The challenge
Cherry Professional had done serious work on their data over the years. They were early adopters of Bullhorn Automation, which they had used to clean up records, enforce GDPR compliance, and improve overall data hygiene. By the time Amplify entered the picture, the foundation was solid.
But solid data that nobody can easily reach isn’t doing its job.
Sarah Gibson, Operations Director at Cherry Professional, describes the frustration clearly. The intelligence was in the system, a note about a client expecting to hire in six months’ time, a candidate’s salary expectations logged during a quick phone call, a lead flagged by a consultant who had since moved on. It was all there, technically accessible. But reaching it meant manually digging through records, running separate searches, and relying on people to remember where they had left things.
For consultants managing busy desks, this created a daily problem: where do I start? Which job is most urgent? Which clients haven’t I spoken to in too long? Without a quick way to surface those answers, recruiters either spent time manually piecing it together or, more often, the information simply got lost.
The interview process added to the friction. After every candidate call, consultants would write notes from memory, then navigate to a separate screen to update salary, location, and availability fields, entering the same information twice. A small inefficiency, repeated dozens of times a week, across an entire team.
Cherry Professional’s goal wasn’t to overhaul their process from scratch. It was to make what they already had work harder, and to create more time for the relationships at the core of their business.
You could still feel that the good data was a bit hidden in the system, just not easy enough to access. It wasn't necessarily about brand new data coming through. It was about digging into what we already had.
The solution
Cherry Professional went live with Bullhorn Amplify to bring their existing data to the surface and put it to work. For Sarah, the implementation was guided by a clear principle: start with the problem, not the product.
“We’ve always tried to have our business goals in mind first, identifying our blockers and bottlenecks, and then finding solutions that support us getting there — rather than buying the tech and seeing where it might fit,” she explains. “We haven’t always done that, but it’s certainly worked better when we have.”
The rollout was deliberately inclusive. Rather than restricting Amplify access to managers or senior consultants, Cherry Professional gave the entire team — from recruiters to finance staff to office administrators, full access from day one. Sarah was clear that adoption had to be driven by curiosity, not compliance.
“From our very first AI introduction session, I really wanted to get across to everyone that it’s not something to be ashamed of. If it helps you write a client pitch, or gets you started on a job advert, be proud that you’ve bought yourself 30 minutes or an hour to go and have a coffee with a client. Don’t hide away from the fact that we’re using it.”
The team holds regular open forums to share what’s working, what hasn’t landed, and what they’d like to see the technology do next. Ideas that come from the floor get tested. When a consultant asked whether Amplify Chat could find part-time credit controllers, Sarah’s answer was the same as it always is: try it.
On the data side, Notes Enrichment has become one of the most impactful changes to daily workflow. Interview transcripts are now recorded and fed automatically into the system. Amplify extracts the key structured fields, salary expectations, location, availability, and updates candidate records without the consultant lifting a finger. The double-entry problem, one of those friction points that nobody had fully quantified but everyone felt, is gone.
We didn't restrict access to managers or leaders. We wanted everyone — consultants, finance, admin — to grab hold of it and see what they could do with it. The more ownership people have over the technology, the more they feel empowered to solve problems with it.
The Results
The change Sarah describes most vividly isn’t a percentage on a dashboard, it’s a placement that nearly didn’t happen.
A consultant had a strong HR Business Partner candidate they were confident about but weren’t sure who to approach. They asked Amplify Chat: who should I speak to about this person? The system returned a list of eight clients. Near the top was a company the consultant would never have thought to call, flagged because of a note left by a colleague who had since left the business. That note, recorded a year earlier, said: call back in a few months’ time, likely to be restructuring and looking for an HR Business Partner.
Without Amplify, that note would have stayed buried. The handover had happened, the context had been lost, and the opportunity would have quietly disappeared. Instead, it came back to the top, with a suggested approach already prepared.
That story isn’t a one-off. It’s an example of a broader shift in how the whole team works.
Cherry Professional’s consultants now regularly ask Amplify to prioritise their live jobs, and the system surfaces context they would have had to manually piece together: which roles are at risk of going cold, where the highest placement probability sits, which clients haven’t been contacted in months.
Business development has changed too. Rather than relying on intuition about which companies might be hiring, consultants now ask Amplify to scan the market, identifying businesses in the Nottingham area showing active hiring signals, flagging sectors with movement, and returning that intelligence in a format they can act on immediately.
Across the business, the impact goes beyond the recruitment team. The finance function uses Amplify to pull key figures and run comparisons, average permanent fees, placement rates by team, without navigating through Analytics manually. What previously meant several steps and a few minutes of searching is now a single question.
“You could do all of this before,” Sarah acknowledges, “but it felt a little out of reach. You had to do several things to get there. Now it’s just there.”
Cherry Professional is still in the early stages of formally tracking the downstream impact of Amplify on key metrics such as time-to-fill and placement rates. Specific figures are expected to follow as the team builds out its measurement framework. What is already clear, however, is the directional shift: consultants are making calls they would previously have missed, data is being captured and structured without manual effort, and the team’s confidence in acting on what the system surfaces is growing with each use.
It's not one person's job. We want everyone to get curious, get creative, and solve problems, and then we grow it together.
Looking Ahead
Cherry Professional’s next focus is on deepening the desk-level automations available to individual consultants, and continuing to let the team shape how those capabilities grow. Sarah is also exploring tighter integration between Amplify and the agencies SMS tool, so that the full communication journey can flow without interruption.
The approach to that growth, she says, will be the same as it has always been: start with a real problem, involve the people who will use it, and measure what actually changes.
Her advice to other recruitment agencies at the start of their AI journey is straightforward: don’t buy the tech and look for problems to solve. Find your bottlenecks first. Make the tools feel like they belong to the whole team, not just the people who procured them. And resist the pressure to measure everything before anything has had time to bed in.
“We need people to feel safe enough to get creative and keep growing it,” Sarah says. “That’s not one person’s job. It never will be.”
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