Winning is Everything: How to Grow Your Business by Leveraging Recruitment Technology, with Eloise Sutton Kirkby, Ep #63

Are you a small to mid-sized recruiter who wants to beat the big boys and be recognized as a market leader? Or perhaps you’re super-ambitious and dream of expanding your recruitment business nationally or even globally?

In either case, you’re in for a treat as I interview Eloise Sutton Kirkby.  Eloise is the Co-Founder and Director of Growth at Vincere, a market-leading all-in-one ATS CRM which is run by ex-recruiters. Vincere means “to win” or “conquer” in Latin, and they specialize in weaponizing recruiters through tech.

Eloise believes that recruitment technology levels the playing field for scrappy underdogs to win against their bigger competitors.  In addition to her knowledge of recruitment technology and automation, Eloise shares her hard-won insights gleaned from scaling her company to 80 employees and offices in 5 countries.

Episode Outline and Highlights

• [3:10] Eloise’s recruitment career takes her from Leeds to Tokyo; why she and her partner Bernie Schiemer started a software company.
• [8:20] Recruitment technology: what is a “Frankenstack”?
• [11:40] Which of your recruitment and business processes should be automated?
• [13:40] Eloise’s entrepreneurial journey and scaling her software company to 80 people.
• [18:18] Discussing the pros and cons of setting up an office offshore.
• [24:55] Business challenges that Eloise faced being headquartered in Vietnam.
• [31:31] Inbound marketing strategies and building a personal brand on LinkedIn.
• [45:17] Dealing with adversity: Eloise shares the toughest experience she’s ever faced. 

What Processes Should Be Automated with Recruitment Technology?

Being in the recruitment technology space, I asked Eloise if she can give an example of a workflow or part of the recruitment process that can be successfully automated. This is how she responded, “I think for mid-sized recruitment firms … the area of automation that is weak usually is between the front-middle-back office.”

She further elaborated, “Around your pay and bill systems, collecting of time from your candidates. Often what we see is that placement is made in the CRM, pushed out to the pay and bill software, and never seen in the CRM again. So the consultants don’t know if timesheets have been submitted if they are paid on that timesheets coming in and that is kind of important and that is just one example of how data is being siloed between different teams in a mid-sized organization.”

Inbound Marketing Strategies

Eloise and her team focused really heavily on product development with the sincere belief that word-of-mouth will do the marketing for them. Eloise recalls, “What we have really woken up to is the fact that we don’t really need to spend a lot in marketing. We don’t want to have a massive sales team, that is not us. What we do want to do is to have our customers not see us as a vendor, to see us as a partner and as part of that partnership, they will be our marketers.”

So what marketing strategies do they effectively employ? Some are as follows:

• Referral and reward system for their existing clients
• Content marketing via LinkedIn

Hear our discussion and sharing of practices on how to strategically use LinkedIn and other social media platforms.

Resilience in Adversity

I also took the opportunity to ask Eloise on what would be the most challenging experience and how she faced the challenge. She shared a very moving personal story which I believe you will find interesting. Best to hear it from Eloise in this episode.

Eloise Sutton Kirkby Bio and Contact Info

Eloise is the Co-founder and Director of Growth for Vincere, an all-in-one platform for recruitment and staffing agencies worldwide. She started her career in recruitment as a consultant with Michael Page in the financial sector. She had experience working in Leeds, Tokyo, Singapore, and is now based in Saigon.

Eloise is also the host of the Contract Recruiter Podcast which focuses on the world of Contract Recruitment.

• Eloise on LinkedIn
• Vincere website link
• Vincere on Youtube
• Contract Recruiter Podcast link

People and Resources Mentioned

• Bernie Schiemer on LinkedIn

Connect with Mark Whitby

• Get your FREE 30-minute strategy call
• Mark on LinkedIn
• Mark on Twitter: @MarkWhitby
• Mark on Facebook
• Mark on Instagram: @RecruitmentCoach

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