Construction recruitment runs almost entirely on WhatsApp, instinct, and a commission structure that most consultants navigate by feel. There's no shortage of hard work. There is a shortage of clarity.
Not in a vague way — in a structural way. Open loops accumulate. Priorities compete. The job creates more unresolved cognitive load than most people can sustainably carry, and the good ones leave because of it.
The consultants who last are the ones who play the long game — relationships, quality placements, retained workers. But the environment pulls hard toward speed and short-termism. It takes unusual discipline to resist that.
They're connected. The consultant who's always reactive and always depleted is more likely to make short-term decisions that damage the relationships that would have compounded into real income.
Fix the first and you start to fix the second. That's the idea, anyway.
A consultant opens their phone to something like this — and has to figure out, entirely on their own, what matters most right now.
Every one of those open loops persists in the background whether the consultant is actively thinking about it or not. That's not a motivation problem or a time management problem. It's just how attention works.
The standard commission structure in construction recruitment is non-linear. Cross certain monthly earnings thresholds and the rate you earn jumps. Below £5k in a month, nothing pays out at all. Above £20k, every additional £1,000 earned pays the consultant £200. Most consultants don't know which tier they're in on any given day.
Monthly earnings are a function of the margin between what a client gets billed and what the worker gets paid, multiplied across hours worked and number of workers placed.
The compounding argument is simple when you see it written down. A consultant who builds a retained base of workers billing every week starts each month with a floor — already partway up the tier structure before making a single new placement. A consultant who churns through placements starts from zero every month.
This isn't a secret. Most experienced consultants know it instinctively. The question is why so few operate this way — and whether the environment can be designed to make it easier.
The way we see it, a consultant's working life sits across three dimensions. Most tools and systems — if they exist at all — address one. We think the interesting problem is all three, simultaneously, and the way they interact.
Wellbeing sits underneath the other two because it sets the ceiling on both. A consultant who's depleted makes worse placement decisions and delivers worse service — regardless of how good they are at the job on a good day. That's not a character observation, it's just how attention works under load.
Open loops are expensive. Not in the time they take — in the attention they hold. A message left unresolved doesn't go away when you close the app. It keeps running in the background, competing with whatever you're supposed to be doing next. The load comes in four forms.
These are the hypotheses we're working from. We think they're right. We're building partly to find out.
Construction recruitment runs on WhatsApp. That's not a problem — it's just how the industry works, and it works because it's fast and personal. But all of that context lives in a phone and exists nowhere else. The consultant holds everything in their head. Nobody can see the full picture.
The tool we're building reads that existing WhatsApp context, understands the relationships and situations inside it, and gives the consultant one clear thing to focus on at any given moment — accounting for where they are in the month, what's active, and what they're trying to achieve. An AI assistant handles the routine alongside them. The stuff that needs a human gets a human.
No behaviour change required. They already use WhatsApp. They've already built all this context. It just needs to be readable and useful rather than overwhelming.
The goal is simple even if the build isn't: fewer open loops, clearer sense of what matters, less of the day spent reacting and more spent doing the thing that actually moves something forward.
The product is in development. The hypotheses aren't proven yet. What's clear is that the problem is real — and that the people who've been closest to it for longest tend to agree.
If you work in construction recruitment, or close to it, and any of this sounds familiar — a conversation would be genuinely useful. Not a pitch. Mostly listening at this stage.
And if you know someone we should be talking to, an introduction would mean a lot.
Joe Bradley — Founder, Vantalos