How Change Recruitment Cut Time to Fill by 25% with Atlas

About Change Recruitment

Change Recruitment is a tech-focused recruitment agency based in Sydney, Australia, operating for just over five years. The team recruits exclusively across tech verticals, including data, AI, and cloud, serving clients across Sydney, Melbourne, and the wider Australian market. 

Ten consultants work the desk, each verticalized into a specific niche, which means deep market mapping and a strong grasp of the candidates and clients within their space. 

We spoke with Mike Hollowbread, the Co-Founder of Change Recruitment, about the switch to Atlas and the impact it has had on his team’s workflow and results. Watch the whole conversation here:

Why Change Recruitment Started Looking for Something New 

Change Recruitment had used Vincere for several years before making the switch. The decision to look elsewhere wasn’t triggered by a single bad experience, but by a moment of realization. Mike had a call with a recruiter running a go-to-market stack, and seeing what was possible with AI made him question how far behind his own team had fallen.

Mike explains that Vincere hadn’t released any new notable features the whole time he was there. As AI tools started gaining traction, Change Recruitment didn’t see the kind of adoption Mike believed the technology deserved. Rather than trying to retrofit their existing system, the team decided it was time to look at what else was out there, beginning their search around March of the previous year.

The old workflow itself was part of the problem. Consultants were juggling multiple point solutions, a sourcing tool, an outreach platform, and a separate email sequencer, just to accomplish what should have been a single connected process. Mike puts it plainly:

“The workflow was broken up into a few different tools. It didn’t really work.”

The bigger cost wasn’t just time. It was consistency. Notes wouldn’t make it into the system, updates lived in personal spreadsheets, and visibility across the business suffered. Mike estimated the team was losing ten to twelve hours a week to this kind of scattered admin.

From First Login to Full Team Adoption 

What ultimately pulled Change Recruitment toward Atlas was the business development tracking functionality. Mike had seen Jordan’s videos on the BD side of the platform and recognized something his own team had been trying to build internally.

“That was the standout feature that got us into the business, and the feature we used the most when we first started using the platform.”

Having every type of business opportunity tracked in one central place, rather than spread across individual spreadsheets with each consultant’s own system, solved a problem Change Recruitment had been living with for a while.

Getting the wider team up to speed didn’t take long. Mike credits the platform’s design as much as the training sessions Atlas provided. As he describes it, the workflows themselves needed some adjustment, but the platform logic made sense from the start:

“Most things flow one to the other, the UI’s clean, the buttons all do something that makes sense.”

Within a couple of weeks, the whole team was running on Atlas, and several of the process changes ended up being improvements in their own right, cutting out steps rather than adding new ones.

From a Day of Sourcing to a Few Hours 

Sourcing is where Mike saw the sharpest change. Under the old system, getting a single CV into the CRM, skill-coded and attached to a job, could take five minutes before any outreach had even started. Add a separate campaign tool into the mix, and one candidate could easily eat up several minutes of admin time before a consultant made contact.

“With the combination of the Chrome extension, the API, and the Magic Search itself, you can get a short list in ten minutes and have outreach out to them.”

For Mike, this isn’t purely a speed story. He’s just as focused on the consistency it creates:

“Every candidate gets outreach, they get multiple points of contact. So it’s not only the speed, but it’s also the quality that goes up.”

More Leads, Faster Fills, Greater Capacity 

Since adopting Atlas, Change Recruitment has recorded two of its strongest months in the past three years. Mike shared the underlying metrics behind that growth: leads in the system are up 25%, and time to fill has dropped by 25%.

“We’ve had two of our biggest months since we brought Atlas in, in the post-COVID era, which obviously is great.”

Capacity has grown alongside those numbers. Mike estimates the team can now handle around 50% more in terms of delivery. Work that used to take a full day of sourcing can now be finished in a matter of hours, freeing consultants to spend more time actually speaking with candidates rather than managing admin around them.

From a Half-Hour Job to Five Minutes 

Asked which single feature had the biggest impact on results, Mike’s answer wasn’t about one standout tool. It was about the accumulation of smaller ones. He points to the recently launched skills feature for candidate CVs and reports as a strong example:

“That for me was a half-hour job. It now takes five minutes.”

Bulk CV sending, automated tagging, and small workflow shortcuts don’t individually feel like headline features, Mike says, but together they smooth out the entire working day. He also points to the pace of product development itself as part of the value:

“You guys are bringing out stuff every two, every week, two, three things a week. It’s hard to keep up.”

Before AI-powered reporting, building a candidate report meant manually working through a Word document and merging it into a PDF, roughly a twenty-minute job on its own. That process now takes minutes.

Atlas – the Recruitment Platform Is a Massive Time Saver

When asked what he’d tell a recruiter considering Atlas, Mike didn’t hesitate:

“Atlas’s use of AI is the most intuitive that I’ve seen. It’s built into the platform in every way that’s useful, and you don’t really have to think about it too much.”

He believes agencies that aren’t yet AI-native stand to gain the most, describing Atlas as a way to take advantage of AI progress without needing to understand the technology deeply first.

Clients have noticed the difference too, even if indirectly. Mike says delivery has sped up, and automated pipeline updates mean candidates are kept better informed throughout the process. Asked what he’d tell his past self before switching, his answer was one word: sooner.

If he could keep only one feature, Mike says it would be the AI chat function, largely down to his own admitted weak spot:

“I’ve got a terrible memory and I’m not very good at taking notes. Being able to immediately ask what did I say on that call, what am I meant to follow up on, is super important.”

Asked to sum up Atlas in three words, Mike landed on: massive time saver.