How We Helped AJ Recruit Build a Structured Recruitment Process That Scales
The brief
AJ Recruit is a UK-based recruitment agency specialising in back-office and hospitality roles. Founded by Amanda Fahy, the business draws on more than 15 years of experience in the recruitment industry. Amanda is known for her methodical hiring process, deep industry knowledge, and people-first approach to candidate and client engagement.
Having worked independently for several years, Amanda’s success meant the business was growing rapidly; and so was the ambition to scale her team.
With plans to bring in new consultants, Amanda identified two clear objectives for our engagement. First, she wanted to clearly articulate the standards, tone, and values that underpin how she works with candidates and clients. Second, she needed support translating her intuitive process into structured documentation, so that when she expands her team, she can confidently communicate the AJ Recruit way of working and maintain the quality that her brand is known for.
AJ Recruit’s work is fast-paced, nuanced, and highly dependent on trust. Clients rely on Amanda to find the right people quickly, while candidates trust her to advocate for their best interests.
This balance requires more than industry knowledge—it demands process discipline and clear messaging. Our collaboration was about capturing that expertise in a format that could scale. Capturing this growth in a structured way helped clarify each stage of Amanda’s recruiting process, ensuring nothing got lost as the volume of work increased.
What we delivered
Ysobelle Edwards partnered with AJ Recruit to deliver a complete documentation and enablement suite. We built a bespoke Candidate Welcome Pack along with core templates and tools to support every stage of the recruitment process. These assets are designed to enhance client delivery and to help standardise how AJ Recruit manages candidate experience and communication on behalf of its clients.
Translating instinct into structure
The work wasn’t just about writing policies. It was about understanding how Amanda thinks, how she communicates with people, and what makes her candidates feel informed and supported. This understanding became the foundation for an efficient recruitment process that could deliver a consistently positive candidate experience.
We turned that understanding into practical tools her future team could pick up and run with. These tools allowed AJ Recruit to turn instinct into teachable assets, creating a refined recruitment process that could be repeated and scaled as the business grows.
This included language Amanda naturally uses when speaking with candidates, the logic behind her screening approach, and the subtle signals she relies on when recommending a final shortlist.
By capturing those details, the documents became more than just templates, they became a written version of Amanda’s judgement. Capturing these elements ensures the hiring process is teachable and repeatable across the entire recruitment and selection process.
Key tools and templates included:
Step-by-step guidance aligned with the 7 stages of the recruitment process
Clearly written Candidate Terms of Engagement
Interview process guidance including preparation checklists and communication protocols
Counter-offer and job offer handling templates that reflect the needs of each new hire
Post-placement follow-up structure to support new employee transitions
Policies covering social media conduct, confidentiality, and data handling
Screening candidates and shortlist management templates to assess candidates with consistency
In addition, we developed:
Customised Client Terms of Business
Recruitment process maps and detailed recruitment process documentation
Best-practice frameworks for drafting a clear and compelling job description tailored to each role
Tools to assist with job descriptions, job openings, and job boards
Templates for managing potential candidates, candidate relationship management, and selection process reviews
A format for writing a comprehensive job description that aligns expectations and attracts suitable candidates
Each element was crafted to support a foolproof recruitment process that saves time, builds trust, and reinforces a positive candidate experience.
From first contact through to placement.
Building a repeatable recruitment process
A recruitment process that’s codified and easy to teach is one that scales with quality. We worked with AJ Recruit to make their recruitment process intuitive to follow, easy to implement, and built to reflect Amanda’s high standards at every stage.
This clarity strengthens the entire hiring process, ensuring the entire process runs smoothly for candidates and clients alike.
Breakdown of AJ Recruit’s enhanced recruitment process
Below, we break down how we brought structure to each stage of Amanda’s client-facing recruitment process.
1. Job description creation
Amanda already had a strong sense of role scoping and market needs. We worked together to enhance her approach by formalising the process, ensuring every job opening began with a sharp, tailored brief that reflected both business needs and brand tone.
The comprehensive job description served as an anchor for screening, interviews, and client discussions, ensuring alignment from day one.
2. Advertising and sourcing
We provided structured templates for consistency across job portals and job boards. These included best practices for tone and platform formatting, ensuring the job description remained consistent across channels and resonated with the right audience, as well as streamlining how roles were promoted.
3. Screening candidates
Amanda’s instinct for identifying quality candidates was well-established.
We introduced templated tools to document right-to-work checks, qualification reviews, and suitability criteria, supporting future scalability and helping identify the most suitable candidates for each role.
4. Shortlisting and interview preparation
We contributed tools to shortlist candidates efficiently, including management templates and checklists to help improve consistency and efficiency. These were designed to complement AJ Recruit’s high standards and support client delivery.
A strong hiring process creates trust at every stage, helping recruitment agencies avoid a complicated application process and improve overall results.
5. The interview process
Our additions included optional guides and best practice summaries to help ensure a smooth, repeatable and effective hiring process that delivers a consistently positive candidate experience throughout interviews conducted on behalf of clients.
6. Offer and negotiation
Amanda has always handled offer conversations with clarity and professionalism. We provided standardised templates for job offer documentation, incorporating key details like role title, start date, and conditions. These templates ensure the successful candidate is presented with a professional and clear offer experience.
This improved the offer stage by reducing friction and supporting a clearer handover between recruiter and client. The resulting offer package was both professional and reflective of the employer brand.
7. Post-placement follow-up
We built a scalable process for feedback loops, onboarding success tracking, and optional coaching moments, reinforcing long-term candidate satisfaction in line with AJ Recruit’s client-focused delivery. This also included checklists to assess candidates' integration and performance in their new hire journey.
Why a structured recruitment process drives confidence
For growing recruitment agencies like AJ Recruit, consistency is not just operationally helpful; it protects brand reputation. A clearly defined and effective recruitment process sets the tone for the candidate journey and client satisfaction alike.
Without a structure, it's easy to lose track of potential candidates, skip important screening steps, or fall into compliance risks.
A strong recruitment process starts with clarity. That includes:
A well-written job description for every job opening with the job description serving as a foundation for candidate alignment and expectations.
Defined recruitment process steps to avoid miscommunication
Policies that ensure a fair, compliant, and professional interview process
Clear guidelines on how to handle job offers, counter-offers, and onboarding
A system to capture feedback from candidates and hiring managers
When the whole team operates from a shared understanding of what ‘good’ looks like, the business can move faster and make better decisions. This shared clarity avoids bottlenecks, reduces second-guessing, and ultimately supports scalable growth.
Takeaways for Recruiters
Here’s what other recruitment agencies can take from this work.
A clearly documented recruitment process creates consistency across your hiring team, supports every hiring manager, and reinforces a positive candidate experience without adding unnecessary admin.
Structured documentation isn’t just helpful, it’s transformational. It turns implicit know-how into explicit systems that elevate the entire hiring process.
In this project, we supported AJ Recruit by formalising each recruitment process step. We provided rationale for every asset we created and showed how each one aligns with the broader recruitment lifecycle.
Shared across a team, these resources don’t just reduce ambiguity. They improve time-to-hire, candidate communication, and internal confidence. The result is a more refined recruitment process that delivers better outcomes with less effort.
Even something as foundational as a job description can shift candidate quality when it’s built with intention. Whether you’re refining an outdated template or writing from scratch, a perfect job description blends clarity with character—it sets the tone for the entire hiring process. Multiply that across your entire recruitment process, and you’ve got a hiring system that scales without compromise.
The power of process documentation
Recruitment teams can benefit from simple improvements—especially when looking to streamline a complex or inefficient hiring process. Sometimes, it’s not about reinventing the wheel, but creating small tools and clear language that clarify expectations and improve the candidate experience.
Every recruitment process benefits from structure, clarity, and communication that aligns teams.
Whether you're running an internal recruitment function or scaling up a consultancy, documenting your recruitment and selection process is one of the most impactful steps you can take. It reduces stress, shortens time-to-hire, and helps your recruitment team operate with clarity and confidence.
Done well, documentation becomes more than just paperwork. It becomes the backbone of an efficient hiring process—one that supports the hiring manager, enhances the candidate journey, and reduces friction for your internal recruitment team. Even just refining how a job description is written can have a cascading effect on candidate quality, interview readiness, and placement outcomes.
In Amanda’s words
"I’ve been doing this a long time, but working with Ysobelle Edwards helped me articulate things I’d never written down. Now I have the clarity to grow, delegate, and still protect the standards I’ve built my name on." — Amanda Fahy, Founder of AJ Recruit
The outcome
AJ Recruit now runs with a complete toolkit built to support the entire process of recruitment. From initial job vacancy through to post-placement feedback, Amanda has the structure in place to guide each candidate, meet every deadline, and stay focused on quality at every stage. With a clearly structured recruitment process in place, Amanda is positioned to:
Onboard new candidates efficiently with a professional, branded Welcome Pack
Manage the recruiting process across job portals and job boards
Engage with each hiring manager using standardised job specs and feedback forms
Reduce delays in candidate screening and preparing documentation
Improve how she manages qualified candidates and tracks new hires
Confidently check candidates for suitability and fit before they are shortlisted
As Amanda prepares to grow her business further, she now has the systems, tone, and documentation in place to ensure that her client-facing recruitment delivery remains consistent, scalable, and aligned with her high standards.
Looking ahead
AJ Recruit’s investment in operational clarity now positions it for sustainable, controlled growth. As Amanda begins to build out her team, these foundational assets will give her the freedom to delegate with confidence, knowing that everyone is working from the same playbook. What was once instinct is now infrastructure ready to support the next chapter of the business. For Amanda, this means maintaining a great experience for candidates as she begins to bring on more internal support and collaborate with each hiring manager involved in future delivery.
Other ways we support recruitment businesses
Custom tools to streamline your hiring operations
While Amanda’s project focused on documentation, many of our recruitment clients also need support with workflow automation, reporting, and data management. We design and build databases and lightweight systems that replicate the benefits of an applicant tracking system—without the cost or complexity.
We’ve created tailored solutions that allow recruiters to:
Log and track candidate progress across each hiring stage
Manage job openings, interviews, and placement data from one dashboard
Generate custom reports for clients and internal use
Build features commonly found in an applicant tracking system, tailored to your workflow and language
Integrate with forms and portals for seamless data collection
These tools aren’t one-size-fits-all, they’re designed around your actual process, and built to scale as you grow.
With the right approach, even a lightweight system can support the entire recruitment process from planning to placement.
What’s your recruiting process costing you?
If your recruiting process relies on instinct rather than infrastructure, you’re likely losing time, clarity, and qualified candidates. A process that lives only in someone’s head can’t scale, especially when the stakes are high and the demand is constant.
Scalable systems, built your way
Whether you're an agency founder, a solo recruiter, or managing a small team, the right tools and documentation can turn ad hoc decisions into repeatable results. An applicant tracking system can help, but most agencies don’t need an off-the-shelf solution; they need something built for how they actually work. That’s what Amanda built, and it’s what you can have too.
Ready to upgrade your recruiting process and attract more qualified candidates?
Let’s talk. We’ll help you build something that supports your talent search, protects your employer brand, and strengthens every stage of the hiring process—without compromising your personal standards.
Let’s make your recruitment process unbreakable.