🎙 A recruitment system that replaces guesswork with clarity—so hiring finally feels structured, simple, and scalable.
You probably didn’t start your business because you loved recruitment.
Most founders don’t.
In fact, many quietly dread it.
Reading through piles of CVs.
Trying to guess who’s actually capable.
Hoping the person you choose turns out to be the right fit.
And when it goes wrong?
The cost isn’t just financial.
It’s the hours spent training someone who isn’t right.
The energy invested in onboarding.
The frustration when you realise you’re back at square one again.
So what happens next?
Many founders delay hiring.
Or hold onto the wrong person longer than they should.
Not because they don’t see the problem…
But because the recruitment process itself feels like the bigger one.
I know that feeling well.
For over two decades, I’ve wrestled with the same frustration—from reviewing CVs early in my career, to building businesses that depended on the right people showing up.
And the more I experienced it…
The clearer something became.
The problem isn’t usually the people.
It’s the process.
In this week’s episode, I share the story behind how that realisation led me to design a recruitment system that removes much of the guesswork from hiring.
A system that filters candidates step by step…
So by the time you’re meeting someone, you’re already speaking with the strongest applicants.
No piles of CVs.
No relying on gut instinct.
Just a clear path from applicant to shortlist.
If hiring has ever felt heavier than it should, this conversation may shift how you think about it.
🎧 Listen to the episode.
Because building a team shouldn’t feel like a gamble.
It should feel like a predictable system.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: Building a Recruitment System That Actually Works
- Stop Trusting CVs and Gut Feel: AI‑polished CVs and “she seems nice” interviews are a terrible basis for judging who can actually do the work.
- Use Test Tasks As An Initial Filter: Use structured applications, test tasks, and clear scoring to filter candidates. Reserve your human judgment for the final interview stage.
- Own Your Recruitment System: When agencies control your hiring, you stay dependent, delay firing, and tolerate mediocre performance.
- Make Hiring Easy to Run Without You: When a VA can run the entire process, you can mostly remove yourself and your management team from the equation. Creating a near-frictionless hiring process ensures you get the right people into the right places quickly – particularly important during periods of high growth.
BEST MOMENTS: Recruitment System Insights That Challenge Traditional Hiring
00:31 – 💬 “ There was no way of comparing like for like. It was purely down to my gut feeling about who should replace me in my role.”
05:17 – 💬 “You can waste huge amounts of time on taking someone through a recruiting process and interviewing them and even hiring them, only to find out they can't actually do everything they said they could do.”
07:47 – 💬 “I believe a business owner can easily do the recruitment better than anybody else.”
11:17 – 💬 “You need your company to stand out from every other job advert out there. To be the one that's different, the one that actually speaks to that person.”
TIMESTAMPED OVERVIEW
00:00 Intro: “Hating Recruitment to Perfecting It”
06:44 Avoid Overreliance on Recruitment Agencies
08:32 AI-Powered Recruitment Made Easy
12:12 Streamlined Hiring Process Workshop
Episode Transcript
Please note: This transcript was generated using automated transcription tools and may contain typographical errors or inaccurately captured words or phrases.
Dr Steve Day: I\'ve had an issue with recruitment for over 26 years, when I was asked as a intern, as part of my degree. To sift through 50 CVs and shortlist candidates to replace myself in my role as I was going back to my studies. The process was completely disorganized. It was just an arbitrary selection based on pure subjectivity. There was no logic or reasoning behind the decisions that were being made.
Yes, we could look at their qualifications and their grades and what they\'d done in the past. But it was all up to me to make the decision. There was no way of comparing like for like. It was purely down to my gut feeling about who should replace me in my role. That was when it all started. And when I became an entrepreneur, my dislike turned into more of a hatred to more of a complete aversion to having to do any recruitment at all.
However, if you\'re a business owner, you\'ll know to run a business and have a life, you need to hire people. Even if that\'s just one virtual assistant to help you in the day-to-day running of your business. Having somebody is essential for you to take true time off. Unless you have a business, you can literally just switch off and on again, at will, which many of us don\'t.
So if you are interested to know how I overcame the challenges of my hatred for recruitment. And use that to actually motivate me to create an awesome system driven by AI, run by virtual assistants. That allows me and my clients to hire people at will and hire brilliant people at that, then keep listening to this episode.
And at the end I wanna share a exclusive link so you can actually jump on a bootcamp to get guided step by step through the entire recruitment process. Listen in for more details.
Okay, so in the intro I mentioned that I\'ve had an issue with recruitment for over two and a half decades. That issue has grown over the years to be somewhat of a hatred of the entire process. However, that hatred has fueled me to put a considerable time and effort into designing a process. That does not rely on human subjectivity in order to find brilliant people. You see my journey into the world of recruitment started out when I was tasked with hiring my own replacement in my university sumage degree. And I was asked to go through 50 CVs and try and cherry pick out just a few who would be then shortlisted for an interview.
I then worked in my own property business where I was renovating properties and I was trying to hire people to help me do the work. That was an absolute nightmare. I ended up just relying on friends and people I knew. To basically come down and help when I could. And I used to buy them beers or lunches, whatever, to pay them.
I had a few people that did hang around for a bit. But they were all mates or mates of mates or mates of my brothers, or there was always a link to them. But that in itself caused problems. Because then there\'s a relationship thing. And if people don\'t show up for work, it\'s difficult to sack them and all the rest of it.
So it becomes really messy really quickly. But finding people that you don\'t know to do the work is equally as unreliable. And then in my mid twenties, I co-founded a recruitment company with one of my best mates.
And she had an experience in working recruitment in the past, and I had an experience of, well. Not a lot really, except for running businesses. And so I came along with a bit of cash and a bit of motivation to try to get this business going with her. I saw how hard she worked to try to find just one person to place with one of our clients.
It was just an relentless never ending on the phone, calling people, checking people out, emailing people, checking over CVs, checking over references. It was painful to say the least. And it was incredibly time consuming. That business unfortunately folded. Because we just didn\'t have the resources to be able to keep it going long enough to make it profitable. And we just didn\'t know enough about business, I don\'t think, to make that work at that time.
And then when I became a doctor, I saw a different side of recruitment, when I was the one applying for the jobs. And I realized how broken the system was, yet again. You see, when I was applying for a place at a hospital, I would draft my CV. And I would give it to someone who knew how to write CVs and they would make it sound good. They would make everything I\'d done sound three 10 times better than it was.
However wrong that may sound, that is the way that most CVs are written. Almost good CVs are written. They\'re written by people who know how to write CVs, CV copywriters. Now with the world of AI, you don\'t need to pay someone lots of money to do that. You can get AI to do it for you for free. So that\'s open up the playing field for everybody to basically make stuff up and stick it on their CV. But make it out to sound like it\'s actually true.
And yes, it may be founded in truth and it may not be actually lying, so to speak. But it can be very misleading if it\'s worded in the ways that they often are. And leads you to think that someone has confidence and ability beyond their actual means. And therefore, you can waste huge amounts of time on taking someone through a recruitment process and interviewing them, and even hiring them. Only to find out they can\'t actually do everything they said they could do. And it was all down to their ChatGPT bot or whatever AI they happened to be using. Who thought they\'d jazz at the CV and make it sound good.
And then finally when I got back into the world of entrepreneurship, when I left medicine, I started building a team. I started going through an agency and using a block of hours where I basically paid for like 10 hours a month. And I\'d have somebody who then do some tasks for me. That didn\'t work because I didn\'t know who I was working with. There was no continuity. I was basically having no relationship with this person, so there\'s no trust. And therefore they just basically fell down really quickly. And then tried to hire someone myself by cherry picking on Upwork.
I\'d put a job advert up. I got some people that applied. I looked at their resumes. Looked at their reviews and said, that one sounds good, I\'ll go with that. That didn\'t work out either. Because again, there was no process involved. It was just me just trusting other people\'s opinions, which may or may not be true. And seeing what someone had written on their CV and saying, yeah, she sounds like a good fit, let\'s give it a go.
The problem is the cost of just giving it a go is huge. We invest a massive amount of time, not only in the recruitment process. But also in the onboarding process, the training process, and the ongoing support and nurturing of that person. So they become a valuable team player. If we\'ve picked wrong at the beginning, then it means that we put all of that effort into the wrong person who inevitably leaves.
And therefore the entire effort is wasted. If we\'re not careful, we can do that a few times, end up feeling completely disillusioned about the whole recruitment process in general. And then think, right, great, I\'ll go to recruitment agency and they will solve my problems for me.
The problem with that is you\'re then offloading one of the most important activities in your business to somebody else to deal with. And okay. I\'ll argue that if you wanna hire a specialist, if you wanna have someone with a specific skillset that you don\'t have the understanding of or the capability, to be able to know how to hire that kind of person. Maybe a programmer, a web developer, a web designer, a video editor, someone with that special sort of source that you need. But you dunno what to, how to start. Then fair enough, maybe an agency can help you.
But if you are just hiring someone to be a virtual assistant, a personal assistant, an executive assistant, an admin assistant, anything with an assistant on the end. Anything where it\'s not somebody who\'s coming in and bringing massive amounts of skill. And therefore you want someone with years of experience that can be, you know, proven, then that is where you, I believe, as a business owner, can easily do the recruitment better than anybody else.
You can hire the right person specifically for the job you want. And in a lot less time often than it takes to go through an agency and for a lot less money. And that is key. Because if you remove the barriers from hiring, then you stop hanging onto people for longer than you should. Let me explain that a little more detail.
So one thing I did early on in my journey into entrepreneurship was I got somebody to hire somebody for me. So I paid them a fee and then they hired somebody for me. That was pretty good. And they found something that was actually of a decent standard. So I had nothing against the process. It was relatively painless. I just had to, you know, provide some information about the role, et cetera. And ultimately I got somebody in the business and they lasted for a few months.
However, I had no idea how that person would be found. When that person then inevitably left, I had no way to replace them. And I was then forced the decision, well, do I go back to that agency, and asked them to do it again. Because that person actually left after a few months and it was sort of out of the guarantee period. Which was fair enough, there\'s no complaint with the agency. But it meant I now to think about putting my hand in my pocket to pay for something else again, which may not work out.
And that put barriers up to me actually just going ahead and hiring somebody new. And I\'ve also experienced and seen the situation in my clients many times. When they hang on to people for too long. Because they\'re worried about the cost and effort of going through recruitment.
But when we give them our entire recruitment assistant, which could be run by your virtual assistant or anyone in your team. And is driven, powered by AI to make it super easy and slick to go through. Then the barriers are dropped. And you can grow your team whenever you need to.
And over the years, we\'ve developed our recruitment system so we can hire things like graphic designers and web developers. Because we can build a specific recruitment path for different types of people. We\'ve had hundreds of more clients that have used the system to hire people from all over the world.
Now how the system works is fundamentally pretty simple, but it\'s the detail that matters. It\'s having everything lined up. It\'s having it so it\'s effortless to do that. You can delegate this to anybody to do. That you as the business owner, if you\'re a small business or a micro business, you make the decisions upfront. That allows someone to then do all of the work beyond that until the point where you\'re do your final interviews. And that\'s when I recommend you get back involved.
And having this process which involves initiating or preparing for the hiring. It involves attracting the right people, eliminating the wrong people, testing the rest, and then selecting the finest. And those four, five stages allow us to go from any number of applicants down to a short list of two or three for live interview in a short space of time. As little as three to four weeks. It also allows us to do this consistently and regardless of who is in the role. It is a very structured approach that makes it work.
So for example, imagine you were applying for a job in like a big firm. Whether it\'s an accountancy firm or whatever in the city. You\'re not gonna just literally hang your CV into the front desk and say, great, let me know if I\'ve got the job. You go through a series of tests. You\'ll start off probably with some sort of application form. You\'ll then do some sort of test task to show you\'ve got some ability. You maybe you\'ll hand in some proof of your work. You may then come in for a group interview, a final interview, et cetera, et cetera.
There\'s these hoops you need to jump through. And each hoop gets harder to actually get through until you become that shortlist of that final interview. And then obviously you\'re up against the best of the best, the best of that recruitment drive.
And that\'s what we want in your micro or small business as well. We wanna make it difficult to people to apply. But we also wanna make it really attractive. You need to set your company up from every other job advert out there. Making it stand out to be the one that\'s different. The one that actually speaks to that person. In the same way that you speak to an individual and you\'re selling your services. Let\'s speak to the individual when you\'re selling your business in terms of somewhere that people want to work.
Then we take them through those step-by-step stages until we get to that final elimination. And it\'s a step-by-step approach. Having really structured application forms, structured test task. Everything that be can graded objectively. Removing all subjectivity, not looking at a CV. Not looking at a covering letter.
Maybe at the end when we\'re literally at the point of hiring them. We\'ll use that just to make sure they haven\'t made anything else up during the process. To cross-reference what they said in that application versus what their CV is. But that\'s about it. Because I want to use a standardized process to make sure I\'ve asked all the key questions I need to be able to make a judgment.
What they put in their CV is irrelevant to me as a recruiter for my business and for my clients as well. Because we ask everything we need to make the objective decision. That allows us then to have a final short list of people who then we can add that subjectivity about like, who would I like to work with?
Who\'s gonna be a good fit for the team? Who do I think shares my values? That\'s the kind of stuff that we dig out on that final interview. Because everything else has been covered by the step-by-step, standardized objective process. Going from application all the way through to final selection.
So if you\'d like to understand more about this and actually get handheld through this entire process. It takes around four to five weeks to go through, including the preliminary stuff, to get you set up and ready so you know exactly who you need to hire.
And then over the next few weeks, we literally walk through the entire process in real time, so hiring as you go through this process. So the end of that four or five weeks, you\'ll literally have a new person hired and ready to work in your business.
As the intention of the workshop, if you choose not to do it live. And just come along and learn how to do it, that\'s also fine too. If you\'re interested, head over to sys.academy/recruit to find out more. And to be clear, this is a paid workshop, so there will be a fee for this. And you\'ll find all the details of the pricing, schedule, et cetera, on that page. So go and check it out, sys.academy/recruit. That\'s SYS dot academy forward slash recruit. You find out all about our recruitment challenge on there.
So that\'s it for today. I hope you enjoyed hearing the story and the reasons why behind me putting so much time and effort. Into creating a fully systemized, VA-driven and AI-powered recruitment process. And I\'m really looking forward to seeing you on our recruitment challenge. Where you can actually go through this entire system yourself. Head over to sys.academy/recruit to find out more.
Thank you very much. Bye now.
VALUABLE RESOURCES
If recruitment currently feels slow, hit‑and‑miss, and painful, this is your next step. Register for our Recruit Right Workshop at sys.academy/recruit
LINKS TO CONNECT WITH THE HOST
- Podcast: https://www.systemizeyoursuccess.com
- Website: https://systemsandoutsourcing.com/
- Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/systemsandoutsourcing/
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/systemsandoutsourcing/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/systems_and_outsourcing/
- YouTube: https://youtube.com/@drsteveday42
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drsteveday42
ABOUT THE HOST
Steve moved to Sweden in 2015 and transformed how he ran his businesses—switching to a fully remote model. A former NHS doctor, with a background in computing and property investing, he now helps overwhelmed business owners systemise and outsource effectively. Through his courses and coaching, Steve teaches how to automate operations and work with affordable virtual assistants, freeing up time and increasing profits. He runs his UK-based businesses remotely with support from a team of UK and Filipino VAs, and is passionate about helping others build scalable, stress-free companies using smart systems and virtual support.
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