How Continuity Partners made 22 hires in 1 year through Paraform
Wayne Zhou
•
GM, Recruiters
October 23, 2025
October 23, 2025
John Keenan is the founder of Continuity Partners - a boutique recruitment agency that’s helped Bloomberg, Squarespace, and Two Sigma find technical talent. Before starting his agency he built Palantir's entire NYC office.
"I'm always interested in people who bring a fresh perspective. Paraform was a great way for us to make hires we otherwise wouldn't place." - John Keenan, Partner at Continuity Partners
When it comes to recruiting technical talent, John Keenan knows how to deliver.
“Recruiting is a grind, and we have built a system that is very well attuned to that grind. But I’m always excited to see how we can bring a fresh perspective to more clients.”
While his firm was excelling with his established New York-based clients, John saw a larger opportunity: recruiting for high-growth startups. Expanding his client base would give his team more opportunities to place candidates and revenue upside. It was all green space.
But expanding wasn’t as simple as it seemed.
“We needed to rework some of our strategies around our future goals.”
Finding new clients on his own would drain his resources. If he spent hours reaching out to startups, he’d have less time to engage with candidates and match them with the right roles.
Working with startups often needed more time upfront. Guidance on salaries, the kind of candidates to look for, and setting realistic timelines.
“We need to create a whole lot more opportunities, but we didn’t have the time to go out and prospect hundreds of founders on our own.”
Whatever way he chose to expand, it had to be scalable.
He could do splits with other agencies to place candidates into more roles, but that meant digging through spreadsheets and scattered email threads. Net-net: it was time-consuming and unscalable.
Then he found Paraform.
“Paraform gives you a way to get more business in as many places as possible. We can arrange more interviews, increase our transaction volume, and accelerate placements.”
John joined Paraform and started placing candidates right away.
Instead of prospecting companies one by one, he had access to hundreds of pre-vetted roles from tier-1 VC-backed startups and Fortune 500 companies for his entire team.
“The more roles we can tap into, the more we can dominate in new markets.”
With Paraform, he’s able to have endless opportunities for all his agency’s candidates. Now, Continuity Partners consistently lines up eight to nine interviews with companies rather than just one or two.
“If we get someone seven, eight interviews, or more, we have more chances they’ll accept the job that we’ve introduced them to. Paraform makes this possible for us.”
He also found that the platform let him easily place candidates that most recruiters might overlook.
“Anyone can spot a founding engineer from MIT,” he explains. But John and his team have built their reputation on something bigger: landing hires for exceptional candidates that don’t instantly stand out but would crush it in the right role.
Paraform gives them the roles to work and a platform to use that expertise at scale.
“We’ve made a third of our hires on Paraform. But everyone uses the platform so often that I don’t see a reason it won’t hit 50% or more soon.”
With Paraform, John unlocked an entire stream of revenue. Instead of spending hours sourcing companies, onboarding them, and calibrating expectations to scale - his agency just logs onto Paraform.
This is all possible because Paraform actually builds with recruiters like John in mind. Feature requests get built the next week. Agency tools get slotted directly into the roadmap and feedback loops stay tight with recruiters’ needs in mind.
"It's rare to work with a company that actually wants your input and acts on it. Paraform does.”
For John and his agency, Paraform solved a common agency dilemma: expanding and growing revenue without increasing headcount or workload. He’s now scaling faster than ever across new and existing markets.
Fourteen of John's recruiters are using the platform as their competitive edge with Staff Software Engineering placements at Ramp and countless placements at the world’s best startups.
His advice for other recruiting teams? “Just try Paraform. You have nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain.”
“Paraform makes it easy to work together and create more opportunities without adding friction to our process.”
Join world-class teams using Paraform to fill their most important roles in record time.
