Continuity Partners placed 4 candidates in 1 month using Paraform
John Keenan has been in recruiting for 20 years. For the first several years, he worked on the agency side, and he was one of the first recruiters at Palantir. In 2007, he founded Continuity Partners, a technology-focused search firm in New York City.
John founded his recruiting business knowing there was an opportunity to get in-house recruiters doing more agency work. He’s on a mission to change the perception of agency recruiters and make recruiting more efficient, more fun, and more profitable, all while making the candidate experience better.
Despite the opportunity that agency recruiting provides, it also comes with its own challenges. Building a clientele is an ongoing, challenging process for recruiting agencies, and it’s essential for their business.
John and his team at Continuity Partners billed $82k in the first month of using Paraform - that's $1M in equivalent annual billing. He was initially drawn to the fact that it had the potential to create even more business for his agency. Now that he’s using the platform, John loves that Paraform makes it easier for corporate recruiters to get started in agency work by getting access to new opportunities right away.
In this article, John shares his story and reviews Paraform.
The problem
Agency recruiters all face the same uphill battle: They are their own business development managers. The amount of time this takes is often what prevents recruiters from building a book of business, which is essential for agencies to thrive.
As a way to build up their client base, Continuity Partners began moving toward more and more split placements as a source of business. As it turned out, 2023 was a hard year for hiring, and this ended up being a good approach for the agency.
“[In 2023], it wouldn't have helped us if we had developed more of our own business or not, because everybody who I knew who had developed a lot of their own business was in the same boat,” John says.
But still, for John, it’s all about being maximally efficient in contingency recruiting. While he was working for his clients, it’s equally important to John to offer his candidates great opportunities, which still requires a certain amount of networking and business development.
John also says that this process is essential to keep his business running:
“Recruiters make money by doing the same search over and over. Not by placing one-offs. The best way to grow your business is to find a lot of people, find a lot of jobs, and build a pipeline.”
But at an agency, even without all of the business development effort that’s required, onboarding a single new client can take up to a couple of weeks from the initial meeting to signing the contract.
The solution
John recognized right away that Agency Accounts in Paraform had the potential to simplify and accelerate the process of bringing on new clients for his team. Joining Paraform has made a lot of the effort that goes into business development at Continuity Partners unnecessary.
“We can now spend as much or as little time doing business development as we want, because there's a seemingly endless supply of jobs on Paraform for us to work on,” he said.
Having an Agency Account in Paraform streamlines the recruiting process for the entire team at Continuity Partners. Every recruiter at the agency can easily submit their own candidates for roles in Paraform, rather than John having to manage this process.
With Paraform, John has much more time to focus on tasks that are directly tied to increased billings — understanding the needs of his clients, sourcing high-quality candidates, and placing talent.
One of Paraform’s most valuable features is the visibility it gives recruiters into the details of a role. Right away, they can get a clear view of the job descriptions, as well as the specifics of what a hiring manager is looking for in a candidate that won’t show up in the JD.
They can also have direct 1:1 conversations with the hiring managers right in Paraform. And once they’ve been approved to recruit for a role, they can have full visibility into the candidate pipeline: Who is going through the process, what step they’re at, and who has been rejected.
Not only does this allow John’s entire team to have visibility into the status and details for every candidate up for a given role, but it also allows them to serve their candidates better in finding the right role for them.
“If I talk to a candidate, I want to be able to offer them the greatest menu of choices I can,” says John. Not every candidate is right for every role, so the visibility into their interview process is really valuable.
“We have to figure out what we can tell them that they need to do to prepare for interviews. So it’s an enormous help from an agency standpoint to have access to all of that information at our fingertips.”
The results
Before using Paraform, John was spending around 20 hours a week building a clientele and managing operations, with at least two of those hours being spent just submitting his team’s candidates for their own roles.
Because they’ve been able to focus their efforts away from business development, the recruiters and sourcers at Continuity Partners were more able to collaborate under John’s leadership, allowing them to place 4 candidates in just 1 month using Paraform.
Continuity Partners is still early on in their journey with Paraform, but John thinks the platform will allow him to be as efficient as possible well into the future. He estimates that Paraform will double his billings and 3x his productivity at a minimum based on the following scenario:
“As the market increases, the way I always think about it is like this: If I place one candidate a week, I make $20,000 off that placement. 20 times five is 100, so I would make a million dollars a year if I placed one candidate a week."
"Paraform can get me from placing one candidate a week to one and a half to two or three candidates a week. I'm talking to about 20 or 30 candidates a week now, and I am directly helping find a job for one out of every ten people, which is amazing.”
And, because Paraform allows John and his team to keep up a selection of interesting opportunities for his candidates, they can keep this engine running indefinitely.
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