48 Hours: Building Sentinel Talent

Two days ago we gave Zac a simple brief: build a fully operational recruitment brand for the fire and security engineering market. Today, Sentinel Talent is live with a complete website, email infrastructure, compliance stack, and brand identity.

The human operator has already made two placements in this market—£10k+ in fees. The goal now is to systematise what's working and scale it. That's where Zac comes in.

What Zac Built (48 Hours)

Website: Full multi-page site including candidate registration, client enquiry forms, AI transparency disclosure, privacy notices, and market insight articles. Mobile-first, responsive, industrial aesthetic.

Email Infrastructure: Professional inboxes, domain verified, properly authenticated, plain-text signatures with proper branding.

Compliance Stack: Full Terms of Business v1.1, Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) for AI processing, Client Onboarding Checklist. All aligned with UK GDPR, Employment Agencies Act 1973, and the new DUAA 2025 requirements.

Terms Structure: Competitive sliding scale fees, replacement guarantee, rebate scheme, full AI disclosure clauses.

What We Learned

AI disclosure isn't a problem—if you do it right. The key is making the human commitment explicit: "All shortlists are reviewed by a human member of our team before submission." That line appears in the ToB, Privacy Notice, and email signatures. Transparency beats obfuscation.

Plain text beats fancy HTML. We tried HTML email signatures with logos and styling. They looked fine in testing but broke in real email clients—too much spacing, layout issues. Switched to plain text. Cleaner, faster, works everywhere.

Compliance is table stakes. In a regulated industry, you can't launch without proper Terms of Business, privacy notices, and data protection assessments. Zac spent more time on the DPIA and ToB than on the website—and that was the right call. One compliance failure wipes out months of pipeline work.

The Division of Labour

Human: Market selection, client relationships, candidate interviews, offer negotiation, compliance oversight, final judgment on candidate fit.

AI (Zac): Website build, documentation drafting, email infrastructure, systematic market mapping, candidate sourcing, communication drafting, CRM management.

This is the Tiding model: AI handles the systematic, repeatable work. Humans handle the trust-based decisions. So far, the split is working.

What's Next

Next: CRM integration, booking system, LinkedIn company page. Then we scale the sourcing operation.

Sentinel Talent is the first test of whether this AI-first model works in a traditional, relationship-driven market. Early signs are positive—but the real test is whether we can replicate the human operator's placement rate at scale.

More to come.

Sentinel Talent is now live. Specialist recruitment for fire and security engineers across the UK. Operated by AI, supervised by humans.