IT recruitment company saves 30 hours a week prospecting with Hunter

Meet Kovasys

Kovasys IT Recruitment Agency is a firm based in Toronto, Canada, serving clients across Canada and the US for the past 20 years. 

Its founder, Alex Kovalenko, focuses on placing OT consultants and permanent employees across Toronto, Montreal, New York, and Florida. 

Their sweet spot is finding highly specialized talent for niche markets, such as supplying SAP consultants for massive government entities or trade developers for the banking sector. 

Their target buyers are established organizations with over 100 employees, specifically reaching out to senior-level contacts like CTOs and Directors of HR.

The challenge

Generating high-quality leads in the highly competitive recruitment sector is notoriously difficult. 

For Kovasys, the biggest bottleneck was the large volume of manual research required to identify the right hiring managers. 

Their research teams would spend hours compiling lists of potential targets, but the turnaround time was painfully slow.

Painfully, the resulting lists were sometimes of poor quality, leading to time lost and bounces when trying to connect with highly sought-after IT and operations leaders.

Before discovering Hunter, Kovasys relied heavily on a team of data analysts to do the heavy lifting. 

These analysts would manually search LinkedIn for companies of a certain size, identify potential contacts, and then attempt to guess their corporate email addresses. 

Once a list was manually compiled, Kovasys had to pay thousands of dollars annually for a separate verification software just to ensure the emails wouldn't bounce. 

Even with this software, founder Alex Kovalenko still had to perform manual spot checks to ensure the contact was real, testing one out of every 20 leads. This consumed 20 to 30 hours of manual labor every single week.

The solution

Today, Kovasys manages 99% of its lead generation and outreach directly within Hunter. Here is how they transformed their workflow:

1. Easy contact sourcing: Instead of manually guessing emails, they use Hunter’s Discover to quickly generate lists of contacts in specific regions and industries, such as insurance companies in Toronto. 
2. Automated verification: They rely on Hunter's email verification features to ensure they are reaching only valid email addresses, giving them "peace of mind that it's not someone who doesn't exist".
3. LinkedIn targeting: A favorite feature is the ability to filter for established leads active on LinkedIn, instantly narrowing a list of 1,000 generic names to a highly targeted list of 200 to 300 verified professionals.
4. Set-and-forget campaigns: Once a month, the team builds a targeted list of 1,000 to 2,000 leads and loads them into Hunter's automated email system. They maintain a steady outreach heartbeat, automatically contacting 50 to 75 clients a day.
5. Simple outreach emails: Kovasys keeps its email sequences strictly to one original message and two follow-ups, with copy that is a brief 3-5 sentences, highlighting a specific niche placement they recently completed
6. No hyperlinks: Kovasys avoids placing links in their initial emails, a tactic they tested and proved to increase open and reply rates.

The results

Switching to Hunter allowed Kovasys to eliminate its reliance on manual data-entry teams, saving headcount and recovering 20-30 hours of time every week. 

Alex Kovalenko himself saves a couple of hours each week that he used to spend reviewing numbers and performing manual spot checks.

Beyond the massive efficiency gains, the financial impact has been staggering. 

When asked to quantify the value Hunter has brought to Kovasys, Alex explained:

"I would say millions of dollars if I can put a number on it because of Hunter... It really helps a lot, and I don't even know how we would live without Hunter." 

Alex Kovalenko, Founder, Kovasys IT Recruitment Agency

Because of the steady, automated stream of high-quality leads, Kovasys’ mindset has completely shifted. Alex noted:

"Before, 10 years, 15 years ago, we would have a lead come in and you'd be so excited."

Now, they have the freedom to choose the exact clients they want to work with.

The takeaway

Hunter has fundamentally changed how Kovasys operates, turning a laborious, multi-tool chore into a streamlined revenue engine. 

They no longer worry about empty pipelines or bounced emails; a completely efficient growth channel now exists for the business.

As Alex says himself:

"Hunter automates the whole process. You set it up, and it's done."