Support Adventure processes 4x more client applications with connected recruitment workflows

The company

Support Adventure is a global remote MSP (Managed Service Provider) staffing organisation, founded in 2016 by Eric Muth. After working for many years as an on-site IT technician in Toronto, Canada, he moved to Belgrade, Serbia, and had an idea. What if skilled IT engineers could offer their expertise to forward-thinking organisations from anywhere in the world? Seeing a gap in the market, Eric hired a team and trained them to offer remote IT support to UK businesses from any destination.

By the time COVID struck in 2020, his team were 30-strong and operating a 24-hour help desk. With the infrastructure, procedures, and know-how already in place to offer remote support, the business roughly tripled in size in 2020 and 2021. But, passionate about enabling more IT professionals to live and work from anywhere, Eric then pivoted Support Adventure to a recruitment organisation. Now, the team focuses on finding the best IT and tech support staff worldwide, and matching them with MSP clients looking for remote staff.

The challenge

Like many startups, Support Adventure's operations were managed in a network of spreadsheets. Applicants were captured in spreadsheets, open client positions were tracked in spreadsheets, and leads and sales opportunities were orchestrated from another spreadsheet. TSheets by QuickBooks was in place to log contractor attendance across placements, places, and time zones, but that data was not connected to other records.

"Our workflows were all manual, spreadsheet to spreadsheet, and our data was not linked."

Eric Muth Founder, Support Adventure

This siloed approach limited collaboration, enabled mistakes, and reduced productivity. Eric recognised that to grow and support more engineers and MSPs, the business needed a robust software stack that was connected, accurate, and scalable.

Approaching his team, Eric discovered that Support Adventure's Contracts Manager, Justin Coetzee, had extensive experience using Zoho in a previous role. Justin put forward the Zoho One bundle, a suite of 45+ business applications, as the end-to-end answer to the organisation's needs. "Justin suggested a database-driven Zoho implementation to manage everything from how the candidates come into our company, to how they get placed with clients, and how the ongoing contracts work," recalls Eric.

This was to be the beginning of a journey that would streamline Support Adventure's customer-facing and back office operations, including contractor onboarding, skills testing, interviewing, placements, time tracking, lead nurturing, client communications, and reporting.

The solution

"Zoho One is a game changer. It's a highly-customisable platform that can unify every part of the business, and offers so much flexibility."

Eric Muth Founder, Support Adventure

Because Justin was well-acquainted with Zoho, he spearheaded its roll-out across the business, quickly delivering impact. Today, the team are using no less than 10 of the applications in the bundle, and have built a seamless, synchronised environment that's saved hours of manual effort, eliminated errors, and increased output. To handle both sides of the recruitment process — applications and placements — the team combined Zoho Recruit, Forms, Survey, Sign, Writer, and People in a seamless workflow. To nurture new clients and generate revenue, Zoho CRM and Campaigns were introduced. And to measure the performance of the entire operation, Zoho Analytics became a staple. With the Zoho One suite in place, Support Adventure has driven some impressive results.

• 60% climb in productivity across the recruitment team.
• 25 welcome emails sent in seconds, down from 1 hour.
• 4x more candidate applications processed.
• 13,000 lines of recruitment data visualised effortlessly in Analytics.

Tools that keep engineers employed, MSPs manned, and adventures alive

Zoho Recruit

Becoming the central database for all recruitment activities, Zoho Recruit collects applications, holds candidate profiles, coordinates comms, and stores skill sets.

Candidates complete an application form (via Zoho Forms) on the Support Adventure website, and the details are pushed automatically into the 'profiles' module. Recruit automates the sending of introductory emails to each incoming applicant, delivering not just a positive external perception, but considerable time savings.

"It used to take us an hour just to send 25 emails to new candidates, but now they're sent instantly. We've been able to redistribute that time to other tasks and projects. We have the capability of doing four times as many candidate applications as we used to before Zoho."

Louwrens de Wet Technical Manager, Support Adventure

Each candidate also receives an automatic invitation from Recruit to take a technical skills test in Zoho Survey, with the score shared back to the candidate's profile.

Recruit also handles the open positions logged by MSP clients. "They complete a Zoho Form, where they give us all the details like the job spec, the shifts, etc," explains Justin. "That gets loaded into our 'placements' module, and our Placement Specialists select the candidates that match the role. A curated selection of candidates is submitted to the client through a web portal which is connected to Recruit by an API. They can see all the profiles, introduction videos, skills, and test results. They approve or decline the candidates, and if they approve one, we move ahead with interviews."

"This was a total game-changer for us, because previously we had to sift through candidate information manually and send suitable ones to the clients via email."

Justin Coetzee Contracts Manager, Support Adventure

Employment contracts are handled inside Recruit too. "When a deal is established, we need a contract signed at each end. This was previously a very manual process, but we've automated it," says Justin. Inside the 'placements' module, contract templates are populated through a mail merge function in Zoho Writer, and the contract is issued to each party via Zoho Sign for signing. When the process is complete, Support Adventure's team receives an automatic notification, meaning they can go ahead and schedule the contractor's first day.

If a client wishes to provide equipment to a contractor, the procurement process is handled in a custom module named 'Supply Agreements'. A blueprint orchestrates the whole process of ordering, tracking, and delivering the devices each engineer requires. "When our contractors receive equipment from clients, it's quite an extensive process with many boxes to tick," shares Louwrens. By automating this workflow, the recruitment team saw a huge reduction in admin load, and estimates they are now around 60% more productive.

Zoho People

Hired technicians flow seamlessly from Zoho Recruit into Zoho People, where their working hours are recorded. Each worker checks in at the start of each shift, and checks out when it concludes. It provides the MSP client with real-time visibility of the candidate's activity, and is used by Support Adventure's team for billing purposes.

Zoho CRM

With the recruitment workflow wrapped up end-to-end, Support Adventure looked to digitise its sales cycle using Zoho CRM. Once tracked in a spreadsheet, new website enquiries are now populated inside the 'leads' module where they are progressed by staffing specialists in an automatic round-robin assignment. Qualified leads are converted into deals, where a series of blueprints are activated. "These help the deal move smoothly through the responsible parties, automatically assigning the next person in the process to keep the deal moving," says Justin. "We use blueprints to help keep structure and discipline, from step one to step two, and so on. They prevent manual errors, like forgetting or missing a step, or maybe failing to notify a team member that a task has been completed. Those were some struggles that we had before," Louwrens adds.

To nurture these new clients, the team integrated Zoho CRM with Zoho Campaigns. Regular mailshots keep them informed about services, topical IT matters, and more, with every interaction tracked back to the client's CRM record. With the two-way sync, segmentation and personalisation are made easy. "We pull in our leads automatically from the CRM and then, based on the lead source, the lead status, stage, or type, we send targeted campaigns," says Justin.

Once a client deal is sealed, the CRM information is pushed into Recruit's 'client' module, and the MSP is ready to list new job openings and receive candidates, completing the process. "Together, the two applications work in tandem to create perfect pairings," smiles Eric.

Zoho Analytics

The BI platform helps to visualise over 13,000 lines of data from Support Adventure's Zoho Recruit account, as well as key metrics from CRM, Survey, and Campaigns. Using interactive dashboards and widgets, Eric and the leadership team can track the number of incoming applications, placements, and contractors hired at any time, as well as the volume of incoming leads, the most effective lead sources, and conversion rates. During monthly board meetings, Zoho Analytics is the single source of truth upon which the team makes informed, data-driven decisions with confidence.

Looking forward with Zoho One

With more MSPs looking to embrace remote talent, Support Adventure stands ready to respond with Zoho One's scalable solutions. Here's what's next up on the recruitment roadmap:

• Building new client experience surveys in Zoho Survey.
• Using Zia, Zoho's embedded AI assistant, to link the skills data inside Recruit directly to the placement module.
• Exploring the marketing applications included in the suite, specifically Zoho PageSense, Publish, and Social.