About ANG Climate
ANG Climate is a specialist recruitment firm focused on the smart buildings industry, a fast-growing subsector of proptech. The team recruits predominantly for commercial roles, alongside technical positions such as engineers, project managers and product managers. Now three years into business, ANG Climate operates across London and New York and is expanding into Europe.
We spoke with Christian Thomson-Frost, Founder of ANG Climate, about moving away from legacy CRMs, building a searchable talent pool, and the year of growth that followed. Watch the whole conversation here:
Searching for a CRM That Fit the Way They Work
Before joining Atlas, Christian had cycled through four different recruitment CRMs in just two years. None of them stuck. Coming from a sales background, he had never enjoyed working with CRMs, and the legacy platforms on the market only reinforced that feeling.
“Every six months I was changing. They were just so antiquated. They didn’t do what I wanted them to do,” Christian explains.
The bigger platforms, he says, were designed with large enterprise agencies in mind rather than fast-moving specialist firms. “They’re just built for the big guys,” he notes. Atlas was the first system that worked the way he did. As Christian puts it:
“Atlas does CRM things on its own. I don’t need to be updating it, it updates itself.”
The Hidden Cost of a Database Nobody Updates
The most frustrating part of the old workflow was getting candidates into the system and keeping their records current. Manual data entry and unreliable CV parsing meant that records were often incomplete or wrong, so the database never grew into anything useful.
“The CV parsing was terrible with the other ones,” Christian said. “I wasn’t building a database at all.”
The result was that every role began from zero. Rather than checking existing records, Christian relied almost entirely on a paid sourcing seat on a professional networking platform, and a single search could take three full days. With five searches open at once, that added up to two or three weeks of repeated effort. “It was a new search every time,” he adds.
“Atlas has now just unlocked a new world and realm of opportunities.”
Building a Talent Pool in Seconds
With Atlas, adding a candidate became so fast that it stopped feeling like admin at all. Christian can view a profile on a professional networking platform, add the candidate to Atlas in a click, and the full profile is populated automatically. Uploading a CV then enriches the record further.
“It takes, what, 30 seconds to fully do. Probably 10 seconds, depends how quick your computer is,” Christian said.
For Christian, the real value isn’t the minutes saved on each record. It’s that the speed has turned database building into a habit, for candidates and prospects alike. “It’s not about the time, it’s more about what I’m building that I wasn’t doing before,” he explains.
How ANG Climate Turned Past Candidates Into Instant Shortlists
That growing database quickly began paying off. When a new role came in that closely matched a search from two months earlier, ANG Climate’s resourcer ran the brief through Atlas and surfaced candidates the team had already spoken to. She spent a couple of hours on calls but only a fraction of that time searching.
“She might spend 15 minutes searching. And we had a shortlist ready like that,” Christian said.
The team still sources new candidates to add to the mix, but every search now starts from a strong foundation. “It gave us a base that we’ve never had before,” Christian notes. That’s now the goal for every role ANG Climate works on: check the existing pool first, and only run new searches when they’re genuinely needed.
A Platform That Runs in the Background
When asked which feature clicked first, Christian found it hard to name just one. Integrations brought everything into one place, and the Atlas Notetaker joins every meeting, so notes are captured without any effort. AI-powered auto tagging, based on calls and CVs, means he no longer needs to categorise candidates by hand.
“I hate admin. I really despise admin, and Atlas has made sure that I don’t need to do that admin,” Christian said.
He also credits the overall experience of the platform. “It’s the ease of use of the platform. The slickness of it,” he explains. That ease has opened up new habits too, like tracking performance through dashboards. “The analytics side, the numbers, getting all of that is not something I looked at before, but now it’s something I’m starting to track and measure,” he adds.
“It just reduces your admin and it just runs in the background. So you don’t even notice it.”
Candidate Reports That Build Client Trust
If Christian could keep only one Atlas feature, it would be candidate reports. Before Atlas, a shortlist was simply an email with a handful of CVs attached. “I used to just send an email with five CVs attached and say, here’s your shortlist,” he explains.
Now, clients receive a link to a client portal with a polished report for each candidate, CV attached, alongside their experience, profile and any comments. “Before I know it, I’m creating a candidate report in a couple of minutes,” Christian said. Clients have noticed, too, with several complimenting how the shared shortlists look and how easy they are to use.
For Christian, this is part of a wider shift in how ANG Climate operates. “A lot of what Atlas is doing is activating things that I never did before,” he notes. And that has a direct effect on client relationships. “Our clients need to trust us, and this gives them an element of trust,” he adds.
The Results: Biggest Year Yet
Comparing the 12 months before Atlas with the 12 months since, ANG Climate has grown revenue by around 340%. “I’ve had my biggest 12 months by some considerable way,” Christian said.
He puts much of that down to operating as a more professional, structured business. “It’s just solidified processes. I’ve standardised things that I wasn’t doing before,” he explains.
The team now works to a 72-hour window from opening call to shortlist, where building a shortlist used to take a week or two. Time to fill has dropped from around 28 days to 17. Christian also closed his quickest deal ever with Atlas, going from presentation to offer in three and a half working days. The client had been trying to fill the role for well over a month. Christian called a candidate already in his database, presented them the same day as the only candidate on the shortlist, and they were hired three and a half working days later.
Before Atlas, Christian could realistically handle around three roles at once, since each one demanded a new search. Now, with a strong database behind them, the team can run five or six searches at a time, with each one starting from a list of candidates who are already known.
“We might not need to do one new search at all,” Christian notes. “We could probably double the capacity of each person in the company now.”
“An absolute game changer.”
Why Christian Recommends Atlas to Other Recruiters
Christian often finds himself recommending Atlas at industry events, and his pitch is simple: it saves time. Meetings are recorded, notes are written automatically, and reports are built from saved prompts. “It’s just done for you,” he explains.
When asked to put a figure on the weekly admin time Atlas saves him, Christian found it hard to measure, because the admin is simply no longer a burden. “In terms of time saved, infinite,” he said.
As ANG Climate grows across London, New York and Europe, Atlas gives the team a foundation to scale without adding admin. As Christian puts it: “If you want to save time, you join Atlas.”
