How The Portfolio Group Cut Admin Work by 62% and Contacts Candidates 4x Faster
A Daxtra Case Study
The People
Who is The Portfolio Group?
The Portfolio Group is a specialized recruitment agency. They have built their reputation on being the go-to partner for payroll, HR, procurement, and credit control recruiting in the UK and Canada. With decades of expertise and a worldwide team of 70 employees, The Portfolio Group has cemented itself as the agency of choice for companies hiring in their niche market.
We sat down with Danny Hooper, who oversees The Portfolio Group’s technology, automation, and digital marketing, to learn about their unique use of Daxtra Capture to solve one of their most pressing operational challenges: processing hundreds of thousands of applications, without letting quality candidates slip through the cracks.
The Challenge
How can you manage a flood of applications with limited resources?
Like many agencies, The Portfolio Group was drowning in applications. They receive as many as 17,000 applications a month - that’s 250,000+ applications annually. Despite their full-time admin team, the volume of applications is so high that they were often missing out on the top-skilled candidates.
Danny explains:
"Our admin team would review thousands of applications and forward them to our consultants,” he said. “Then, our consultants focused on calling the best candidates and matching them to our open roles. It was impossible to call every applicant, so we needed a way to filter through them and call the best ones, without letting any great candidates slip through the cracks.”
Manually filtering through each applicant resulted in a backlog of candidates. The admin team often fell 3-4 days behind in processing applications, which had serious business consequences: applicants would apply for a role with The Portfolio Group, but then be placed in the role by competitors, even though they’d applied through The Portfolio Group first.
The Solution
Customized Automation for Specialized Recruitment
As the designated tech expert, Danny was tasked with finding a solution. After exploring several options and hearing positive feedback about Daxtra from industry contacts, he decided to implement Daxtra Capture.
However, The Portfolio Group needed more than an out-of-the-box solution. Danny worked closely with Daxtra's development team to create a highly customized implementation tailored to The Portfolio Group’s specialized needs.
"Our setup is uniquely built to help us filter the best candidates out of a high volume of applications, before they make it into our CRM," Danny explained. "We provided Daxtra with a comprehensive list of sector-specific keywords. Using that list, Daxtra Capture looks at a CV and asks: 'Does this candidate match one of these keywords at a 60% match score or higher? And, do they match any other keyword on the CV?' If they do, the candidate gets uploaded through Daxtra into our system.”
This custom approach meant that only qualified candidates (who weren’t already in the system and who matched The Portfolio Group's specific requirements) would be loaded into their Itris ATS - resulting in deduped, pre-screened resumes loaded in without any additional manual work. Plus, the setup also included non-scored keywords and job title matching to further refine the results.
"Because we are quite a niche business... we can't operate on a 'let's load everything into the database and work it out later' process. All that does is just move the problem down the line," Danny said.
Another unique aspect of The Portfolio Group's implementation of Daxtra Capture was the daily report. This report provides a comprehensive view of all new and updated candidates added to their system within the previous 24 hours, allowing for quick assignment to the appropriate consultants.
"This was essential to helping us understand and track candidate ownership,” Danny said. “Now, we’re able to see who’s been loaded into the system and easily assign the candidates to the right consultants with less manual work.”
The Portfolio Group also implemented Daxtra's CV reformatter as an initial test before fully committing to the larger integration.
"We started off with Daxtra’s CV reformatter... it gave us an idea of how Daxtra worked, and how fluid our processes could be with Daxtra tools,” Danny explained.
This gave The Portfolio Group the confidence in Daxtra's development team they needed to fully implement Daxtra’s custom solutions.
The Results
From Days Behind to Minutes Ahead
The implementation of Daxtra Capture has had a transformative impact on The Portfolio Group's recruitment process.
The most dramatic change has been in candidate engagement and response time:
“Instead of being 3 days behind, every single day by lunchtime, the list of people who have applied is out for consultants to call," Danny said. "Sometimes people get calls within 10 minutes of applying. We’ve gone from 3 days behind to contacting candidates within 10 minutes.”
The system has also dramatically improved efficiency and cut down applicant processing time.
Of the 70,000 applications that The Portfolio Group received in the first four months of the year, 33,000 were filtered out as unsuitable, and another 19,000 were identified as existing candidates. This meant approximately 75% of applications were either duplicates or unqualified—all of which would have previously required manual processing.
"75% of our applications were either duplicates or candidates that weren’t qualified," Danny explained. "When you consider that it's 70,000 people going through a system... that's so much time saved."
Plus, their use of CV Reformatter alone has reduced administrative work by 62%.
"CV reformatter took our average time for formatting a CV down from 40 minutes down to about 15,” Danny said.
This efficiency has also improved The Portfolio Group's data quality and reporting. By automatically tracking the source of applications and placements, they can make more informed decisions about their job board spending.
"Daxtra has helped optimize our spend on job boards, because now we can see where people are coming from and redistribute our spend, which means better ROI on job boards," Danny said.
Most importantly, the solution has created better experiences for candidates, clients, and recruiters alike:
“That better candidate experience is valuable in terms of getting them to buy into you as a recruiting company, but it also creates a better client experience, too, because you are giving them great candidates sooner,” said Danny.
Candidates receive faster responses, clients get qualified candidates sooner, and The Portfolio Group’s consultants can focus on their core responsibilities instead of administrative tasks - it’s a win for everyone.
Custom Solutions for Real Results
What struck Danny most about working with Daxtra was their willingness to adapt to The Portfolio Group's specific requirements.
"When I approached Daxtra with all the different things that I wanted to do to make it work specifically for our business... I was expecting them to say it couldn’t be done. Instead, Daxtra was willing to work with me to do it, which was really great,” he said.
With Daxtra Capture, The Portfolio Group has transformed their application process from a bottleneck to a competitive advantage. By getting to candidates faster, reducing administrative burden, and improving data quality, they've positioned themselves to better serve their specialized markets and continue their growth as recruitment experts in their niche fields.
The collaboration resulted in a solution precisely tailored to The Portfolio Group's needs, one that they couldn't have achieved with a standard implementation. The system now intelligently filters candidates based on their specific requirements for each division, ensuring that only truly relevant applications make it to their consultants.
"There's no excuse for missing out on top candidates now."
With Daxtra, The Portfolio Group has gone from losing out on candidates to competitors to having 100% of their qualified applicants be added to their ATS, and contacted as soon as 10 minutes after applying.
For The Portfolio Group, Daxtra Capture hasn't just been a time-saver. It's become an essential tool that supports their position as specialists in their niche recruitment fields. They can now process applications faster, more accurately, and with greater confidence than ever before.
Danny sums it up:
"We contact each applicant so quickly, that there's no excuse for missing out on top candidates now."
