How Maintenance Recruiter Books 3x More Meetings With Cognism

Find out how a maintenance recruitment company used Cognism’s lead generation and email automation tool to:

• Put their outbound outreach on autopilot
• Save 90% of their time spent on admin and repetitive tasks
• Send personalised emails at scale, resulting in 3-4 favourable responses per day
• 3x their number of calls every week

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The company

Maintenance Recruiter is North America’s leading recruitment company specialising in maintenance recruiting for manufacturing facilities in the US. They serve clients on a direct placement basis, helping with the recruiting, screening, selection, and interview coordination.

Everything Maintenance Recruiter do is done on a remote basis. This has allowed them to do business on a nationwide scale. So far, they’ve helped more than 500 companies in 45 states to find direct hire employees and tap into the best talent pool for their needs.

Their client roster includes: CocaCola, Whirlpool, Bridgestone, and 3M to name a few.

The challenge

We spoke with Arrend Jelsma, the VP of Recruiting Operations at Maintenance Recruiter. We asked Arrend to share the story about how Maintenance Recruiter first started their company and the challenges they were facing.

“When we first launched Maintenance Recruiter, we did it because we spotted an underserved need in the market. We noticed that companies were seeking for recruiters who are very specialised and there weren’t many options on the market.”

“We had years of experience in the space, so we decided to launch Maintenance Recruiter to help manufacturing facilities connect with permanent candidates with the right mix of skills and experience for their needs.”

When they first launched their business, their website was the largest driver of leads and sales.

Arrend explained:

“Since we already had experience in the industry, we launched the business through existing contacts and our website.”

Over the years, Maintenance Recruiter tried to grow using different lead gen tactics and at one point hired SDRs who focused on growing their client base. This has produced a certain level of results, but they had difficulty scaling their outbound outreach, since their B2B sales function was bogged down by admin work.

“We soon noticed that our best salespeople weren’t that effective and even burned out because they spent 90% of their time on admin work and repetitive tasks like typing emails. There’s just so many handmade emails you can send out in a day, so the number of people you can touch in this way is very limited.”

The solution

A year ago, Maintenance Recruiter started exploring different avenues and found out about Cognism. 

“I already knew what worked on a small scale. So I thought to myself, if there’s a way to do it on a greater scale, we could make a real impact with reaching our clients.”

Cognism’s prospecting solution allowed Maintenance Recruiter to do just that.

“What I really liked was the ability to personalise the messages and make our prospects feel like we’re messaging them individually, even though it’s all part of one automated campaign.”

We asked Arrend how easy it was to get started.

“The most demanding part is integrating the emails, but you’re able to eventually get where you need to be with the support of the customer support and the engineering team. Once you’re onboarded and everything’s set up, it gets to a point where most of what you do is on autopilot.” 

The results

What were Maintenance Recruiter’s main concerns?

“When we first started we were concerned that the leads would eventually run out and we would reach everyone in Cognism’s database in 3-6 months. There are many data providers who don’t refresh their leads and I thought Cognism would be the same.”

Arrend was positively surprised by the results.

“I’ve since realised that that’s not how it works. With Cognism, the volume of leads we get just continues to boom. I can actually say our leads are continuously getting better. It’s like the team found our sweet spot and the industries we’re targeting and provided us with those leads. Each time we do a new nationwide campaign, it’s never hitting the same people.”

How long does it take to see ROI?

“In the recruiting space I would say you should be able to see ROI after around 3 months. You need time to book meetings, send information, sign the agreement, get the details, search and interview candidates, send an employment offer, wait for the candidates to give 2 week notice, etc. But once that first period is over, the solution just starts adding to your business.”

We also wanted to know how often Maintenance Recruiter got results from Cognism’s B2B data.

“Once the campaigns are set up and the emails start going out, we receive results daily. Out of all the responses in a given day (at the beginning of a campaign), approximately 3-4 are favourable, and by favourable I mean the prospects are interested in booking a meeting or ask for more information.”

Arrend shared what Cognism’s solution meant for their business.

“With Cognism, we were able to 3x our number of calls every week. Now we’re just closing deals all day and we’re able to do a lot more with a lot smaller staff. The way we use Cognism is, we create a robust list for the next 2-3 months including all the industries and titles that we like, write the emails, and then set the campaigns on autopilot.”

Arrend explained:

“If we were to hire employees to do what we do with Cognism, we’d probably need a staff of 4-5 lead gen specialists doing nothing else but sending out boilerplate emails. Once you do the math, you realise that it’s much more efficient getting the messaging out in this way.”

Arrend had one last thought for us:

“If your business is primarily based on leads and you want to double your company revenue in 2021, but don’t want to add 5x the team, then an automated lead generation and email system like Cognism is the way to go.”