Lawes Consulting Group

Lawes Consulting Group: 25 Years in London, Heavily Invested in Tech

Lawes Consulting Group is a London recruitment firm that has been in business for 25 years. The firm sends out around 45 CVs a day, and every one of them has to land on the client's desk in the Lawes template, tailored to the role. Opportunities to buy new tools cross the desk of CEO Steven Lawes daily, and most of them go nowhere.

"We've been around for a long time and we're heavily invested in tech as a business. For us to be the first in the UK market was irrelevant. If it works, and it works well, and it's efficient, and it makes sense, then we'll be investing in it."

Steven Lawes, CEO, Lawes Consulting Group

The Challenge: Two Full-Time Administrators, Just for CVs

Before Saply, formatting was a department. Two dedicated administrators spent their days moving CVs onto the Lawes template, changing fonts and bullet points, and standardising documents before they went to clients. With 45 CVs a day, that was still not enough, so consultants formatted CVs themselves as well.

"Painstakingly difficult, actually. We always had two dedicated administrators in the business that are constantly doing CVs on behalf of consultants. A CV would come in, we would put it on our template, change fonts, change bullet points."

Steven Lawes

• Time: About 20 minutes per CV, across 45 CVs a day.
• The wrong people on the job: Consultants were doing admin instead of talking to clients and candidates.
• Consistency: Even with a template, output varied depending on who formatted it.

"Consultants are notoriously not very good at admin. That's a fact in the industry. What they're good at is talking to clients, talking to candidates. And that's what you want them doing."

The Decision: Five Minutes

The introduction to Saply did not need a long evaluation. Lee, on the Lawes team, tried the Word plugin and walked into Steven's office within minutes.

"I think within about five minutes, Lee was knocking on the door saying: Steve, you need to have a look at this, it's pretty impressive."

Steven Lawes

Lawes became the first Saply customer in the UK. The plugin lives inside Microsoft Word, so nobody at the firm had to learn a new system. "We weren't aware of plugins into Word, Microsoft 365. The simplicity of what you guys have delivered means that it's really easy. Five-year-olds can do it, or old people like me."

Tailoring Without Inventing

Every CV that leaves Lawes is tailored to the vacancy. The concern with any AI tool is that it will embellish. Saply does not.

"Although it will tailor a CV towards a specific opportunity for you, it certainly doesn't add any more detail, doesn't kind of make stuff up. It just processes that CV and leans it towards the relevant points being more available, or at the top of the CV, geared towards that opportunity."

Steven Lawes

Everything Inside Loxo

Lawes runs on Loxo, and consultants are in it every minute of every day. Saply's Loxo integration means CVs never leave the ATS: no downloading, no re-uploading, no copy-pasting between tools.

"The whole process of not having to go outside of Loxo to download CVs, to then bring them into Saply and then export them again back out to Loxo, the fact that it can all be done in one place, again, it's efficiency at its very best."

Steven Lawes

The Impact: 75 Hours a Week

A CV that took 20 minutes now takes under a minute. Across 45 CVs a day, the firm has calculated the time it gets back.

"To quantify that, it's hours and hours. I think we worked out something like 75 hours a week we've got back from not having to process CVs. 75 hours a week is a lot."

Steven Lawes

• Under one minute per CV, down from around 20 minutes
• 75 hours a week returned to the business
• Consultants back on the phone instead of in Word
• Every CV in the Lawes template, every time

"It's an absolute no-brainer, quite frankly. All of the consultants agree how easy it is to use, and the time it saves. Everybody in the business would agree that this has freed up lots of time, not just a little bit, lots of time for individuals to do what they do best. We don't employ a team of administrators, we employ consultants that should be proactive and working on behalf of candidates and on behalf of clients. And the more time they have to do that, the better they'll be."

Why They Went First