Cathcart Technology RecruitmentOS · tuned for tech Prepared for Sam Wason
The database advantage

Build a pipeline of new clients without adding another recruiter.

Turn your 150,000-candidate database into a consistent source of new client conversations. Automatically, through Bullhorn, with every message approved by your team.

A RecruitmentOS instance built for Cathcart. Done for you, live within four weeks. Three new client conversations inside eight weeks, or your money back, in writing.

Twenty years of trading built this database. It's about time it started building pipeline too.

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001/The constraint

Every new client conversation costs a consultant an hour they haven't got.

Cathcart has built something most desks never will: twenty years of trading and roughly 150,000 candidates sitting in Bullhorn. The constraint isn't the database. It's what's being asked of ten people, and what's being left on the table because of it.

You have around ten heads and every one of them is already filling roles. Business development, the speccing, the outreach, the follow-up, is the work that only happens in the hours left over. There are no hours left over. So new business leans on existing accounts, and the 150,000 candidates you already own stay quiet, because working them properly would cost exactly the hours you don't have.

That is the whole bottleneck. New business at Cathcart is capped by consultant hours, and you are not adding consultants.

It isn't a data problem: the data is better than most agencies twice your size will ever have. It isn't a market problem: companies are still hiring, just more carefully. It isn't a tooling problem: you already pay for capability you don't use. It is a capacity problem, and capacity is the one thing another tool has never given anyone.

Everything below is downstream of that one constraint.

Business development is under resourced

New business isn't being generated at the rate you want, and it's leaning too hard on existing accounts. With around ten heads, there's no headcount fix coming: the answer has to be capacity, not more people.

150,000 candidates, going quiet

Twenty years of trading has built a genuinely large data asset. Most of it hasn't been spoken to in years, and there's no systematic way to find out who in there is ready to move.

Phone outreach is getting harder

The channel that used to carry new business is decaying, and face to face doesn't scale. It's expensive, it's slow, and it only reaches one company at a time.

CV formatting costs money and time

Paying specialist vendors for formatting that comes back slow, costly and mediocre, when it should be one of the easiest things to fix.

Too many tools, not enough system

Paying for capability that never gets used, and bolting point tools together instead of running one system that actually talks to the others.

Bullhorn doesn't do WhatsApp

SMS is native, WhatsApp isn't, so reaching candidates on the channel they actually reply on needs a bridge to work at all.

Tech aware matching, done properly

Construction tiers cleanly. Tech doesn't: stack, seniority and domain all have to line up before a match means anything.

The market hasn't made this easier

Post 2022 tech overhire, the correction through 2023 to 2025, and a recovery that's still fragile. Every wasted hour costs more than it used to.

None of this is a people problem. It's a systems problem, and it's solvable. The fix isn't better AI, or another tool, or another hire. It's capacity that doesn't come out of anybody's day.

002/The new reality

What actually changes in the business.

Not features. Five things that are true about Cathcart on the day this goes live, and weren't true the day before.

01

Your dormant database becomes a live pipeline

Not a place candidates go to be forgotten. Every week a batch of your 150,000 gets read properly, worked out to companies who would hire them, and turned into outreach waiting for a click.

02

New business stops depending on who has a spare hour

The outreach is written before anyone gets in. BD is no longer the first thing dropped when a consultant gets busy, because it no longer costs a consultant anything to happen.

03

Every candidate goes out with a reason a tech buyer accepts

Matched to companies who would actually hire them, with a defensible reason attached. Not "similar industry". Stack, seniority, domain and a live hiring signal, in one line you would be happy to read out on a call.

04

CVs come out agency-grade, in house, in minutes

Formatted in your own template, every time, without a vendor in the loop and without waiting on one.

05

Your best people stop doing outbound admin

And start doing the parts only they can do: the call, the relationship, the negotiation, the close.

And underneath all five

Nothing reaches a client until you approve it.

Every message is read by a Cathcart consultant before it exists in anyone else's inbox. That is the default setting, and it stays on until you decide otherwise.

003/The system

How each one actually works.

A bespoke build on the same engine that already runs a live construction desk daily: sourcing, matching and sending real outreach to real companies. This instance is tuned for tech and pointed at your own candidates. Here is each promise above, taken apart.

01

Your dormant database becomes a live pipeline

What happens
Every week a batch of your candidates is pulled, read properly and profiled: primary stack, role family, seniority, domain, location, remote appetite, salary band, standout signals. The ones showing they're ready to move surface at the top.
How it works
Bullhorn export in for the pilot, full two-way Bullhorn sync on the build. Candidate parsing and enrichment, then re-engagement outreach on a schedule, not on a reminder.
What your consultant does
Reads a ranked list of who is worth a call this week.
Never again
Scroll a database hoping something jumps out. Wonder who in there is still live.
02

New business stops depending on who has a spare hour

What happens
For every candidate the system finds the companies who would want them, resolves the actual hiring manager rather than an info@ address, and writes a first touch to each one. It runs overnight. The queue is waiting in the morning.
How it works
Multi-angle discovery: competitors and peers of past employers, companies hiring that exact stack, same domain at adjacent scale, geography and remote fit. Claude discovery plus Apollo org and people search plus live hiring signal, which lifts a shortlist to roughly 50 to 60 relevant companies per candidate. Decision maker resolved per company. Draft written per company.
What your consultant does
Ten minutes of approvals. Read, tweak, click.
Never again
Build a target list. Find the right contact. Write a first touch from scratch. Decide who to chase today.
03

Every candidate goes out with a reason a tech buyer accepts

What happens
Every candidate-to-company pairing is scored on stack overlap, seniority fit, domain fit, location and remote, and hiring signal. Every match that survives carries one defensible line: "Senior Go and Kubernetes engineer, ex-fintech, to a payments business scaling on the same stack and currently hiring for it."
How it works
A tech-aware matching pack, not construction tiering with the labels swapped. Weak or uncertain matches route to review, never to send. Thirty sharp matches beat fifty loose ones, and the system is deliberately built to prefer the thirty.
What your consultant does
Reads the reason. Agrees or overrules it. Their judgement stays the final word.
Never again
Defend a match they can't explain. Send a spec that reads like it went to everyone.
04

CVs come out agency-grade, in house, in minutes

What happens
Any CV, in any state, comes back rendered in Cathcart's own template, ready to send.
How it works
The formatter is matched to a real example of your house format before anything goes live, so the output is your layout, not a generic one.
What your consultant does
Checks it. Sends it.
Never again
Pay a vendor. Wait on a vendor. Apologise for a document that came back mediocre.
05

Nothing reaches a client until you approve it

What happens
Every draft lands in an editable approval queue. You read it, change it, approve it. That is the only way anything leaves the building.
How it works
Review mode is the default and stays on until you choose otherwise. Sends go from your own mailboxes, inside business hours, under a daily cap, with hard de-duplication and in-flight locks so a contact can never be messaged twice. Follow-ups run on a Day 0, 2, 5, 10 rhythm and stop the instant someone replies. Warm replies land on a board with the full thread attached.
What your consultant does
Approves. Then picks up the phone to a warm reply with the whole history in front of them.
Never again
Wonder what went out. Chase from memory. Lose a reply in an inbox.
004/Before and after

Every pain point, mapped.

Every problem from the constraint section, mapped to the specific thing the system does about it.

The problem
Today
What we build
Dormant database
150,000 candidates, most untouched for years, no way to know who's ready to move
Automated re-engagement outbound that finds and reopens the warm ones, running every week without you lifting a finger
BD under resourced
New business depends on the hours you personally have left over
Outreach that writes itself and books the conversation, so new business isn't riding on your calendar
Phone decaying, face to face doesn't scale
The one channel that still works is getting harder, and there's no scalable replacement
Multi touch email at scale, personalised to each match, running alongside the channels that still work
CV formatting grievance
Paying specialist vendors for slow, costly, mediocre formatting
CVs auto formatted in Cathcart's own template, in house, in minutes
Tool fragmentation
Paying for capability you don't use, bolting point tools together
One system, plugged straight into Bullhorn. You pay for what you use, nothing more
Bullhorn's WhatsApp gap
SMS is native, WhatsApp needs a workaround
Works with your existing WhatsApp bridge, so the channel candidates actually reply on is covered too
Matching that actually holds up
Good candidates sit in the database because nobody has time to look
Tech aware matching against companies actually hiring that stack, with a "why this company" line on every match
005/Proof

Why you should believe this works.

The honest version. What is already proven, what gets proven on your desk, and what nobody can promise you.

£10,500
A placement in the first week of the engine running on a live desk
7
New client conversations in a single week, from outbound nobody wrote by hand
2
New clients won in month one

It already runs a real desk, every day

This isn't a prototype pointed at a demo dataset. The engine is live inside Motion Group, a working recruitment agency, and it was built by Alistair Gent, a recruiter, for his own desk. Sourcing, discovery, matching, drafting, approvals, rotating-mailbox sending, follow-up sequences, warm reply detection and the lead board are all built and in daily use.

Built by a recruiter, not sold to recruiters

What you're buying is a system that survived contact with a real desk before it was ever sold to anyone. Every guardrail on it exists because something went wrong once and got fixed.

The discovery number that drives all of it

Roughly 50 to 60 genuinely relevant companies surfaced per candidate. That's the number that turns one good candidate into a week of conversations rather than three phone calls.

And the proof we put money behind

Every tier on this page carries a written money-back guarantee. We wouldn't put cash on the line for something bolted together from point tools.

The proof that matters most is the one you can interrogate. Everything above happened in construction. Your doubt has always been that tech won't tier the way construction does, and you're right, it doesn't, which is why the matching pack was rebuilt for tech rather than relabelled. So the demo runs on your candidates, in your sector, matched to real companies, with the "why this company" line on every one. Pick a candidate you know well and try to break it. That's the intended use of the demo.
What we don't claim. We guarantee an implemented, working system and new client conversations. We don't guarantee placements, because placements come from your consultants' judgement, your relationships and your close. The system's job is to make sure your desk never runs out of the right people to be talking to. That's the honest line, and it's the same one we'd give you on the call.
006/Rollout

From nothing to live in four weeks.

Four stages. You see something usable at the end of each one, so you're never waiting on a big reveal.

Week 0 · Scope

Lock the batch and the start date

A short call to agree scope. We take a Bullhorn export of 10 to 100 candidates you're not precious about, one example CV in your house format, and a handful of your real client-outreach emails for tone.

You see: the exact scope, in writing, with a start date.
Week 1

Your instance, standing up

An isolated Cathcart instance on its own infrastructure, branded to match your site, with your candidates imported and profiled. Your data stays yours and never mixes with another agency's.

You see: your own dashboard, at your own address, with your candidates on it.
Week 2

The matching pack, tuned on your people

The tech-aware profile and scoring model built and tuned against real Cathcart candidates. The CV formatter matched to your template.

You see: your CVs, in your layout. Your candidates, matched, with the reason on each one.
Week 3

Your voice, your approval queue

Drafting trained on your real outreach. The approval queue live, editable, holding every message.

You see: a queue of first-touch emails you'd be happy to have sent under your own name.
Week 4

Live, then hypercare

Handover on your desk, review mode on. Optionally a small controlled send to prove deliverability. Then four weeks of hypercare: weekly one-to-one calls, changes made, outputs checked, effectiveness audited.

You see: it running. And someone on the phone every week while it beds in.
Phase two, when you want it: full two-way Bullhorn sync with activity written back, WhatsApp re-engagement through your existing bridge, rotating mailboxes at production volume, and the matching tuned across the full 150,000.
007/The economics

What this replaces, and what it has to earn.

The arithmetic, in the open. Run it with your own average fee and it works the same way.

What it replaces

The hire you're weighing

A BD or resourcer hire in this market is a £30,000 to £45,000 salary. Add employer NI, commission, equipment and a desk and the true year-one cost is meaningfully north of that. Then add three to six months of ramp before they contribute, and the real risk that they don't work out. The full build is £12,000, once, and you own it. Same output, no salary, no ramp, no employment risk, and it doesn't resign.

The formatting vendor

Whatever you currently spend on specialist CV formatting stops, permanently, from week two. That line disappears from the P&L rather than shrinking.

The tools you pay for and don't use

One system instead of four shallow ones. You pay for what you use, nothing more.

The hours nobody had

The target list, the contact lookup, the first draft, the chase. All of it comes off the desk and none of it comes back.

What it has to earn

A mid-level tech placement on a £60,000 salary at a standard 15 to 20 per cent fee is roughly £9,000 to £12,000. The full build pays for itself on the first placement, or the first two. Everything after that is margin on work nobody had the hours to do.

Figures are illustrative and use market-standard fee assumptions. Put your own average placement fee in and the shape of the answer doesn't change.

What it costs to run
No retainer. No subscription. No seat fees. The system runs on your own AI and data accounts, so you pay credits on what you actually use and nothing else. Use it harder one month, pay a bit more. Pause it, pay almost nothing. Those accounts are in your name, which means the bill is yours to see and the off switch is yours to press. We'll walk you through a realistic estimate for your volume on the call.
The comparison that matters
A BD hire
This
Year one cost
£45,000+ salary, NI, commission
£12,000, once
Time to contribution
3 to 6 months
4 weeks
Ongoing cost
Salary, every year, rising
Credits on what you use, on your own accounts. No retainer
Risk if it doesn't work
Notice period, replacement, a lost quarter
Money back, in writing
Who owns it
They can leave
You. Outright, forever
008/Control

Exactly what it can and can't do.

You've been nervous about client outreach hitting your clients. Fair. So here's the full list, both sides, no hedging.

What it does

  • Reads every CV properly and builds a real technical profile
  • Finds 50 to 60 relevant companies per candidate across four discovery angles
  • Identifies the actual hiring manager, not a generic inbox
  • Scores every match and attaches a defensible reason
  • Writes a first touch per company in Cathcart's voice
  • Chases on a Day 0, 2, 5, 10 rhythm and stops the moment someone replies
  • Spots genuine warm replies, filters out auto-responders, puts the thread on a board
  • Formats CVs into your template

What it cannot do

  • Send anything to a client without your click. Review mode is the default and stays on until you turn it off, per channel
  • Attach a CV on first touch. A deliberate rule, not an oversight
  • Message the same contact twice. Hard de-duplication and in-flight locks make it impossible
  • Send outside business hours, or above your daily cap
  • Send a weak match. Anything below the score threshold routes to review
  • Touch your live Bullhorn records in the pilot. The pilot reads an export; write-back is an explicit, scoped decision on the full build
  • Share your data. Isolated instance, your infrastructure, your accounts. Cathcart's candidates never sit next to another agency's
  • Keep running if you don't want it to. Rotate a key and every connection stops
  • Replace a consultant. It removes the grind that happens before the judgement. The call, the relationship, the negotiation and the close stay exactly where they are

It cannot embarrass Cathcart, because nothing goes out that a Cathcart consultant hasn't read.

009/The investment

Three ways in. One guarantee behind each.

Start where you're comfortable. Every tier is built into your real tools, on your real candidates, and every tier is guaranteed.

Pilot · start here
Prove it in four weeks
£4,000
We prove the system in four weeks, built into your real tools, on your real candidates.
  • Live inside your real Bullhorn, not a sandboxed demo
  • Tech aware matching, tuned on your own candidates
  • CVs formatted in your own template
  • Outreach drafted in your voice, held for your approval
The guaranteeIf it doesn't work, you get your money back. If it does, the £4,000 credits straight toward the full build.
Recommended
Full build
Own the full system
£12,000Pilot credits toward this
The full system, owned by you, proven and handed over.
  • Everything in the pilot, running across your full database
  • Full Bullhorn sync: candidates in, activity written back
  • Multi touch outreach running on a schedule, not by hand
  • Yours to own: no subscription, no lock in
The guaranteeIf it doesn't produce 3 new client conversations within 8 weeks, you get your money back.
Scale · 4x throughput
Four times the return
£20,000Pilot still credits toward this
The whole system, times four: four times the sending, four times the return.
  • Rotating mailboxes built for high volume sending
  • High personalisation held even at four times the scale
  • Your full ~150,000 candidate database worked continuously
  • The highest investment, and the highest return
The guaranteeIf it doesn't produce 10 new client conversations within 8 weeks, you get your money back.
Start with the pilot if you want the lowest risk route in: four weeks, £4,000, watch it run on your own desk before deciding on anything bigger. Every guarantee on this page is one we can stand behind on the call.
010/What's included

Support built in. Nothing bolted on.

No retainer, no seat fees, and four weeks of hands on support after handover as standard.

Four weeks of hypercare, included at every level

After handover we monitor and iterate the system with weekly one to one calls: making changes, checking outputs, auditing effectiveness. Included whether you're on the pilot, the full build or scale.

No retainer

You pay for what's built, not a seat, not a subscription. Credits carry forward and only apply to what you actually use.

One system, not four shallow tools

The guarantee is what proves the depth: we wouldn't put money on the line for something bolted together from point tools.

Built for tech, not adapted from construction

Watch the live demo and read the "why this company" line on your own candidates before you decide anything.

Nothing reaches a client without your approval

Every draft sits in a queue, editable, until you click send. That's the default, not an afterthought.

The price is right here

£4,000, £12,000 or £20,000, decided today. No "it's bespoke" conversation, no waiting on a quote.

Next step

Your consultants spend their day placing candidates, not manufacturing the conditions that make a placement possible.

The target list is built before anyone gets in. The right contact is already found. The email is already written, in your voice, with a reason attached that stands up. The follow-up happens whether anyone remembers or not. The CV comes back in your template in minutes. What's left is the part your people are actually good at.

Your database, finally working for you. A pipeline of new clients, without another recruiter. Three new client conversations inside eight weeks. Guaranteed, or your money back.

The pilot begins with a short scoping call to lock the sandbox batch and a start date. Every tier on this page is guaranteed. You own what's built: no subscription, no lock in.