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Catch of the Day: With Darren Westall of Paiger

  • Ben Fielding
  • Aug 13
  • 5 min read

Why 99% of Recruiters Are Invisible Online



Holly Langley is back with another plate of fish and chips, this time with Darren Westall, Co-founder and CEO of Paiger, one of the people who's known her the longest in recruitment tech. They cover the shed where Paiger started, why building your own AI tools can quietly wreck your business, and why almost nobody in recruitment is posting on LinkedIn.

Short on time? There's also a bite-size cut of the episode.

Quick Bite

  • Why 95% of people on LinkedIn never post, and why that's a wide open door for the recruiters who do

  • How AI can take on the BD drudge work so recruiters can focus on the relationships that actually close deals

  • Why personal brand and company brand should be working together, not competing for the same attention

  • What Darren learned going from employee to founder, and what he wishes he'd known before he did it

  • Why the future of recruitment is tech-led and human-finished, not one or the other

  • Darren once set off a firework in his bedroom as a teenager and told his mum the radiator did it. She believed him.


Meet the Guest

Darren Westall is Co-founder and CEO of Paiger, a platform built to help recruitment businesses find and act on commercial signals, from ideal customer targeting to knowing exactly who to call, why, and when. Darren started his career as a junior developer at Broadbean, working his way up to Chief Technology Officer by 28 without a degree or a passing grade in IT at college. After hitting that goal and realising he needed a new one, he set up Paiger from his garden shed in 2018. Eight years on, the product has customers logging in from the US and Australia.

Find Darren on LinkedIn.


The single point of failure hiding in your "we built our own AI tool" story

One of the sharpest points in this episode has nothing to do with recruitment on the surface, and everything to do with it underneath. Darren described a 40-person recruitment business where one person had gone away, taught themselves tools like Claude and Clay, and built something genuinely useful off the back of it.

His reaction wasn't "well done." It was: now what?

That one person now holds knowledge nobody else in the business has. Nothing is documented, nothing is repeatable, and if that person leaves, goes on holiday, gets sick, or gets poached by a competitor, the whole thing breaks. Darren's comparison was blunt: nobody runs their business on a single server, because if that server goes down, you're finished. A single person quietly running your tech stack is the same risk with a payroll number attached.


He also pushed back on the idea that building it yourself is free. Once you account for the person's salary, the five or six tool dependencies stitched together, and the time spent learning and maintaining it, Darren's rough numbers put a DIY setup at around £120,000 a year, against something like £10,000 for a platform built to do the job properly. And that's before you factor in the GDPR exposure of data sitting across a patchwork of personal AI tool accounts nobody signed off on.


For an agency owner, the message is simple: a clever prototype built by one enthusiastic team member is a great way to find out what you actually need. It's a terrible foundation to run the business on long term.


Automate the admin, not the relationship

Darren was equally clear about where AI belongs in a recruitment business, and where it doesn't. His view: recruitment is a human-to-human industry, so if you're automating the bit that makes you great at your job, you're automating away your own value.


The line he drew was between backend and front end. Admin, data processing, research, the manual grind that eats a recruiter's day, all fair game for AI. Business development and relationship building, the human part, shouldn't be handed over to a bot pretending to be a person. Holly agreed, adding that a lot of the industry has spent the last decade obsessing over cleaning up data, and is now at risk of making the same mistake again by rushing to automate outreach without thinking about what actually drives revenue.


Where Darren sees the real win is tools like Paiger Intelligence, which surfaces who to call, why, and when, based on real commercial signals, so the recruiter still makes the call, but with far better information going into it. Some of Paiger's customers have made placements in the first week of using it. The AI does the finding. The human still does the talking.


Nobody's posting, and that's the opportunity

Darren dropped a stat worth sitting with: only around 1% of people on LinkedIn actually post. In recruitment terms, that's a huge gap for anyone willing to show up consistently, and Darren was firm that it has to start at the top. If the CEO isn't posting, you can't expect the consultants to.


His advice for agency leaders: make regular posting a baseline expectation, not a nice-to-have that falls entirely on marketing's shoulders once a week. If you can measure activity through something like Paiger's leaderboards, do it, because "we can't measure it" is often the real reason it never gets prioritised.


Holly's own approach backs this up. Rather than treating LinkedIn as a sales channel, she and the RE:STACK team focus on posting useful, practical content and letting inbound interest follow from that, which she says has generated a steady stream of leads without ever feeling like a hard sell. Darren's pet hate is the same as hers: AI-polished posts that read like nobody actually wrote them.


His advice to recruiters using AI to help with content is to feed it your own writing style rather than letting it flatten your voice into generic "no fluff, just facts" LinkedIn-speak.


The human bit

Before any of the industry talk, Darren opened with a fireworks confession from his teenage years (a bedroom, a rocket, and a story about a radiator that his mum believed for years), which Holly matched with her own tale of hiding an uneaten sausage roll under her wardrobe and blaming her granddad. Later on, quickfire questions revealed Darren is an unapologetic Nickelback fan, wants to spend more evenings with his kids, and would have been chief technology officer of Lapland UK's elf department if things had gone slightly differently in 2018.


Fish and chips rating: eight out of ten from Darren, six out of ten from Holly, who felt let down by a shop that looked better than it tasted.


Watch the Episode


If your tech stack is one person's login away from breaking

Darren's single point of failure warning doesn't just apply to homemade AI tools. It applies to any agency where nobody outside of one admin or one ops lead really knows how the Bullhorn instance, the automations, or the integrations actually work. If that's starting to sound familiar, a RE:STACK Bullhorn Audit is built to find exactly those gaps before they find you. Get in touch.

 
 
 

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