National Recruiting Network Raised Candidate Connection Rates 25% with ZoomInfo

The North Carolina recruiting firm moved candidate sourcing off hand-built spreadsheets and onto filtered searches with automated outreach, cutting manual effort in half.

VANCOUVER, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: GTM), the all-in-one AI GTM platform, has reported that National Recruiting Network, a recruiting firm placing engineering, maintenance, and leadership talent in plastics and packaging manufacturing, has raised its candidate connection rates by 25% and cut its manual sourcing work by 50%, according to the company. It did so with a small team, in a labor market where every qualified candidate had options.

National Recruiting Network was under two years old and growing fast. Its sourcing process was manual. Candidate information came out of various sources and went into Excel spreadsheets, work the firm describes as incredibly tedious and time consuming. For a large agency with a research department, that is a line item. For a firm this size, it was the workweek.

Worse, the tedium was hiding a targeting problem. Plastics and packaging manufacturing roles require very specific expertise and education, and a spreadsheet assembled from whatever was findable cannot tell you who has that background. So the firm was contacting people who looked plausible rather than people who qualified. Its own stated baseline: reach out to 100 candidates, and one reply was a good day. Ninety-nine touches went nowhere.

The firm changed three things with ZoomInfo, and each attacks a different part of that failure. First, precision. Detailed searches isolate candidates matching a specific expertise and education requirement, so in a niche like plastics processing the list is 40 qualified people instead of 500 plausible ones. Second, reach. Accurate contact data means the message lands in a live inbox rather than bouncing, and a bounce is a candidate the recruiter never knows was interested. Third, volume without headcount. The firm builds a separate automated outreach sequence per type of role, then sends it to the candidates those searches surface. Reporting shows which messaging works for which audience, so the pitch for a maintenance lead is tuned separately from the pitch for a process engineer.

The results followed the mechanism. Candidate connection rates rose 25% against that one-reply-per-100 baseline, and manual effort fell by half, according to the company. The recovered hours went into relationship-building with candidates and clients instead of data entry. The firm reported its best month on record and a lower time to hire, which gave it room to take on more clients, and it credits ZoomInfo for the revenue that followed.

The bet from here is capacity, not headcount. Each recruiter carries more searches, so the same small team serves more clients. In a niche where the qualified pool is narrow and the competition for it is not, finding the right 40 people beats reaching the wrong 500.

About ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: GTM), the all-in-one AI GTM platform, enables sales, marketing, and customer success teams to execute their go-to-market strategy with confidence. Powered by the industry's most comprehensive B2B data, including more than 100 million companies, 500 million contacts, and billions of signals, ZoomInfo delivers the intelligence, automation, and integrations that modern revenue teams need to identify, engage, and convert their best buyers.

Learn more at zoominfo.com.