Recruitment firm reaches candidates and clients at scale

Segment: Recruitment / staffing agency

Snapshot: Carbon Talent · tech recruiting · London, UK · 140 mailboxes

The challenge

Carbon Talent runs outbound on two fronts: sourcing engineers for client roles, and winning new client mandates from heads of talent. Mixing both motions on the same domains was tanking reply rates, candidate-sourcing volume was getting their BD emails flagged, and a single bad week of deliverability could cost them a five-figure placement fee.

Why they chose Icemail

Per-motion domain isolation, predictable per-mailbox pricing, and unified reply management across teams made Icemail the obvious fit. Free replacements meant they could lean into volume without worrying about losing a domain mid-campaign.

The solution

Carbon Talent split their sending into two isolated workspaces, 90 mailboxes for candidate sourcing, 50 for client BD, each on their own domain pool with independent reputation. Both teams work out of a single unified inbox with tagging, so a sourcer never accidentally replies from a BD mailbox (or vice versa).

The results

• 2.4× more candidate replies per week
• Client BD reply rate stabilized at 7.8% (up from a volatile 2–5%)
• Placed 11 senior roles attributable to the new outbound motion in 6 months
• Zero domain blacklist incidents post-migration

"Our recruiters and our BD people finally stopped fighting over the same inbox reputation. Both numbers went up." , Hannah Boateng, Managing Director, Carbon Talent

What''s next: Adding a third workspace for a new executive-search practice launching next quarter.