Salo

How contract staffing specialists Salo built a competitive advantage and generated $1 million in billings through search automation technology.

Background

Salo is a nationwide talent firm, connecting experts in the finance, accounting, and HR fields with organisations that need their expertise. Operating in their market sector for over 20 years, Salo employs 70 staff who recruit candidates on a contract basis for senior positions in departmental leadership and specialist functions.

"In a little over a year since rolling SourceBreaker out across all our sales team, we’ve seen almost $1 million in billings attributed to talent found using SourceBreaker."
Auhtor Profile
Adam Sprecher

Vice President Strategy & Development | Salo

Location

London

Employees

70

Industry

Corporate Governance & Technology

“If you don’t use SourceBreaker, you’re losing business.”

How have Salo leveraged SourceBreaker to maximise productivity?

In the fast-paced world of contract recruitment, Salo was looking for a way to ensure their recruiting team had the tools to rapidly and thoroughly search their full talent base, both inside their proprietary Bullhorn ATS and across LinkedIn.

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They were also looking to invest in a technology solution that would create higher levels of collaboration between staff, enabling team members to work together to create a better client experience.

Which features are most notable for Salo?

Adam Sprecher, Vice President Strategy and Development at Salo, worked with IT, Sales and Talent teams to implement SourceBreaker’s search automation technology, leveraging a deep integration with Bullhorn and LinkedIn to unlock previously hidden talent pools and embed robust, scalable search workflows to facilitate future growth.

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“Other tech platforms might make us more efficient – but SourceBreaker is fully integrated into the culture of who we are as a company.”

SourceBreaker as a solution to…

Before SourceBreaker we hadn’t been leveraging category specialities or skills in Bullhorn, and staff relied on individual tearsheets. They would also search LinkedIn directly using their own networks. This meant that only experienced and highly-skilled employees could run effective searches. It wasn’t scalable.”

Building a competitive edge through technology

One of the key drivers for Salo’s decision to invest in SourceBreaker was the speed of the contract staffing market and the need to further develop a competitive edge in delivery of well-matched candidates ahead of other firms.

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“For Salo, SourceBreaker solved the business problem of creating better searching for our teams – giving us visibility over all the talent available in our platform,” Adam explains. “We’ve always worked hard to beat the drum that our database is our ‘source of truth’, so we needed to choose a solution integrated with our Bullhorn ATS.

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“Before SourceBreaker we were not able to leverage our entire talent base. Now we have a solution that ensures all our teams can have access and visibility to all our available talent across markets.”

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Adam and the Salo team were anxious to build processes that would allow all team members to uncover quality candidates at the pace the market demanded.

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“We knew that long-term we had to move to a better system. SourceBreaker created a bridge that allowed us to go deeper and further in our searches,” he explains, “it taught Boolean to our newbie staff instantly, and the integration with Bullhorn meant that our team could continue working from inside the ATS while accessing all of the talent across our sources.”

Maximising Redeployment

With the majority of Salo’s search mandates being for contract positions, it was key for the company’s leadership team to find a solution that would not only identify new placeable candidates, but optimise redeployment of contract candidates.

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“We already had superior deployment and retention rates in the industry,” Adam notes, “but we saw that SourceBreaker could help us maintain or even improve them.”

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“One example has been our expansion to more talent bases – SourceBreaker has helped create awareness for our teams of talent available outside our typical regions. This has removed limitations when it comes to bringing new talent into the pool, and hints at future ROI from the SourceBreaker platform as well as what we’ve already seen.”

Fostering Collaboration Through Workflow Automation

An additional challenge for Salo was finding a way to encourage higher levels of collaboration among teams. “Since deploying SourceBreaker and creating higher levels of visibility across our platform through search automation, there’s much more awareness around what new talent is coming into our network as a whole.

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This has created shared talent pools, with higher levels of accountability around data management and quality and – most importantly – it’s meant that more candidates are able to work with Salo continuously, since there is more sharing and collaboration across the team.”

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“This has been our first time working with a partner who proactively sends us usage reports, checks in monthly and regularly talks about their product roadmap.”

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Salo’s investment in SourceBreaker has also allowed staff to learn faster from one another, as well as creating a shared responsibility to find the right candidate for client assignments.

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“We save huge amounts of time on searching because everyone has access to everyone else’s searches on SourceBreaker, and they can tweak based on what they’re looking for,” Adam explains. “But critically SourceBreaker has created a notion within the business that there is more talent available in our database than staff previously thought, and the teams now work harder to make sure they’re considering all options to ensure they meet their clients’ needs”

Would Salo recommend SourceBreaker?

Investing in SourceBreaker has allowed Salo’s team of 70+ staff to consistently find high quality candidates across their own database and LinkedIn, whilst expanding and continually adding to their talent pool to out-perform their competition.

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Salo has seen new team members ramp up quicker by grasping search concepts and having fingertip access to powerful cross-platform search queries and full visibility into what’s working for their highest-performing colleagues and other market teams.

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As Alex Pike, Senior Manager of Sales Operations & Enablement, explains:

“Over the last year, we have seen SourceBreaker expand the pool of talent (by skill set and location) we identify and bring to our clients. They helped us remove the self-created constraints we had in our management of talent pools. Through this partnership we have won more business and created more meaningful experiences for our consultants.”

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“In contract staffing markets things move so fast – you need everyone working together. SourceBreaker has allowed us to create a collaborative workflow that has been instrumental in gaining a competitive advantage.”

Success Through Support with SourceBreaker

A vital element of Salo’s success with SourceBreaker was down to high adoption levels and the support of the Customer Success team.

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“We had an amazing onboarding experience with SourceBreaker specifically because of the feeling of partnership that was created. Other platforms we’ve brought into the organisation were a lot more scripted when it came to implementing.

SourceBreaker had an interactive partnership which played a significant role in driving adoption but also maintaining usage in the long term,” adds Adam.

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“There’s a running joke that we’ll hire Rachel, our SourceBreaker Customer Success Manager, because she helped us adopt new tech in a way we’d never been able to do before!

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But, ultimately, what made the difference was the partnership mentality and collaboration to determine what was possible and quickly work with the tech team to implement it.

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We saw from the start that SourceBreaker was invested in being successful for Salo, and not being just another piece of tech in our stack.

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Sourcebreaker allows Salo to do what we do best: seamlessly providing more Meaningful Experiences for our clients and consultants.”.

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