Curtis Key has been building automation for about 20 years, first with basic code and scripts, then in Salesforce at a real estate brokerage that grew from 8 to 105 agents. But when hiring became the brokerage's hardest problem, he founded Blue Castle Agency, a recruitment firm exclusively for real estate and property management.
Curtis keeps one idea in front of the team: the best candidates aren't looking. They're already employed, and a recruiter has to find them and earn a conversation. Most of that finding is repetitive work, and Blue Castle gave it to Claude.
What Curtis built
Several times a day, Claude picks active jobs from Blue Castle's applicant tracking system. It reads everything the company knows about each one: success profiles for the company and the role, plus notes on the segment, such as multifamily, associations, affordable housing or luxury. Then it uses Blue Castle's sourcing tools to find candidates and build a list.
A second Claude run checks the list later in the day. That's the same quality-control step a human used to do, now done by a different pass with the same context. Curtis says the human sourcers' candidates are approved 78 to 83 percent of the time. Claude's are approved about 94 percent of the time. Curtis estimates that at Blue Castle's current production volume, the sourcing and quality-control automations are saving the team 240+ hours per week.
A separate submission process runs on Blue Castle's own server. When a recruiter is ready to submit a candidate, it reads their notes and the Zoom transcript, checks them against the job and the success profile, and scores the candidate. It also researches the companies on the resume and writes the submission. Curtis estimates it saves each recruiter an additional 4+ hours a week.
This is all in addition to a long list of smaller admin tasks and automations that Claude and Zapier handle for Blue Castle every day.
What Zapier made possible
Claude on its own can reason about a candidate. It can't reach into an applicant tracking system, a sourcing platform and a Google Sheet by itself. Zapier MCP is how Claude gets to the tools Blue Castle has used for years, without custom integrations for each one. Curtis says a lot of the sourcing work runs through it.
"It all comes down to context. The technology is all there. We just have to provide the understanding—Zapier MCP helps make that possible."
"This is all infinitely scalable. When we need more sourcing capacity, we don't need to start an internal hiring process. We just turn the knob."
What the agency looks like now
Blue Castle's recruiters used to start their day with sourcing and writing. They now start with a list that's already built and checked, candidate meetings already booked, and a submission that's already written and ready to go. Sourcing output is up about four times, and Claude's candidates get approved more often than the lists built by hand.
Blue Castle is adding more people where it counts: recruiters. Their time goes to having real conversations with candidates. Curtis describes the setup as an end-to-end experience for recruiters: every step makes sense, and a recruiter can't get lost in the process.
"Recruiters should be spending their time doing what they do best—connecting with people."
Moving the repeatable steps into Next-Gen Zaps
Blue Castle has started building Next-Gen Zaps with Claude over MCP. One runs at 2 a.m. on weekdays. It builds prep sheets for the day's candidate screening calls and posts a morning note in Slack. Another logs each closed-won deal to a sheet for tracking active clients.
Curtis believes that the best technology starts with a vision. Creating tech for the sake of creating tech results in fragmented stacks and inefficiencies, whereas great systems backed by a vision can make the ordinary extraordinary. His next question is where Claude is repeating work that a Zap would do the same way every time. Moving those steps into Zaps leaves Claude the judgment calls and should bring the cost down.
Curtis Key is the CEO of Blue Castle Agency, a recruitment firm for real estate and property management.
Learn more about Next-Gen Zaps.
