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The recruitment firm reaching candidates and clients at scale

Timothy VaddeJune 8, 2026
The recruitment firm reaching 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.