Rebel Recruiters is a Nottingham, England-based recruitment agency that prides themselves on ethical, high-quality tech recruitment. Their name comes from their commitment to breaking the mold of typical recruiters and offering a genuine alternative to the high-cost, low value competitors out there.
Best Practices
Zelda Perry is very fun — but when it comes to data, she does not mess around.
Zelda comes from a background with a LOT of organization — in which a CRM is your holy grail, and everyone is trained to farm, nurture, and take care of it.
When she entered the recruitment space, she was in for a rude awakening — one that included a lot of disparate tools, competing “best” practices, and an absolute basic way of using an existing CRM – simply logging activity instead of vital, valid and informative information.
As Operations Manager at Rebel Recruiters, Zelda became hell-bent on changing the name of the game — and equipping her team with a tool that 1) everyone actually liked using and 2) made it easy for everyone to keep organized, clean records.
When Zelda joined Rebel in 2021, it became clear that Rebel’s data was stale, and that something needed to be done about it. With a database of almost 25K+ people, there was some information that hadn’t been updated for years, rendering it effectively useless.
It also didn’t help that Vincere’s support team was “basically nonexistent.” Zelda lamented that pretty much any time she’d reach out, she’d get kicked down the hill to the next person — basically a never-ending list of team members telling her “not my problem.”
“We didn’t even have an account manager,” Zelda says. “We had no one that I could go and pick up the phone and say ‘I need your help.’”
When they began exploring new solutions, Azar, the MD of Rebel, and Zelda were drawn especially to Loxo’s simplicity. They knew this would be the solution that would get their team on the same page – building a powerful talent database that would put most other recruiters to shame.
“In Vincere, you’re so used to having to click seven different times to do one tiny thing,” Zelda says. “Then you get into Loxo and you only have to click once or twice to do so much more, and you’re thinking this has gotta be too good to be true.”
As soon as they decided to move forward with migrating their data to Loxo, Rebels’ dedicated Account Manager, Lorcan, sprung into action.
Rebel had a very short notice period with Vincere — which meant that instead of a 12-week migration period, the entire migration process had to happen within four weeks. Even now, Zelda remarks on how quickly Lorcan and Loxo’s data team were able to get everything done.
Zelda Perry, Operations Manager at Rebel
Since getting started with Loxo, Zelda’s biggest priority has been getting the team to drop the bad habits — or just necessary workarounds they’d had to build into their system when using Vincere.
After getting ramped up, Rebel has been able to drop not only Vincere but also Sourcewhale and even a few job boards — which means tons of workflow consolidation.
Zelda Perry, Operations Manager at Rebel
Wins are small now, Zelda says, but she predicts they’ll be major in the next 6-9 months, once everyone is truly getting the most out of the platform — specifically leveraging Loxo’s automation capabilities more.
“Thank God the team has started replacing my name with Loxo,” Zelda laughs. “Things that they used to come to me for, they can now intuitively figure out in Loxo themselves.”
That being said, everyone is still learning — which is where Loxo’s support comes into the picture.
Rebel has an established informative meeting with the team every Tuesday where they go through one specific topic that someone may be struggling with. They call it Tune-in-Tuesday. It’s 30 minutes a week where everyone focuses on learning and helping one another.
“Do you know how many times Lorcan has jumped into a Tune-In-Tuesday meeting with us?” Zelda asks. “I just send him the Teams link and he leads trainings for me. And not only that, but then he’ll check in with me a few days later to see if everything is sticking or if we need more help.”
As we mentioned earlier — Zelda is a stickler for clean data, and that’s a big part of what led her to Loxo.
She says that, especially in today’s wild-and-crazy job market, the importance of good data is even greater. While Rebel is still in its infancy using Loxo, there have already been several “wake-up call” moments, as Zelda refers to them.
Zelda Perry, Operations Manager at Rebel
You see the value of good, clean data in the moment — for example, when effectively using tags, you get more precise matches between jobs and candidates — but Zelda’s biggest sticking point is the compounding interest of it all.
“If it’s doing this now, imagine where you’ll be a year from now,” she says. “You put in the work now, and at a certain point it becomes second-nature, and you start to see results and are so glad you started investing in data quality a year back.”
What started as a simple recruiting CRM migration has turned into something much more — with the Rebel Recruiters team recently upgrading to the full version of Loxo.
Zelda’s specifically excited to start using Loxo’s Sales CRM, Deals, to start driving business development initiatives. They’ve already got visions of splitting the recruiters into two teams to drive friendly competition — and leveraging Loxo Reports’ new “Leaderboards” functionality will make doing so even easier.
She’s also excited by the ways her team has been able to custom-tailor Loxo to work for their specific needs — their own little “Loxo Hacks.”
Maybe one day we’ll have her write a post on all of those, specifically — but until then, we’re just happy that Zelda has finally found a platform that loves data cleanliness just as much as she does.