April 2025 | 3 min read
By Will Bourne, CEO Rekbot
When I left off, Rekbot had just taken 3rd place at the FutureTech World Cup qualifiers at the Dubai AI Festival. Sharing the stage with some of the sharpest AI startups in the world gave me confidence we were onto something.
But the real test wasn’t standing under the lights or holding a trophy—it was whether recruiters would actually use Rekbot when the training wheels came off.
The First Paying Customer
Fast forward to this month, and we’ve officially deployed Rekbot to our first paying customer, Avery Fairbank, with a forward-thinking CEO. Charlie [CEO] runs a growing recruitment business where people’s outcomes and performances can literally make or break his business. His problem wasn’t unique—it was mine too back when I was scaling teams in London.
New starters were eating up hours of senior consultants’ time, shadowing wasn’t sticking, and role-plays felt nothing like real life. Grads would crash on their first live calls, confidence would crumble, and managers would be left picking up the pieces.. This 1st customer deployment milestone should’ve felt like champagne and fireworks—but if I’m being honest, it was brutal. The platform broke every day in week one. At one point, my dev team was fixing a bug until 5 am just to keep the lights on.
The crazy thing? The customer stuck with us. Instead of walking, they doubled down. Charlie started throwing his team at it—even when the system creaked under pressure.
Here’s what he told me 24 hours in:
“F***ing nuts this mate. I actually feel like I can do some work, and they [grads] are sorted, going through calls and modules etc… It’s working really well. Buzzin.”
That was the moment I knew the pain was worth it. We weren’t just selling an idea anymore; we were becoming embedded in the day-to-day workflow of real recruiters and solving problems.
Brutal But Brilliant
Charlie, himself an experienced recruiter, scored 4 out of 5 on his Rekbot assessment. Achieving a 5 out of 5 is almost impossible, but his reaction was… “Harsh.” That’s exactly the point. Rekbot isn’t built to flatter seasoned pros; it’s built to challenge them and raise every single recruiter’s level regardless of role, title, or experience levels.
Meanwhile, and amusingly, during early product testing, another user completely lost his head when faced with an aggressive candidate scenario. That moment proved to me Rekbot was doing its job: creating realistic, high-pressure simulations that expose weaknesses and push your buttons before they happen on a real call.
And then came feedback from Charlie’s own consultants:
“It’s way easier speaking to a candidate than Rekbot.”
Honestly, that’s the best feedback I could ask for. The hardest rounds are in the gym—if Rekbot is harder than real life, then stepping into a live candidate call suddenly feels easier. They would even come in early to get some early Rekbot use in before they start their days. It showed me they were enjoying using it!
Early Wins at Avery Fairbank
The proof came quickly. One of Charlie’s new hires, Oliver, ran his very first candidate interview on his own within a matter of days, and without ANY human interaction from a training standpoint to date. Fully Rekbot automated new hire management from onboarding to his first call with a real candidate. He pitched the role, the client, uncovered motivations, captured experience, and even secured the CV—without Charlie or his team stepping in.
Charlie compared it head-to-head with previous hires:
“It’s ridiculous. Adding in how little time the team spent role-playing with them, this is miles ahead; it feels like a cheat code for grads.”
Another consultant, Joe, came off his first live call and told Charlie that the candidate “talked a lot, but it still felt easier than Rekbot.” When Rekbot checked the transcript, Joe had actually managed the call structure and didn’t let the candidate ramble.
Charlie summed it up simply:
“One of the biggest things I’ve noticed is the confidence it gives them and the ability to practice on their own. Rekbot forces a consultant to dictate a call—and they carry that control into the real thing.”
The User’s Perspective
The wider team feedback we gathered lined up with this. Recruiters said Rekbot felt tough, sometimes even tougher than real-life calls, but that the realism and repetition gave them confidence they hadn’t felt in any previous real-life training programs.
Even when bugs interrupted dashboards or insights, users consistently called Rekbot “realistic,” “helpful,” and “way more engaging than traditional training.” That’s the signal I needed: the core value is landing.
Where We Are Now
Right now, Rekbot is still raw. The system has failed more times than I’d like to admit. But we’re building with our users, not just for them. Charlie and his team at Avery Fairbank aren’t just customers; they’re co-pilots, stress testing every corner of the product, surfacing the cracks, and pushing us to fix them faster.
And despite the chaos, they’re excited. They want to “get the lads on it.” They’re excited to see psychometric results, have Friday afternoon ‘Rekbot Offs’, and are wrapping Rekbot into their competitive culture internally. They’re even asking when they can use the BD Zone, helping prepare for client acquisition via cold call practice scenarios (coming soon).
That tells me something simple but powerful: Rekbot isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s becoming a must-have for recruitment organisations onboarding and training new-to-industry hires. If you want to see the case study, please click here and submit your details.
The Next Chapter
If Part 1 was about proving Rekbot had a market, Part 2 is about surviving the fire of real-world usage. Every day we’re learning, fixing, improving. The product that broke on Monday is already stronger by Friday.
And the vision hasn’t changed. We’re still here to revolutionise how recruiters learn, onboard, and perform—but now we’re doing it with real users shaping the journey.
We’re not building a product in isolation. We’re building it with the industry, in the trenches, one aggressive candidate simulation at a time.
Stay tuned—because Part 3 is coming, and it’s going to be about scale.
#Recruitment #AI #StartupJourney #FounderLife #Rekbot #FutureTech #DubaiAI #RecruitmentInnovation #CustomerStories #StartupStruggles #EarlyAdopters #TeamDevelopment #AIRevolution
Part 1 is here:
