Focus Cloud Group Accelerates Hiring and Candidate Engagement with TalentMatched

Overview

Focus Cloud Group, a specialist global recruitment agency for cloud technologies, faced one of the industry’s oldest challenges. Balancing speed, quality, and candidate care. With more than 70 consultants recruiting for Workday, SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle roles worldwide, the agency was drowning in applications. Consultants were forced to prioritise only a fraction of candidates, and too many applicants never heard back.

By integrating TalentMatched with their CRM, Focus Cloud has accelerated how consultants screen, shortlist, and communicate. The results are early but already clear. They’re witnessing faster shortlists, greater accuracy, and the ability to build stronger candidate relationships at scale.

The challenge: speed vs relationships

Recruitment is high volume and high stakes. Focus Cloud consultants were spending up to 20 minutes reviewing a single profile before even beginning conversations. Multiply that across dozens of consultants and hundreds of applications and the time drain was enormous.

Ryan Thompson, Head of Marketing at Focus Cloud, explained the impact:

“Our consultants only have a certain amount of bandwidth per day. They can’t go back to every single applicant that applies. If they do, it would usually be a generic message on a timer. It doesn’t really help them, it doesn’t give them much value other than a thanks but no thanks kind of message.”

• Valuable candidates were overlooked or lost in the “black hole” of unresponsive pipelines.
• Inconsistencies between junior and senior consultants led to varied outcomes and risked client confidence.

Ryan acknowledged this as one of recruitment’s “ugly truths”:

“Some candidates fall victim to not even hearing a response at all. It is something we are always trying to work on, and using something like TalentMatched is just one way we are trying to change that stereotype.”

The solution: AI-powered, bias-free screening

Focus Cloud chose to integrate TalentMatched directly into Bullhorn, their recruitment CRM. That integration was critical for adoption across a global consultant base.

Ryan highlighted three key areas where TalentMatched stood apart:

Bias-free matching: “There is no individual bias, there are no preferred names that pop up. Everyone is graded on the same plane. That has been quite helpful because it helps you uncover new candidates that you might not have looked at before if you see names you recognise.”

Deeper insight: “It gives you absolutely everything and it gives you the why they might not be great for that role as well. That allows you to make the judgment call. It could be time zones, it could be culture, it could be softer factors that other tools just don’t show you.”

Candidate empowerment: “It starts to propose ideas as to how candidates could be better as well. If someone is 70% of the way there, it can show what they need to do to get to 85%. That way, we can push that back to the candidate so next time they apply, they are ready. That is powerful.”

Results: faster placements, stronger relationships

Even in the early stages of rollout, consultants have noticed a difference.

“I have had consultants come to me and say this is working better than another provider that we were using. We had full faith in that other provider. So for TalentMatched to already be seen as better, that is promising.”

The measurable benefits are beginning to emerge:

• Faster delivery to clients: “It enables you to get that talent in front of the client much quicker than we were able to before. That helps clients take notice and trust you more. You become a preferred supplier.”
• Better candidate experience: “Instead of being a one-off transactional thing, we want to build and maintain relationships. TalentMatched is helping us do that by giving us more detail to go back with.”
• Scalable efficiency: “If we have the same amount of consultants as we do now, the only way to be quicker is better tools. TalentMatched is one of those tools that allows us to do more with the same..”

Looking ahead

The Focus Cloud team believe TalentMatched will have a lasting impact on candidate care and consultant performance. Ryan connected it directly to the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) ambitions:

“The biggest bugbear from candidates is non-responsiveness or lack of feedback. TalentMatched helps us answer that. If we can deliver valuable responses to everyone, our NPS will improve. That is what I expect to see.”

Why it matters

For an agency built on global relationships, TalentMatched is a way to deliver faster, fairer, and more human recruitment.

Ryan summed it up simply:

“If you have job vacancies open and you just do not have the time to maintain relationships with all the applicants, TalentMatched is a great tool to break down those barriers. You can communicate with all applicants, good or bad, but do it in a meaningful way.”

Ready to transform how you manage candidates?
See how TalentMatched can help you shortlist faster, reduce bias, and improve candidate experience, all without adding headcount.