businesses also have an opportunity to think differently about the data they use for business development.
A live vacancy is an obvious indicator of hiring demand, but it is not the only one.
Publicly available information can reveal characteristics of organisations that indicate likely workforce requirements. Recruitment businesses can analyse companies similar to successful clients, identify patterns associated with agency usage or use other public indicators to prioritise potential prospects.
The opportunity is therefore not simply to automate existing searches. AI makes it practical to combine and interrogate information in ways that would previously have required significant manual research.
For recruitment leaders, that creates a useful question: what data would tell you that a company is likely to need your service before a consultant begins prospecting?
Build around the client's problem, not the technology
The commercial opportunity becomes more significant when AI moves outside the recruitment agency and into the client relationship.
Addition demonstrated this during the renewal of a client partnership.
The client did not have an applicant tracking system and did not intend to invest in one. Its leadership team nevertheless wanted greater visibility over recruitment activity and the delays occurring within hiring processes.
Addition built a bespoke portal connected to its own Bullhorn system and the client's technology.
Senior stakeholders could see activity across the recruitment process, while hiring managers were restricted to information relevant to their own vacancies. Candidate details, CVs, submission dates and progress through the process became visible in one place.
The first version took around two days to build.
The value was not simply that Addition had created some technology. It had listened closely enough to identify a client problem and then built something practical to solve it.
That helped differentiate the relationship during the renewal process and demonstrated value beyond candidate delivery.
AI can move an agency further into the client relationship
This is where the conversation becomes strategically important.
If several agencies can source candidates effectively, differentiation based purely on recruitment capability becomes difficult.
A recruitment business that also solves operational problems for the client creates another reason to retain that relationship.
The same principle can apply during new business pitches. Added value tools can give an agency additional evidence that it understands the client's wider hiring challenges rather than simply competing on access to candidates.
AI therefore has the potential to change the position of the recruitment business within an account.
The agency remains a recruiter, but the relationship becomes harder to compare with a conventional supplier when it is also providing tools and solutions built around the customer's needs.
Challenge what you currently buy
AI also raises another question for recruitment leaders: which parts of the existing technology stack still need to be purchased?
Addition has started examining platforms where much of the underlying information comes from publicly available sources.
Simon described building internal tools that combine sources such as Companies House data, alerts and other public information and then connect directly with Addition's existing systems.
He estimates that replacing selected external platforms could reduce annual technology expenditure by tens of thousands of pounds.
There is also an operational benefit.
A product may provide excellent information but still require recruiters to move between systems and manually update the CRM. An internally developed tool can be designed specifically around the agency's workflow.
That can make integration as valuable as the cost saving itself.
You do not need to become a developer to begin building
One of the barriers for recruitment leaders is the assumption that building technology requires technical expertise.
That was Simon's assumption too.
His experience with platforms such as Replit, Lovable, ChatGPT and Claude changed it.
The process can begin with explaining the business problem in straightforward language, asking the technology to create an initial version and improving it iteratively.
Not everything will work immediately. Some applications require more technical knowledge, integrations or external data. Restrictions imposed by third-party platforms can also stop otherwise promising ideas.
But the threshold for testing an idea has fallen dramatically.
A problem that might previously have required a specification, external development company and significant budget can now often be explored internally before the business makes a major commitment.
Put governance around experimentation
Lower barriers to development should not mean unrestricted experimentation with business data.
Addition maintains controls around what employees put into external AI systems and who can modify applications connected to systems such as Bullhorn.
Its internally built tools can also contain different permission levels for users, administrators and directors.
This is particularly important for recruitment businesses because their systems contain candidate, client and commercially sensitive information.
The objective should be to make useful AI widely accessible while keeping responsibility for data, integrations and core systems clearly controlled.
Let your most curious people create momentum
Technology adoption rarely succeeds because leadership announces that everyone must start using a new tool.
Addition found a more practical route.
The business initially worked with consultants who were naturally curious about technology and regularly suggested improvements. Tools were built around their problems first.
Once colleagues saw what those people could do, interest spread.
Consultants then began contributing their own ideas.
For leaders, this provides a useful implementation model. Find the people who already want to experiment, solve genuine problems for them and let practical results build demand elsewhere in the business.
Small failures are part of the process
Not every AI idea will become a useful product.
Addition has abandoned or paused builds when external restrictions made them impractical or the technology was not yet capable of delivering what was required.
That does not necessarily make the work wasted.
AI platforms are developing quickly and leaders are becoming more capable through repeated use. An idea that proves too difficult today can remain available to revisit later.
The important shift is that experimentation can happen relatively cheaply.
Instead of needing every technology project to justify a major investment, businesses can test more ideas and retain the ones that create tangible value.
The cost can be smaller than expected
Addition's ongoing AI expenditure has settled at roughly a few hundred pounds in a typical month, although experimentation produced higher costs at earlier stages.
Better prompting and a clearer understanding of how credits and tokens are consumed have helped reduce unnecessary expenditure.
The relevant comparison, however, is not simply the monthly AI bill.
It is what the same functionality would previously have cost to commission externally, what existing software subscriptions can potentially be removed and what commercial value the resulting tools create.
A relatively small technology cost can look very different when it contributes to retaining an important client or eliminates a significant annual software subscription.
The competitive gap is likely to be operational
AI does not mean that established recruitment fundamentals stop mattering.
Recruiters still need relationships, judgement, sales ability and the capacity to deliver.
What changes is the environment surrounding those activities.
A consultant who can identify the right opportunities faster, access the right data immediately and move information seamlessly between systems has more time available for the work that only a recruiter can do.
That is why the difference between adopters and non-adopters may become increasingly visible.
Simon described the comparison simply: put today's Addition against the same business from two years earlier and the current version would be faster and capable of handling greater volume across virtually every part of delivery.
For recruitment leaders, that is a more useful way to think about AI than asking whether a particular tool is worth adopting.
The question is whether your business can progressively remove enough friction that, a year from now, the old version of your company would struggle to compete with the new one.
Host: James Osborne - Co-Founder and CEO, The Recruitment Network