Standing Out As A Recruitment Agency | Anthony Kelly on The #SocialRecruiting Show

New agency thinking? “Help us help the candidate”

Our guests aren’t always people we’ve known for a long time, we meet new and interesting people regularly and this week’s guest is a great example of this. Katrina met Anthony Kelly in the summer at the TA Labs event in Berlin and we invited him on to talk to us about how he is changing the agency recruitment model.

Anthony is currently Team Manager at ALLDUS, a start-up recruitment agency and focused on AI and Data Science for the Berlin market. Prior to joining his mentor, and Co-Founder, at ALLDUS, he worked for the agency S3 and Indeed before taking on the challenge of a new start-up, in a new country with a new technology focus – talk about gear change!

Opening the show, we ask Anthony – why AI and Data Science?

“Data science and unstructured data were the biggest challenges for tech companies; they can’t get access to it and they don’t know what to do with it.”

Fast-forward and the first 12-months have been very successful as he runs the AI in Action Berlin meet-up and the podcast series of the same name. This doesn’t sound like a typical agency recruiter, right? – and you’d be correct as Anthony tells us he’s more of a “professional networker” and his role allows him to continue “meeting really interesting people and having interesting conversations”.

How to be a peer and not just a recruiter

Rewinding slightly to the beginning of his career, we ask Anthony what underpins his approach, he tells us he continues to focus on;

“Being engaging and meeting your candidates and having those quality relationships” which he thinks translates to being seen as “being their peer.”

As we talk more about his candidate approach, we discover how much Anthony offers as he tells us about his “candidate preparation courses” which cover everything from CV reviews, interview preparation and post-interview follow-ups. In his own words, he wants to,

“Make sure people are more confident going into these interviews.”

In contrast to the existing agency model, I think it’s safe to say that Anthony operates in a very different way as his own working week illustrates as he tells us “Monday I flew to Berlin, Tuesday I had an event, Wednesday I had a roundtable, Thursday I recorded a few podcasts and then I flew home” – all this alongside the process of delivering for both candidates and clients.

If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll hear Anthony talk about:

• Being transparent with clients and candidates
• The power of feedback
• Providing candidate feedback at every stage – even if you reject them! 
• The value of ‘mock interviews’ 
• Don’t ignore your Glassdoor reviews
• The importance of setting expectations with your clients