Driven by Data: How Allen Recruitment optimised sourcing, engagement and their database

A Daxtra Case Study

Introduction

Allen Recruitment Consulting is an international recruiting powerhouse. Working in eight countries across sectors like tech, e-commerce, engineering and more, Allen Recruitment’s approach to sourcing and placing talent is a well-oiled machine. They know what hiring managers are looking for, and deploy experts at every step of the recruitment process to find qualified candidates. 

Allen Recruitment has been a long-time believer in Daxtra products. First implementing Daxtra’s solutions in 2014, Allen Recruitment has continuously updated their approach to keep up with the times and engage candidates effectively, even as recruiting technology progresses.

For Allen Recruitment, it all comes down to data—and Daxtra is instrumental in their approach. We talked to managing director Brian Cunningham about how Allen Recruitment uses Daxtra to process over 115,000 CVs a year and keep their database up to date.

The Challenge

Sourcing, Shortlisting and Engaging with Unreliable Data

Allen Recruitment’s team was challenged by manual searching and shortlisting. At scale, the process was slow and the results were unreliable, making it difficult to effectively engage with candidates, build relationships, or even find the best candidates for jobs.

“If you have a list of 20 candidates, by the time you’ve read through 19 candidate profiles, your eyes have glazed over,” Brian said. “You’ve lost interest—and even if candidate number 20 is the perfect candidate, you won’t really see them because they’re at the bottom of the list.”

On top of this, the recruiters’ manual searches were leading to candidates without the minimum requirements being added to shortlists.

“When all of our recruiters did their own searching and shortlisting, we found that they added a lot of candidates to the job shortlist who didn’t match what we were looking for,” Brian said.

They also had a candidate engagement problem: recruiters would reach out to candidates and leave a voicemail. By the time the candidate heard the voicemail and called back, the recruiter was busy making a call to the next candidate, who also didn’t answer. Candidates were losing interest, and recruiters couldn’t engage candidates and share important information about jobs. 

This created an ineffective strategy: sourcing wasn’t working, shortlists had the wrong candidates, and the candidates who were a good match to jobs didn’t respond quickly to outreach—if they responded at all. On top of this, Allen Recruitment wanted to drastically reduce job board spend.

Brian knew there was a better way—and it all boiled down to data.

“We realised many years ago that data was really, really important for us,” he said. “Data is a key factor in messaging candidates—so something we had to work out is ‘how does data get into our database?’ Getting data wrong means the whole quality of your database gets poorer and poorer. If that goes on, you’d be continually sending the wrong information to the wrong people at the wrong time.” 

So, Brian approached Daxtra.

The Solution

Powering Data-driven Recruitment with Intelligent Automation

Allen Recruitment set out to build a data-driven operation. By integrating Daxtra products into their tech stack, they aimed to quickly pinpoint the right candidates and engage them effectively.

Daxtra Search Nexus and Daxtra Capture turned out to be key parts of the process. Allen Recruitment runs all incoming candidates through Daxtra Capture, to ensure accurate, up-to-date and consistent candidate data is in their database.

Daxtra Capture parses every candidate. It automatically loads candidate data and prevents the creation of duplicate records by updating existing candidate records in Allen Recruitment’s database. This empowers Allen Recruitment’s team to engage candidates effectively and authentically, built on the foundation of good data.

“We used to send candidates texts and emails after the call, and we realised: why don’t we send them the information and tell them why we want to talk to them up front?” Brian said. “We actually share the name of the client, details of the job, pay details and what type of work it is before we reach out to the candidate—and then they book in our diary.”

Using Daxtra Capture as a key solution in their tech stack, Allen Recruitment can ensure their Bullhorn database is packed with detailed, accurate and consistent information. That information goes on to power Allen Recruitment’s automation in Bullhorn, making those processes more reliable, too. Overall, that translates into a better experience for both recruiters and candidates.

Allen Recruitment has also leveraged Daxtra Search Nexus to further empower its recruiters. Daxtra Search Nexus’ intelligent candidate ranking analyses the search terms and ranks candidates based on the context of where those terms occur in their CVs. Plus, Daxtra Search Nexus’ vacancy match feature automatically generates a search based on a job description, runs it against Allen Recruitment’s local database, and matches candidates to vacancies. These features enable the recruiters to precisely search internal and external sources from one convenient platform at the same time, with all results compiled and ranked in one place.

 “Vacancy match is on a whole new level,” he said. “If you want a list of candidates shortlisted on the job in your database—that match your requirements—with no effort whatsoever, just make one click.”

Daxtra Capture’s ability to automatically load and clean up data, combined with Daxtra Search Nexus’ ability to streamline sourcing has also led to more accurate candidate engagement.

“Imagine if our data wasn’t very accurate—I might share a job with someone who worked as a Java developer five years ago, but is now a team lead or a manager,” Brian said. “The job wouldn’t be relevant. By bringing our database up to date, it means our matching is better and our candidate marketing is much better. Using Daxtra Capture gets candidates into our ecosystem, and Daxtra Search Nexus and vacancy match allow us to get a good set of candidates very quickly, without complicated technical knowledge.”

The Results

Building an Optimised Tech Stack 

Now, Allen Recruitment’s tech stack is set up to maximise the value of their data. Accurate data feeds into an optimised set of tools to help them make more placements from their database.

It syncs seamlessly with Bullhorn—so Allen Recruitment can effortlessly ensure their candidate data is up to date. In the end, Daxtra Capture automates loading candidate data and prevents the creation of duplicate candidate profiles by updating existing records. It has updated more than 50,000 of Allen Recruitment’s existing candidate records over a 12-month period. This makes it that much easier for recruiters to rely on their database for qualified candidates.

Plus, with Daxtra Search Nexus’ intelligent candidate ranking and vacancy match, finding the best candidates in their database is easy. This, Brian says, has significantly streamlined their sourcing.

“If Daxtra Search Nexus says a candidate is number one, that candidate is number one. You don’t have to search through hundreds of candidates. It’s like magic. But, you also have the ability to see starred rankings of candidates to provide transparency in the ranking process, so you know which candidates are a good match and why—that is huge.”

Together, vacancy match and intelligent ranking have resulted in significant time savings for the firm. Recruiters don’t have to spend as much time doing specialised research on qualifications or what particular skills a candidate would need in a particular sector. Instead, they use Daxtra Search Nexus to easily fine-tune candidate results.

“With Boolean search, if you search for 'Java developer,' you might find a candidate who is currently a C++ developer but used Java in college. But with Daxtra Search Nexus, you can search 'Java developer' as a job title, and candidates with that title will be returned. From there, you can use filtering to find candidates where that is their current job title—it is very accurate. Daxtra Search Nexus gives us scalpel-like precision.”

Daxtra’s solutions also allow Allen Recruitment to simplify their data storage and loading.

“Recruiters can see the data in one simple place—Daxtra loads the job and loads the data, recruiters click search, and that’s it. To me, that’s a really good way of doing it,” Brian said. “With Daxtra, you don’t have to leave the platform - everything you need is there. Process results, filter, rank, add them to a shortlist or tearsheet – that’s the power of Daxtra. Nobody else does that."

Another result of their efficient database? Allen Recruitment has scaled back their spend on job boards, and makes the majority of placements from their internal database. According to Brian:

“We’ve gone from spending on 10 job boards at our height to only using one today. Recruiters don’t have to say ‘We don’t have candidates,’” he said.

Plus, Brian is a discerning customer—he regularly researches the latest tech, and doesn’t hesitate to compare what’s out there with his current tech stack. Consistently, Brian has found Daxtra to be among the best.

“I look at every search tool…we look at them all the time, but nobody comes close to Daxtra,” he said. 

Better Sourcing, Better Searching and Less Manual Work 

With Daxtra, Allen Recruitment has achieved a healthier candidate database, more efficient (and more integrated) tech stack, and ways to conveniently utilise the power of AI and automation.

Allen Recruitment’s team has leveraged these tools to make more placements, save time and streamline their workflows—making the hiring process easier for candidates, recruiters and clients alike.