Who is Cultivate?
Cultivate is a New Zealand recruitment agency that connects businesses with great people across areas including business operations, finance, customer experience, HR, supply chain and executive roles. They take a relationship-led approach to recruitment, working closely with both employers and candidates to create better, more lasting matches.
Why they started with Autohive
Cultivate’s recruiters were spending too much time on admin: proposals, meeting notes, summaries, candidate reports, job ads and interview questions. All of it took time away from building relationships and other higher-value work. Some of that work had already moved into workflows they’d built in Claude, and then an advisor helping Cultivate with its AI strategy recommended Autohive, because agents there are easy to build, share and deploy.
“It's a no brainer. It makes the development and deployment of agents in your business so easy anyone can make the most of it with very little training.”
How they use Autohive
Cultivate built a team of agents to take on the work pulling recruiters away from what matters most: people. Sales proposals used to go through marketing, get built in Figma and go out as attachments, a process co-founder and co-CEO Tony Pownall calls slow, boring and inefficient. Now the sales team builds their own, with an agent that turns the briefing transcript into an interactive, on-brand proposal, publishes it online and drafts the covering email, and the client accepts with one click. It replaces a SaaS tool that would have cost $15,000 a year.
Job ads tell the same story. An agent writes inclusive, SEEK-optimised ads that SEEK still rates among the most effective in the market, in 10% of the time.
| Agent | Result |
|---|---|
| Sales proposals Builds interactive, on-brand client proposals from the briefing transcript, publishes them online and drafts the covering email. | Result$15k a year saved |
| Ad writing Writes inclusive job ads optimised for SEEK from the client’s website, briefing transcript and job description. | Result90% less time per ad |
| Total hours saved | Hours saved68 hrs/mo 🎉 |
The impact
At the time of writing, Cultivate was saving an average of 68 hours a month.
The agents produce accurate, branded outputs, so recruiters now spend much less time on admin and copywriting. That time goes into managing relationships, having better conversations and doing higher-value work. Across the business, the agents keep the quality of output high and surface insights through reporting, so the team stays focused on customer deliverables rather than internal distractions.
“We’ve always been focused on quality. Now there are far fewer things getting in the way of this.”
What’s next?
Cultivate now has agents across sales support, marketing, finance, operational reporting and compliance, shared by all 24 staff and organised into separate operations and sales workspaces. Two more team members have been trained to build agents, and scheduled agents now run on their own, emailing and saving their results. Agents have even replaced the Power BI style reporting tool they had planned to bring in.
Next, they want more bespoke agents, more microsites, and more reporting and automation across the business.
How they got there
Each person got 15 minutes of training, adoption was instant and nobody pushed back. The agents connect to OneDrive and a web-based internal app, and the workflows Cultivate had built in Claude moved across to Autohive. There were no formal structural changes, and the agents are now part of day-to-day work across the business.
Your team has a use case too!
Every recruitment agency has everyday work that takes longer than it should. We will show you where to start, then create an Autohive agent with you on the call.
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