Recruitment and staffing · Our own operation
The staffing agency we automated first: our own.
MSD's technical director runs a staffing agency. We automated its back office first, and MSD is the supplier and the case study at once.
Start with the context
The disclosure,
first.
Michael Szalaty, MSD's technical director, runs that agency. MSD is the supplier and the case study at once.
The problem.
Michael Szalaty, MSD's technical director, runs a staffing agency alongside MSD. Its back office ran the way most agencies' do: timesheets arriving by email, WhatsApp and paper across a working week, each one manually read, checked against the rota and the rate card, and keyed into payroll by hand. CVs came in against open roles and had to be read and qualified one at a time before a recruiter's time was worth spending on them. Every new client needed the same onboarding pack chased and filed before a placement could start. None of it was difficult work. All of it was repetitive, interruptive and easy to get wrong at volume, and it ran on the same handful of people who were also expected to be doing recruitment.
What we built.
Rather than pitch the idea to a client first, MSD automated parts of its own back office: timesheet processing, CV qualification, client onboarding and the administration around them. The brief was narrow on purpose: automate what was entirely rule-based and leave anything judgement-led to a person.
How it works.
A timesheet arrives by email, WhatsApp or an upload, in whatever format the sender used. The worker reads it and extracts the worker, site, shift and hours.
It checks what it read against the rota and the rate card. A submission that matches goes straight through.
A submission that does not match — a shift that is not on the rota, hours outside the agreed pattern, a rate that does not resolve — is queued as an exception and escalated to a named person with the reason attached, not silently corrected or silently dropped.
Matched submissions are written into payroll-ready lines with the source document attached, so anyone checking the run can see where a figure came from.
The same escalate-on-doubt pattern runs the CV qualification and client onboarding workflows: read the input, check it against the rules, act when it is unambiguous, hand it to a person when it is not.
What changed.
A more structured operational process with less reliance on repetitive manual work. MSD has not published measured savings for this work.
The integrations.
- The agency's rota system
- Payroll
The solution was designed around the actual operation rather than starting with a piece of software and attempting to fit the process around it.
The account describes MSD's own involvement and the processes it worked on. It is not an independent client endorsement or a claim of measured ROI.
No AI worker has run for a client yet. We scope it and discuss it; we do not claim it is running for a client.
