A free guide from FittonMillett
Build your own recruitment system.
How care managers can use Airtable and automation to cut admin, speed up hiring, and stop relying on agencies. With AI doing the heavy lifting.
If you've ever lost a good candidate because a confirmation email didn't send, or spent a Friday afternoon chasing references that should have chased themselves, this guide is for you. You don't need to be technical. You need a bit of time, the right tools, and a clear order to do things in.
Why a system beats a spreadsheet.
Most care providers run recruitment out of a shared spreadsheet, an inbox, and someone's memory. It works until it doesn't. Candidates fall through gaps, compliance dates get missed, and the whole thing lives in one person's head.
A proper system fixes that by doing three things a spreadsheet can't:
It remembers for you.
Compliance dates, follow-ups, and chases happen automatically in the background.
It moves candidates forward on its own.
Acknowledgement emails, interview confirmations and reminders send themselves.
It shows you the truth.
Time-to-hire, drop-off points and source quality, on a dashboard, not guessed at.
The tool: why Airtable.
Airtable looks like a spreadsheet but works like a database. That difference is everything. It lets you link your candidates, jobs, interviews and compliance records together, so updating one thing updates everywhere. It's free to start, runs in a browser, and needs no coding.
The honest truth: the ATS I build for clients is Airtable plus automation, branded and wired together properly. You can build a simpler version of the same thing yourself. It takes time and patience, but it is absolutely doable. This guide shows you how.
What you're actually building.
At its core, a recruitment system is a set of linked tables that mirror your hiring process. Start with these four:
Candidates
Every applicant, their status, contact details, and which role they're going for.
Jobs
Open roles, location, hours, and how many people you need.
Interviews
Scheduled interviews linked to candidates, with dates and outcomes.
Compliance
DBS, right-to-work, training and references, each with a renewal or due date.
Link them together (Airtable calls these "linked records") and you've got the skeleton of an applicant tracking system. Everything else is built on top of these four.
Building it, step by step.
Here's the order to work in. Don't try to build it all at once. Get the tables right first, then add automation once the foundation holds.
Map your process on paper first.
Before you touch Airtable, write down every step from "advert goes live" to "new starter day one." Every email, every check, every handover. This becomes your blueprint. Skip this and you'll build a mess.
Build the four tables.
Create Candidates, Jobs, Interviews and Compliance. Add the fields that matter to you: name, status, dates, contact info. Keep it simple. You can always add more later.
Link the records.
Connect a candidate to the job they applied for, and to their interviews and compliance records. Now one candidate's full picture sits in one place, no hunting across tabs.
Add views for how you actually work.
Create filtered views: "Awaiting interview," "Compliance due this month," "Started this week." Each person sees only what they need. This alone removes hours of scrolling.
Turn on automation last.
Once the tables work, use Airtable's built-in Automations (or connect Make.com for more power) to send the emails and reminders. Start with one: an acknowledgement email when a new candidate is added. Get that working, then add the next.
Where automation earns its keep.
These are the jobs worth automating first, because they're the ones quietly costing you candidates and time:
Acknowledgement emails
Auto-reply the moment someone applies, so no one's left wondering if you got it.
Interview reminders
Automatic confirmations and reminders cut no-shows dramatically.
Reference chasing
The system nudges referees on a schedule so you don't have to remember.
Compliance alerts
Flag DBS, training and right-to-work renewals before they lapse, automatically.
Compliance is the one worth getting right first, so the next section walks you through setting it up properly.
The big one: automating compliance.
This is where a system genuinely protects you. Miss a DBS renewal or a training expiry and it's not just admin, it's an inspection risk. Get this running and it watches the dates so no one has to.
What to track, and the dates that matter.
Every compliance item has a date that eventually runs out. The trick is capturing the expiry date, then letting the system count down to it. Start with these:
DBS checks
Renewal date (or date issued, if you renew on a fixed cycle).
Right to work
Visa or document expiry where time-limited. Flag well ahead.
Mandatory training
Expiry date per course, so refreshers get booked in time.
References
Date requested and date received, so gaps are visible at a glance.
Registrations
NMC, Social Work England or similar, with annual renewal dates.
Mini set-up: a compliance reminder in Airtable.
A simple version you can build in under an hour. No code, just fields and one automation.
Add an expiry date field.
In your Compliance table, create a Date field called "Expiry Date" for each record. This is the thing everything else keys off.
Add a "days until due" formula.
Create a Formula field using DATETIME_DIFF(Expiry Date, TODAY(), 'days'). It shows a live countdown for every record, so you instantly see what's closest.
Build a "Due Soon" view.
Make a filtered view showing only records where "days until due" is less than 30. This becomes your single at-a-glance list of what needs action this month.
Automate the reminder.
In Airtable Automations, set a trigger: "when days until due reaches 30." Action: send an email to yourself (or the responsible manager) naming the staff member and what's expiring. Now the system tells you, instead of you remembering.
Take it further with calendars. Connect Airtable to Make.com or Zapier and the same trigger can create a calendar entry in Outlook or Google Calendar, or post a reminder into a Teams or WhatsApp channel. The renewal lands in your diary automatically, weeks before it's due, with zero manual effort.
Once this is live, compliance stops being a spreadsheet someone's scared to break and becomes a quiet background process. Nothing lapses by surprise, and you walk into inspections ahead of the curve.
Letting AI do the heavy lifting.
You no longer need to build any of this from scratch. AI tools like Claude can walk you through it in plain English: suggesting your fields, writing that formula, designing the automation, or drafting the reminder emails. Treat it as the patient colleague who's built this a hundred times. It removes the guesswork.
Want it done faster, or done with you?
Building it yourself is real and worth doing. But if you'd rather skip the trial and error, here's where I come in. You've now got the map. The next step depends on how much time you've got and how much support you want.
Health Check & Blueprint
£197
Before you build anything, find out exactly where your recruitment is leaking. A 54-question self-audit scored across 9 stages, plus the Blueprint Workbook: a working blueprint you tick off as you go, with your progress saved. The clearest first step you can take.
Get the Health CheckRecruitment Diagnostic
£997
Rather I did the digging? A two-week forensic audit of your whole recruitment operation with a costed 90-day action plan. If I don't find at least £5,000 of recoverable cost, you don't pay. The evidence and the plan, handed to you.
See the Diagnostic90-Day Reset
£1,500
Want the system built properly, with you, so you own it and the skills stay in-house? Twelve one-to-one sessions over 90 days where we rebuild your recruitment together using the C.E.R.T framework. You finish with a working system and the know-how to run it.
Book a chatNot sure which? Start with the £197 Health Check. It tells you exactly which path makes sense for your service, so you spend money where it actually counts.
Not sure where your process is actually breaking down?
The Health Check scores your recruitment across all 9 stages in around 20 minutes. You'll know exactly what's leaking before you build a single automation.