The recruitment campaign generated 206 applicants, produced a successful hire in a 24-day live period and saved over 45 hours of internal recruitment work. The new capacity also helped Glow Accounts take on two additional clients it may otherwise have struggled to service.
“He’s exactly what we’re looking for… he’s taking responsibility for a load of stuff, and that’s what I wanted more than anything.” – Stephen Crisp, Glow Accounts
The Challenge
Glow Accounts had reached a resourcing pressure point.
The firm was taking on substantial new client work while an existing team member was preparing to leave. Founder, Stephen Crisp, needed more capacity across bookkeeping and accounting, but the exact shape of the hire was deliberately flexible: the right person might be a strong bookkeeper, a broader accountant, or someone able to operate across both.
The underlying requirement was much clearer. Glow needed someone technically capable who could take ownership of work rather than allow it to keep flowing back to Stephen.
Without that additional capacity, Stephen expected client delivery to suffer and his own time to remain consumed by firefighting.
The Outcome
- 206 applicants
- 13 recruiter interviews
- 12 qualified candidates
- 1 successful hire
- 24-days to hire
- 45.2 hours of client’s time saved
- Two additional clients Glow said it may otherwise have struggled to service
The Approach
A role that needed more than technical competence
Initially, Glow was considering two potential profiles.
One was a more senior accountant who could take client work away from Stephen. The other was a hands-on bookkeeping hire who could manage day-to-day delivery and outsourced bookkeeping activity.
The technical brief included bookkeeping and self-assessment experience, with broader accounting knowledge valuable. Just as importantly, Glow wanted someone capable of taking responsibility for the bookkeeping workload, deciding what to handle internally, what to delegate and how to keep the work moving.
That combination made the hiring decision more nuanced than simply finding someone with the right software or qualifications.
The previous hiring approach
Without Nexstema, Glow expected it would either try to recruit directly or return to a traditional recruitment agency.
Stephen’s previous agency experience could produce good people, but he felt the cost did not always reflect the recruitment work being carried out. He also described receiving individual CVs periodically rather than seeing evidence that a broad market had been systematically searched and filtered.
Nexstema’s approach
Nexstema structured the search around Glow’s real hiring problem rather than forcing the requirement into one narrow job title.
The team prepared parallel bookkeeping and accountant briefs, distributed the opportunities across multiple job boards and initially prioritised organic reach before considering paid advertising.
The campaign organically attracted 206 applicants, including 165 during the first two weeks, proving that additional advertising spend was unnecessary.
That changed the recruitment problem from “Can we find applicants?” to “How do we protect Stephen’s time while identifying the candidates genuinely worth considering?”
Nexstema handled the initial filtering and recruiter interviews. First-stage interviews were recorded so Glow could review candidates without repeating introductory screening calls, while recommendations allowed unsuitable applicants to be removed before consuming more management time.
Stephan found Nexstema’s preliminary interviews particularly valuable because they reduced the amount of time he had to spend deciding whether candidates were worth progressing.
Weekly campaign reviews were designed to use the live market response to adjust criteria -tightening the brief if too many candidates were getting through or reconsidering requirements if the pipeline was too narrow.
Refining the campaign as the evidence came in
One useful lesson emerged during the process.
Stephen later felt the initial screening criteria could have been narrower, meaning several candidates reached the recruiter interview who could have been filtered earlier. The team responded by tightening the criteria during the campaign.
That refinement mattered because the market itself was highly responsive.
From 206 applicants, only 13 (6.3%) progressed to recruiter interviews. Twelve of those 13 were assessed as qualified, a 92.3% interview-to-qualified conversion rate.
The successful candidate demonstrated the combination Glow had been looking for: broad bookkeeping experience, VAT and self-assessment capability, management-account experience, client communication skills and previous experience overseeing outsourced bookkeeping teams.
The Result
The role was successfully filled following a 24-day live campaign.
The impact was visible quickly.
Glow initially asked the new hire to clear a backlog of sole-trader accounts, followed by self assessments. He also took ownership of clean-up work for new clients with difficult bookkeeping records, turning one piece of work around within days and accompanying Stephen to client meetings.
Within weeks, Stephen described the appointment as exactly what Glow had been looking for, particularly because the hire was taking responsibility and moving work forward without everything returning to the owner.
Most importantly, the extra capacity affected what the business could take on.
“We’ve been able to take on two new clients that I think we would have struggled to take on and service.” – Stephen Crisp, Glow Accounts
Recruitment cost
Glow’s own comparison was direct. Stephen said the successful hire felt like it had been achieved for “less than a quarter of the price” he would have expected through the agency route.
The campaign report also estimates that handling job-board distribution, screening, shortlisting, interview coordination and hiring-process support saved Glow 45.2 hours (approximately 6.5 working days of internal recruitment activity).
For a business already trying to release its founder from day-to-day delivery, protecting that time was part of the result.
Need capacity, not another pile of CVs?
When a vacancy is already pulling senior people back into operational work, recruitment needs to protect their time – not consume more of it.
Nexstema combines broad sourcing, structured filtering and first-stage screening to help hiring managers spend their time on the candidates genuinely worth meeting.
