Kutbuddin Khan

For the next 90 days I'm running a founder-led study on how US and UK recruitment agencies handle the manual ops eating their week. The short version: most agencies are losing hours through gaps they've stopped noticing. The CRM that doesn't sync with the ATS. The client report pulled manually from three dashboards every Friday. The candidate who was "super promising" three weeks ago but no one remembered to follow up because the tracker is a shared Excel file. These don't show up as lost deals. They show up as "we just couldn't grow this quarter." The study: — 30 interviews with US and UK recruitment agency founders, managing directors, and ops leads — Boutique one-desk operations through to 50-headcount firms; contingent, retained, exec search, staffing — 20 minutes each, structured but conversational — April through July 2026 — No sales pitch, no product demo I'm asking about current intake and tracking channels, data reconciliation between tools, the manual work that was supposed to disappear when you bought the stack, and the one workflow owners would automate if they could wave a wand tomorrow. At the end I'll publish the findings openly, so agencies that couldn't join still get the takeaways. If you run a recruitment agency in the US or UK, send me a message. — — — Full disclosure: I'm a builder and co-founder of Agentic Research & Kinetic System, which ships AI automation for agencies. That's why this problem is on my desk. But the study is neutral — its job is to tell me what's actually happening inside recruitment agencies, not to sell anything. I'll say the same thing upfront when we speak.