Inside the McDermott + Bull rollout: 90% off the candidate write-up

Recruitment AI has settled into a clear answer to the loudest question. It is not whether AI will replace the recruiter. It is which parts of the week the recruiter gets to reclaim. Bullhorn's 2026 industry survey found that firms with the strongest year-over-year revenue growth — those above 25% — were four times more likely than the rest of the market to be running AI inside their ATS. Korn Ferry's 2026 talent-acquisition outlook puts the number more bluntly: 84% of talent leaders intend to deploy AI in 2026, and 73% rank critical thinking as their single most important recruiting skill. The job is not going anywhere. The week is being rebuilt around it.

The week, as it stands today for most recruitment firms, leaves very little room for the part you actually hired the recruiter to do. Radancy's 2025 reporting put it at 45% of the recruiter workweek on administrative tasks — write-ups, parsing, formatting, copying out of one system into another. Bullhorn's GRID data points the same direction from a slightly different angle: an average of 14.6 hours a week spent on candidate search alone, with another three-plus hours absorbed by admin that AI can handle when it's there. The recruiter who could be on the phone with a candidate is, in fact, retyping the candidate's last role into a write-up template.

Executive search sits in a particular corner of that picture. Hunt Scanlon's March 2026 analysis of retained search firms found that only 10% had AI embedded across the full workflow; about a third were still in basic generative-AI experimentation; the rest were stuck somewhere in between. The mass-market AI plays — Paradox for high-volume conversational screening, Eightfold for talent intelligence, HireEZ for outbound, Manatal for SMB ATS automation — were built for volume markets, not for the partner-led retained search where the written perspective on a candidate is the thing the firm is paid for.

That gap is where the question becomes more specific. If sourcing is well-covered, and screening is well-covered, and the candidate write-up is the artefact partners actually sign their name to, then the write-up is where the augmentation has to land — and it has to land without flattening the firm's voice.

McDermott + Bull came to us with that question.

The rollout

McDermott + Bull is a retained executive search firm. Their candidate data already lived inside the ATS — that part of the problem was solved. What wasn't solved was the hours each recruiter spent every week pulling that data into client-ready write-ups: copy, paste, reformat, edit for tone, double-check the title, double-check the date.

The rollout integrated MyCandidate.ai directly into the ATS as a one-touch solution. Internal data flows in. Write-ups come out in under a minute, formatted to the firm's standards. Management keeps full control over content, structure, and presentation — the candidate brief, the alignment-with-mandate section, the format of the closing summary.

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"The AI tool reduced time spent on candidate profiles by 90% while increasing our recruiting team's CRM utilization and driving higher data integrity."

— Rod McDermott, CEO, McDermott + Bull

Two things stand out in Rod's quote that we hear often. The first is the time number — 90% off the write-up itself. The second is the second-order effect: CRM utilization went up. When the tool reads from the CRM and writes back to the CRM, recruiters have a reason to keep the system complete. It gets cleaner because the recruiter's workflow rewards keeping it clean.

The error-reduction number that came alongside — 98% — comes from a related place. When the writing is automated and the data validation is structured, the things that used to slip through (wrong title, wrong tenure, wrong date, wrong format) stop slipping through. The recruiter's eye gets reserved for judgment, not proofreading.

What 90% off the write-up actually unlocks

Cutting an hour off a single write-up is a lever. Cutting an hour off every write-up, across a team of recruiters, across an active book of searches, is a different lever entirely. The compound effect is what Rod's team reported: not just faster individual write-ups, but better engagement with candidates, fuller CRM data, fewer mistakes carrying through to the client.

That is the part Korn Ferry's outlook is gesturing at when it ranks critical thinking as the number-one recruiting skill — and ranks AI literacy fifth. The AI is not the differentiator. What recruiters do with the hours it gives back is.

How a rollout actually works

Before McDermott + Bull saw the platform on a live search, we ran a short scoping call. Three things matter on that call:

1. Where does candidate data live today? ATS, CRM, recruiter inboxes, all three. The answer decides the integration shape.
2. What does a finished write-up look like for your firm? Voice, structure, sections — the way you say yes, the way you say not yet. We calibrate the writing engine on past write-ups in the first session.
3. Who reviews the work? The platform writes. The partner signs their name. We design the review loop around that.

From the recruiter's side, the day-to-day reads like this: bring an intake, paste in screening notes, get a draft in the firm's voice, edit inline, send to the partner. From the partner's side: a queue of drafts that read like the team wrote them, ready to sign. The partner's judgment is still the deliverable. The hour of typing in front of it is the part that goes away.

What this looks like for your firm

Most firms start with a pilot. One of your live searches, run end-to-end through the platform. Bring whatever past write-ups you can share and we calibrate the voice in the first five minutes. By the end of the search, you know whether the work makes the case for a firm rollout.

If you want to see what one of your live searches looks like through MyCandidate.ai, schedule a thirty-minute walkthrough. Bring the brief and a couple of past write-ups; we'll show you the rest.