Chris Collins is a lifelong technophile. Having dipped his fingers into virtual reality applications, the metaverse, and now RoboRecruiter—an automated messaging and chatbot platform for recruiters—he has to be.
"I've always moved towards new technology. I wanted to work in something with a technological subtext, with technology that was broadly available," says Chris. "And messaging was something that more and more businesses were adopting as a way to communicate with their customers."
Since 2017, Chris has served as the CEO of RoboRecruiter—a company aimed at streamlining the repetitive steps in the recruitment process and helping recruiters engage prime candidates. "What that engagement does," explains Chris, "is also allow candidates to find a role, see if they're qualified for that role, schedule interviews, and do video recordings of themselves."
Recently, RoboRecruiter was acquired by Gupshup, and Chris now runs the U.S., U.K., Australian, and Latin-American markets as a Senior Director of Business Development. His secret to growing the business while staying nimble? Automation.
Automation, the game-changer
From the beginning, Chris knew the RoboRecruiter team would need to rely on automated workflows. But while they initially coded many of these workflows themselves, this approach wasn't sustainable.
"The downside is that I'd always have to use up engineering resources to build those integrations," says Chris. "And engineering time is always stretched thin."
And resources mattered. At the time, the RoboRecruiter team only had eight employees.
Then Chris remembered Zapier, which he'd signed up for in 2014 when it was still in beta. He realized it could be a real game-changer for his team.
"I thought that it would be better if we could just use Zapier to hook up to all our different systems," Chris says.
Moving faster as a startup
Using Zapier, RoboRecruiter set up when to message and follow-up with candidates, and, when a candidate replies, where to send that response (like to an email or a centralized CRM).
Then if a candidate says they're available, they use automation to send a different response based on those parameters. "Very quickly," Chris says, "we can map all of those things out in Zapier."
The result is simple: RoboRecruiter's engineers get to work on the core product, which is exactly where they're needed most.
In turn, RoboRecruiter's non-engineers gain the skills needed to have an impact, which means the company can grow faster without putting a drain on its engineering resources. "That's the net result," Chris says. "We've been able to move much faster."
Building a seamless sales process
Not only is Chris' team now more agile with automation, but Zapier has also helped the company increase conversions.
Their sales process plays a big part. Whenever a new sales opportunity comes through their sales app, Zapier automatically routes that opportunity to another platform (where every team member can see it), which then triggers a series of follow-ups. This workflow then notifies the right salesperson with a reminder to follow up with the lead.
The result is higher conversion rates at a lower internal cost.
"That's because we can test something out and go, 'Well, that didn't really work,''" explains Chris. "The cost to change it is very low because you can turn to the Zapier editor and make a quick change, instead of having to talk to the engineering group again and disturbing them."
Meeting customers at their point of need
But Zapier doesn't just help the RoboRecruiter team be more productive in their jobs. It also provides value to customers.
"There was a huge demand for integrations from customers," says Chris. "They were coming to us asking, 'Can you build an integration with XYZ app? Can you add this piece to your product?''"
At first, Chris thought that building native integrations added a lot of value to the company, but he quickly realized they couldn't keep up. "The reality is that we couldn't move fast enough to build all those pieces. And again, it was dragging engineers off core product building."
So Chris turned to Zapier again—only this time, to become a partner.
Today, customers can connect their apps to RoboRecruiter through Zapier and automate their own internal processes. "It's also allowed our customers to be able to do the same things with their data," says Chris, "which is huge, without us being the bottleneck."
Since joining Gupshup, Chris has also built out a Gupshup integration allowing all Gupshup customers the ability to connect their apps to Gupshup’s messaging capabilities, like WhatsApp!
The value of upskilling
As a CEO of a burgeoning company, Zapier has helped Chris Collins move faster as a business, save vital engineering resources across the board, and upskill his other team members.
"I've found that my staff enjoy [using Zapier], and have been able to understand it very quickly. That's the big thing; it's easy to pick up and get going quickly."
Today, his staff use Zapier internally for work, but also have their personal accounts to use on the weekends for shopping lists and the like.
He explains how he sees Zapier's value: "Taking some data, doing something with it, and then spitting it out in a different way is one of the big core principles of engineering. In Zapier, you're doing those core elements. Some data is coming in, you're then doing something with that data. And then you're putting it out somewhere else. And I think [Zapier] demystifies a lot of those areas."
