"It has made our process way easier; before, I had to manually download 20k+ contacts monthly to make sure they were up to date and receiving our emails."
Nicola Flowers, KSB RecruitmentHow KSB Recruitment, a hospitality and catering recruitment specialist, moved from manual, monthly email blasts to a fully automated, journey-based Firefish + Kulea pipeline - without losing the personal touch.
Every month, KSB Recruitment manually downloaded 20,000+ contacts out of Firefish, updated spreadsheets by hand, and re-imported them into a separate email system - just to keep their marketing database current. Application acknowledgments, interview confirmations, and placement updates were all written and sent individually, on top of that.
Beyond the 20+ hours a month lost to admin, every spreadsheet export of sensitive candidate and client data sitting on laptops or in downloads folders was a genuine data security risk - not a hypothetical one. And with most of that 20,000+ contact database sitting dormant, a huge amount of relationship value was going entirely unused.
"It has made our process way easier; before, I had to manually download 20k+ contacts monthly to make sure they were up to date and receiving our emails."
Nicola Flowers, KSB RecruitmentFirefish data flows into Kulea automatically, eliminating the manual exports, spreadsheets, and security risk that came with the old process entirely.
Application acknowledgments, interview confirmations (booked and confirmed automatically via Calendly), and placement congratulations now trigger the moment a candidate's record changes in Firefish.
Clients who'd been called are automatically entered into a nurture sequence, keeping them warm without a consultant needing to remember to follow up manually.
Monthly newsletters and market insight content stayed as genuine bulk sends - KSB didn't abandon campaign marketing, they stopped using it for things that needed to be timely and personal instead.
"We automated congrats on the job emails so candidates automatically get them, where as before they were sometimes forgotten about or delayed. The automations have also helped improve the candidate journey when they apply for a job and book in for an interview."
Nicola Flowers, KSB RecruitmentMeasured as the increase against KSB's own previous, manual-process baseline.
+103%
increase in click-through rate
+83%
increase in email open rate
+28%
more placements
20 hrs
reclaimed from manual admin, per month
65.8%
average open rate - nearly double the recruitment industry average of 35-40%
24.4%
average click rate - against an industry average of around 3-5%
93.8%
delivery rate - relevant, triggered emails landing in the inbox, not spam
"The automations have helped a lot with lead gen too - clients who get called automatically go into a nurture sequence afterwards, so nobody falls through the cracks. It's not always easy to track one-to-one, but there's no doubt it's had a big impact: we've seen a lot of people come through as hot leads, which means we can pick up the phone instead of starting from cold. And honestly, it's made a real dent in my workload - I get to focus on the creative side now, while the consultants get to focus on actual conversations instead of writing emails."
Nicola Flowers, KSB RecruitmentKSB didn't abandon bulk campaigns - they used them strategically, reserving genuine mass communication for newsletters and insight content, while letting triggered, journey-based automation handle the high-volume, time-sensitive touchpoints that make up most of day-to-day recruitment communication. The result: more than double the engagement, 28% more placements, a near-perfect delivery rate, and 20 hours a month given back to the team.