Growing 60x in 2 years – How Ekkiden Created One of The Fastest-Growing Consulting Businesses in Europe

Meet Ekkiden, a European consulting group that focuses on one thing above all: creating an exceptional experience for both candidates and clients. 

Consulting is a tough business to run. Between engaging clients and candidates, removing hurdles, and playing the coach and the closer, it can get hectic. Scaling a consulting company business is even harder. However, the UK continues to enjoy some of the most rapid growth in the consulting business and Ekkiden is one of the fastest-growing consulting companies with 60X growth in less than 2 years. There’s something that they are doing differently and we take a deeper dive into what and explore how they did it all. 

We sat down (of course virtually), with Hélène Loine, Vice-President of Human Resources,

at Ekkiden to get a closer look at how they use recruitment CRM, keep track of metrics, and how have automated more than 32,000 tasks with Recruiterflow.

How Does Ekkiden Operate?

Ekkiden has 7 offices across Europe – namely one each in Lyon, Paris, Munich, Cologne, Madrid, Zurich, and Geneva. When it comes to the team’s operations, Ekkiden epitomizes a flat structure in consulting business – which has traditionally been extremely hierarchical. Ekkiden has several business units and each business unit has a manager depending on the needs of the client, they assemble a team of the best people across the geographies to deliver. 

With their community Together by Tech, the firm really goes further and beyond to ensure a blissful experience for candidates and clients alike. Leveraging this community, Ekkiden makes sure that they carve out a brand recall in a super competitive market and at the same time, help the tech community learn and collaborate together. It’s a great online space where people across Europe can connect and share their insights, ideas, and experiences on various tech topics. 

Managing Hyper-Growth

“When we moved to Recruiterflow, we were already growing quickly and had massive plans to expand in multiple geographies. We needed something that was robust, intuitive, and helped us scale” – Hélène. 

Ekkiden needed an operating system for blitz scaling. As you grow, the challenges change. Ekkiden had identified the top three priorities for their choice of ATS & Recruiting CRM.

• Ease of Use: Unless the software is super easy to use, recruiters won’t love to use it and there would be inaccurate metrics and data will be reported. 
• Automation: In order to deliver an unforgettable experience to clients and candidates, it is important that recruiters spend time on high-value interactions and not on admin and data entry. 
• Accountability & Collaboration: As a flat organization, where teams are put together not for the easiest process but rather to deliver the best outcome for clients and candidates, they needed a system that gave them an easy way to collaborate and help drive accountability. 

With these priorities, the team made a few features part of their wishlist. It also helped that they were using Hubspot for their marketing automation and knew what features they would love in their new recruiting CRM. Some of the wishlist items were,

• Help identify opportunities to streamline how we operate, 
• Seamless 2-way sync with Outlook email and calendar
• Flexibility in hiring workflow – to cater to each client’s separate process 
• Higher visibility into what each member of the team is doing. 
• Keeping track of their high-priority candidates in the pipeline

Ekkiden needed recruitment software with robust recruitment automation capabilities that streamlined their hiring process so they could get things moving quickly. The kicker? They found all of their must-have features embedded right into Recruiterflow. What made them switch to the ATS and recruitment CRM was the fact that they could focus on scaling their business while their software automated most of their work efficiently. 

Ekkiden’s Secret Sauce

The first part of the process is doing extensive intake calls with the clients to get a deep understanding of the client and their requirements. Once a requirement is collected, Ekkiden puts together the best team to fill the role. This depends on the geography and functional area in which the hire needs to be made. 

Ekkiden’s recruiting process involves multiple rounds of interviews before a candidate is submitted to the client. Each interview or interaction is designed to gather specific information from candidates which will be reviewed by the manager before the submission. 

Usually, the recruiter is in charge of the selection and qualification of candidates. It is a close collaboration between business managers and talent acquisition specialists, working hand in hand to find the best experts. “While we like to follow a process, we don’t let it become a hurdle in the way of speed and candidate & client experience,” explains Helene. 

How Ekkiden deploys automation for candidate experience and  collaboration

Keeping everyone in the loop

Ekkiden uses recipes to create smart notifications for the team to understand whenever a major pipeline activity occurs – for example, a notification goes out to the recruiter and the account manager whenever a submittal is made on a particular job. 

Keeping candidates updated with their status

One of the worst things that you can do from a candidate’s experience standpoint is not getting back to them. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds and that’s why Ekkiden deploys automation wherever it can. 

If a candidate has applied and gets disqualified from the early stages of the process, they get an email about their disqualification. The emails are customized according to the disqualification reasons that the recruiter picks – there is personalization at scale. That said, at later stages of the process, they also like to give personal feedback to candidates.

What the team loves most is the extent of automation they can do along with complete control and visibility. This has led to massive opportunities to truly build and nurture relationships with both candidates and clients – the company’s ultimate goal. 

The Impact That Recruiterflow Has Driven

For Ekkiden, implementing Recruiterflow has influenced recruiters and business managers to run their processes more efficiently. Teams are now able to collaborate, record, and track conversations, prioritize tasks, run automated email campaigns, notify candidates, and run the entire hiring pipeline in one place. 

At Recruiterflow, we were beyond thrilled to see the numbers – and the overall change it brought to the agency’s work structure. Here are the features their team uses the most: 

Sourcing & Outreach

Ekkiden’s growing number of online leads arrive largely from our LinkedIn Chrome extension. Contact details are automatically captured from the social platform and fed into their Recruiterflow dashboard. They can track the status of their leads, move them into a different stage, add recipes, and manage them inside Recruiterflow. 

Automation – Recipes 

At Ekkiden, there are multiple open jobs going on at the same time with more than one person being in charge of a job – communication and staying on the same page becomes essential for that. Using “Recipes”, their team has automated a large part of their mundane, repetitive tasks. This has also helped them streamline their workflow. 

Reports 

Recruiterflow’s recruitment dashboard lets Hélène and the rest of the leadership team at Ekkiden stay on top of sales metrics. She’s able to create custom reports for projects and view them instantly in the sales dashboard. (metrics of reports). 

Recruiterflow Helps Maintain the Sweet Balance 

Staying on top of your game requires much more than just ideation. You need an action plan and the right software for recruitment agencies that help you along the way. Ekkiden agreed to find a better ATS and recruitment CRM that would take the busy work of the team and require more effort. 

Just two years back, Ekkiden was a team of only 2 members. They’ve grown since then to a team of 130 members and have been able to focus more on relationship-making. 

Automated emails, boolean searches, and integrations help save Ekkiden time and improve productivity for their team. Implementing Recruiterflow has provided the team with a visual reference for their hiring pipelines, while they focus on nurturing relationships. 

Recruiter productivity is at the core of Ekkiden’s operations. Every process is designed to help recruiters deliver an incredible experience to clients and candidates and for that, they need to be freed up from admin so that they can focus on doing what they do best – nurturing relationships. Ekkiden’s single-minded focus on this has helped them smash their growth goals and become a force to reckon with in Europe’s IT and Engineering consulting groups.

To learn more about Recruiterflow, book a demo with us or sign up for a free 14-day trial.