Growing A Geofencing & AI Recruitment Technology Company (For Easier & Better Hiring)

In this episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guests, Stephen Anderson (CEO) and Marc Harrison (Account Director) discuss how crooton is transforming recruitment marketing with hyper-targeted, data-driven strategies.

crooton is a recruitment marketing business specialising in location-based recruitment marketing powered by its proprietary, highly targeted technology. The company helps employers promote job vacancies directly to the right people in the right locations at the right time, rather than relying on candidates actively searching for roles. This approach enables organisations to reach both active and passive candidates, improving the quality of applications while often reducing cost compared with traditional recruitment agencies.

By combining AI-driven insights with human expertise (“AI + HI”), crooton uses data to inform targeting while its recruitment specialists refine campaigns for maximum effectiveness. The team—made up of recruiters, data experts, developers, and digital marketers—designs and delivers tailored campaigns that improve ROI, strengthen employer brand visibility, and attract candidates who are more likely to stay longer and perform well.

Founded in 2019 by Stephen Anderson, crooton was created to challenge traditional recruitment models and deliver better outcomes for employers in terms of cost and candidate quality. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the business supported large-scale NHS recruitment campaigns, which helped establish its reputation for high-impact, location-based hiring solutions across healthcare and other high-volume sectors.

Today, crooton works with SMEs, global brands, and non-profit organisations to deliver strategic recruitment and digital marketing campaigns worldwide. Its technology and approach have also expanded into broader marketing services, enabling clients to run highly targeted, location-driven campaigns that connect them with the right audiences at scale.

You’ll hear practical strategies for finding consulting clients, marketing for HR & workplace consultants, and using AI in consulting. Whether you identify as HR, workplace, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to attract clients, win contracts, and grow sustainably.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How hyper-targeted geofencing campaigns help win large recruitment projects
• The emerging challenges (and solutions) with AI-driven application volumes in recruitment
• Why crooton’s real-time tools and bespoke approach drive better ROI for recruitment clients

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

Remember to subscribe to our mailing list to get notified of new episodes.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode Transcript

Episode 313: How To Attract High-Volume Recruitment Clients With Geofencing & AI – with Stephen Anderson and Marc Harrison from crooton

Ben [00:00:28]:
Hello and welcome back. Thanks very much for joining me. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with two fabulous guys from a very interesting company called crooton.

I’m joined by Stephen Anderson and Marc Harrison. They’re both from crooton, which I know through their work in the recruitment marketing space. They have a particular focus on location-based targeting through geofencing — some very interesting technology. I met Stephen recently in Dublin at the Disrupt Dublin event, and that’s how we connected.

I already know a little bit about the recruitment marketing and geofencing side of the business, but they’ve also got some very exciting developments in the pipeline for companies looking to increase either the volume or quality of applications and improve their recruitment processes.

But before we get into that, guys, thank you very much for joining me today. It’s great to have you.

Stephen Anderson [00:01:11]:
Great to be here. Thanks, Ben.

Ben [00:01:14]:
I know we’ve met and spoken before about crooton, but maybe I could start by asking you both two things: what is crooton, what does it do, and who does it help?

Stephen Anderson [00:01:22]:
Crooton is a recruitment marketing business. We typically work with large SMEs through to enterprise-level clients. A typical campaign we might work on is for an employer looking to target and reach a very specific audience, often based around location.

One example was Marriott Hotels opening a large new hotel in the States and needing to recruit around 300 staff. They wanted to target people in the local area — people who were already working in hospitality, retail, or similar industries.

We build campaigns based on people being in specific physical locations. Our geofencing technology allows us to create an audience of people who are actually in a particular place — for example, working in a specific hotel or living in a certain area. We then deliver employer brand messaging or details about specific vacancies directly to that audience.

Over the last six years, we’ve developed a range of additional recruitment marketing tactics. We do a lot with digital out-of-home advertising, such as digital billboards in specific locations.

The days when you needed a million-pound budget to run a TV campaign are gone. We can now deliver highly targeted, localised TV advertising, podcasts, and other digital channels. Our core market is typically high-volume recruitment with a very specific requirement around location — helping employers reach the right people in the right place.

Ben [00:03:02]:
That makes so much sense. But just in case it’s gone over people’s heads, the way I think about it is that companies like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have huge budgets, and they’re everywhere all the time. That works for them because they can run nationwide campaigns.

But when you’re a business like the Marriott Hotels example you mentioned, where they’re opening a specific location, you don’t want to go nationwide because your budget and ad spend just disappear. Is that the concept?

Stephen Anderson [00:03:25]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think our focus has always been around helping employers manage their recruitment marketing spend much more effectively. As you say, if you’re Coca-Cola and you’re running a brand awareness campaign, you’re going national. But that’s not what a lot of our clients are looking for.

They want to deliver a message in a very specific area to a highly targeted audience. It’s all about delivering a strong ROI from the campaign and minimising wasted spend. You don’t want to be spending money targeting an area that’s an hour’s commute away when, realistically, your audience may only travel 30 minutes for a particular role. Our core focus is ROI and reducing wastage by making sure your message reaches the right people.

Ben [00:04:13]:
Got it. Are there certain roles, industries, or types of businesses that are more likely to use this approach?

Stephen Anderson [00:04:19]:
My timing in terms of launching this business wasn’t ideal. We launched in January, and then the world went into lockdown and recruitment slowed significantly.

As a result, we had to focus on the sectors where hiring was still happening. Healthcare was one of those areas, so in that first six to nine months, we were recruiting lots of nurses, social care workers, and working with the NHS on those types of roles.

We started to build a strong reputation for ourselves in the healthcare space, and that has continued. We do a lot of work in healthcare, both in the UK and globally, but we also work extensively across logistics, retail, and hospitality.
These tend to be relatively high-churn, high-volume sectors where we operate, but it’s not exclusive to them. We’ve also worked on campaigns where we were looking for specialist roles, such as developers in specific locations around the world.

Ben [00:05:16]:
Marc, can I ask for your perspective on what crooton does and how it helps?

Marc Harrison [00:05:19]:
One of the biggest things, Ben, is the move towards hyper-targeting. There are traditional channels that people use, but as you mentioned earlier, if you’re looking to open a new location, traditional channels don’t always allow you to reach only the people you want to engage with. As a result, a lot of your spend can be wasted. Clients work with us to build audiences where the expectation is that those people have the right skills and experience they’re looking for.

When you deliver content to those audiences — whether that’s vacancy advertising or employer brand messaging — it’s much more likely to be relevant and noticed. We all see thousands of adverts every day, and we remember very few of them. The ones we remember are usually the ones that are relevant to us.

For example, if I’ve recently been looking at trainers online and then I start seeing adverts for trainer offers, I’m more likely to pay attention because it connects with something I’m already interested in.

The same applies to recruitment. If someone starts seeing content that says, “We have vacancies for electrical and mechanical engineers,” and they’re an electrical and mechanical engineer, they think, “That’s relevant to me. What are they doing? Let me click and find out.” There are real advantages to delivering a message that directly matches the audience. It helps make sure your spend is attracting the people you actually want to engage with.

Ben [00:06:52]:
And I know you’re developing — I’m not sure what you call it, whether it’s a platform, a product, or a service — so it’s not just geotargeting and geofencing. You’ve got other things in the pipeline as well?

Stephen Anderson [00:07:02]:
Yes. There’s clearly a growing issue with AI driving not necessarily quality applications, but a huge increase in application volume. AI tools have made it very easy for candidates to customise CVs, tailor applications, and apply for dozens of jobs within seconds.

There is now a huge volume of applications coming in for certain roles, and internal recruitment teams are struggling under the weight of that.
In an ideal world, you’d review every application and every CV properly, but that’s becoming much harder. We’re hearing real examples of clients receiving over 1,000 applications for a single role.

There’s no realistic way they can spend three minutes reviewing every CV. So we’re launching a new service called Crucial, which is a tool that analyses detailed job descriptions, reviews incoming applicants, and applies scoring and weighting to help evaluate applications more effectively.

And this isn’t just about screening people out through job boards. The objective isn’t to reject candidates — it’s to help identify where the quality candidates are coming from.

For example, if one channel or job board is generating 300 applications but only one is a quality applicant that you’d consider progressing, you may want to reduce your spend on that channel. But another channel might only generate 10 applications, and five of those could be strong candidates. In that case, you may want to shift more budget towards that channel in real time.

So this tool sits in the middle, analysing applications coming in in real time and moving spend accordingly. It also allows the employer to define: “How many good-quality applicants do I realistically want to see and take through to interview?” Once that threshold has been reached, you can pause the campaign. That means you’re not continuing to spend hundreds or thousands on advertising a role when you already have enough strong candidates to review.

There are people in the space doing similar things, but the focus has traditionally been on application volumes — moving money towards the channels that generate more applications for less cost. But actually, that’s not always what you want. That can just create noise. I want to identify quality applications and base my spend on that, because the metrics are very different. Focusing purely on volume can seriously increase your cost per quality application.

We’re really excited about it because it feels like a natural development for us. The focus is still on managing recruitment spend more effectively, but shifting the focus from volume to quality.

Ben [00:10:10]:
Very clever. You just gave me a bit of a flashback. I think it was my first HR manager role when I thought I was being really clever by putting a unique code word into each job advert. Whether it was a newspaper advert, an online listing, or a local job board, I’d say: “Please quote this code.” That worked for one job — maybe a finance manager role or something similar — but doing that at scale, when everything is online across multiple job boards, different locations, and even different countries at the same time, would be incredibly difficult.

I really like this because, especially when the economy is under pressure or when applications are increasing, you suddenly have a huge amount of sorting and filtering to do. This sounds like a really effective way of identifying where the quality candidates are coming from, so you can either increase investment there or pause the channels that aren’t performing. That’s really smart.

Stephen Anderson [00:10:53]:
Absolutely. There’s a really strong AI-generated assessment of each applicant. There are obviously risks associated with using AI to screen people out, and that’s not what this is about.

The purpose is to help highlight the strongest candidates. For example, if someone is the 999th applicant but happens to be an excellent match, they’ll be flagged and brought to the top rather than getting buried in the pile. There’s a real risk when you receive hundreds of applications. You spend the first few days reviewing candidates, and then strong applicants who apply later can easily be missed. This makes sure those candidates are identified and highlighted.

We also believe there are significant savings to be made simply by stopping campaigns when you’ve reached your target number of quality applicants. If you’ve already got six strong candidates, there’s no reason to keep spending. You could potentially save 50% on your job board spend by managing campaigns this way.

Ben [00:11:54]:
Marc, any thoughts on this?

Marc Harrison [00:11:55]:
You’ve covered most of it already, and I think it’s really important that Stephen highlighted that this process doesn’t exclude or reject anyone. One of my clients recently posted a vacancy and, on this occasion, it was a single role they needed to fill. They received around 500 applications, and it took the team days to work through them all.

With this tool, that ranking process could have happened in moments. I completely understand the point around saving money, improving ROI, and reducing spend, but for my day-to-day contacts in recruitment teams, the biggest priority is getting to the right candidates as quickly as possible.
It depends on the sector, but you can easily have someone applying for six different roles from their phone while they’re standing in a queue at Greggs.

For them, it’s less about brand loyalty or thinking, “This is the company I really want to build my career at,” and more about, “I want to get out of my current role and move somewhere else.” In those cases, it’s often speed that hooks them in. If the right candidates are appearing at the top of those rankings, you and your team can act quickly and reach out before competitors do — especially if they’ve already applied elsewhere.

So for these types of roles, speed is key. It’s about moving quickly to engage the right people as soon as they’re identified. That’s really valuable in high-volume recruitment scenarios.

Ben [00:13:21]:
So Marc, for an employer listening to this, why should they work with crooton?

Marc Harrison [00:13:25]:
Good question. The answer is that we’re a strong partner when it comes to understanding exactly what you’re trying to achieve, and working closely with you to build tailored solutions.

This is very much a two-way process. We design activity that is bespoke to your needs, because every organisation is different — different roles, different locations, different regions, and different tactics that work in different contexts.
We focus on helping improve ROI, maximise return on recruitment spend, and reduce the time your teams spend engaging with and ultimately hiring and onboarding candidates.

Another key point is that this isn’t a static process. We don’t just launch a campaign and review it at the end. It’s continuously monitored, optimised, and refined using live data to ensure performance is as strong as possible. All of that insight and feedback is also shared with the client, because transparency and visibility are really important.

Stephen Anderson [00:14:40]:
One of the things we’ve also developed recently is a product and platform we’re calling Atlas. It’s essentially a visualisation tool. When we sit down with a client, we can map out their audience in real time. On a live call, for example, a client might say, “We want to target these specific competitors,” and we can immediately build geofences around those locations.

We can then add additional data layers — for example, targeting specific income groups within a defined area. That map is then generated in real time, and we can overlay different media channels. So we might identify a digital out-of-home advertising board in a specific location and build that into the campaign instantly, with the client’s input.

From there, we run the campaign through our platform, and the final piece of the puzzle is reporting — showing exactly what each channel delivered in each location, including click-through rates and engagement levels.

Nothing has fundamentally changed in terms of what we do, but Atlas gives clients a visual way of seeing it all come together. It’s more intuitive, more tangible, and it really helps demonstrate how campaigns are built and optimised.

Ben [00:16:05]:
There’s so much data available these days. In theory, you can throw it into a chatbot and get answers, but that’s not really how things work at this stage.
And as Marc mentioned earlier, talent acquisition teams are incredibly busy. It’s a demanding role, so there isn’t always time to step back and look at the bigger picture.

That’s why I really like Atlas. It helps clients get the best out of their recruitment — not just in terms of volume, but also quality, and ultimately doing it in a more efficient way that frees up their time.

Three big value points there. I know you also have a great online magazine, The Untapped, which covers stories that matter in the recruitment industry.

Stephen Anderson [00:16:52]:
It’s not just an online product either — you actually produce it as a hard copy as well, which you take to recruitment events and similar industry gatherings.

Ben [00:17:00]:
That’s a smart approach. So, for people listening, what are you doing to grow crooton and get the word out there?

Stephen Anderson [00:17:05]:
We use many of the same channels and tactics we deliver for our clients.
For example, geofencing works very well for us. If there’s a high concentration of decision-makers in recruitment marketing attending a trade show, we can geofence that specific location.

Even if we’re not physically there, we can still build an audience of anyone who enters that event space and serve them digital display advertising about crooton and our services for the following month.

We can also combine that with digital out-of-home activity. So if there are billboards outside venues like Olympia, and we know attendees will be passing through at specific times, we can place ads there and reach people as they arrive and leave. We also attend a lot of industry events, recruitment conferences, blogs, and podcasts. And I’d say Marc is our standout when it comes to events — engaging with people and having those conversations face to face.

Marc Harrisonn [00:18:19]:
Yeah — I’m happiest when I’m face to face with real people. And I have to say, going to events, conferences, and think tanks is also a brilliant opportunity to get in front of clients you don’t necessarily see on a regular basis. Pre-COVID, we were much more used to meeting in person. Since then, we’ve become so comfortable with technology that a lot of communication has moved online. But I do miss that face-to-face interaction. So being at events is fantastic. When I talk to people about what we’re able to do — how refined we can make audience targeting — and I see their reactions, it’s usually one of two things: either, “Is this even legal?” (and of course it is — fully compliant across every region we operate in), or, “This is the best thing since fire.” Either way, it always makes me smile. It’s a really great way to engage with people in person.

Stephen Anderson [00:19:18]:
I think partnerships are important as well, and that’s something we’re really focused on at the moment. Whether that’s with other tech providers in our space who complement what we do, or with RPOs — we already do quite a lot of work with them, particularly when they’re pitching to larger clients. There are a number of partnership routes we’re already exploring, but it’s definitely a key focus for us moving forward.

Ben [00:19:46]:
That’s an interesting point on partnerships, because I think a lot of businesses miss it. They think it’s just a formal arrangement where you refer business, take a percentage, and document everything in a contract — which is fine.

But there are so many other ways to collaborate: co-marketing, co-promotion, writing articles together, running webinars, and much more. So I want to put you on the spot before we wrap up — looking ahead, especially in recruitment and talent acquisition, what’s coming next? What should people be preparing for?

Marc Harrison [00:20:19]:
Advances in AI are an unstoppable force — it’s only going to continue impacting more and more of our working lives. If AI is doing more of the heavy lifting, including tasks that skilled professionals traditionally handled, then I think a strong position for talent acquisition professionals will be focusing on understanding organisational development.

They’ll need to be able to anticipate future hiring needs, see where demand is coming from, and start building relationships early — before roles even formally exist. That ability to think ahead and nurture talent pipelines will become increasingly important.

Stephen Anderson [00:21:05]:
I agree with Marc. AI and the tools available are incredibly powerful, and they add a really important layer. But I wouldn’t underestimate the value of experienced talent acquisition professionals in the process. There still needs to be ownership, oversight, and validation. We have a small in-house recruitment team that runs more managed campaigns and works directly on specific roles for clients.

We’re now even being asked whether our team can proactively speak to applicants, because while AI tools can surface strong-looking candidates, once you actually speak to them, you sometimes find gaps between presentation and reality. That human validation step is still essential. It’s difficult to fully automate that level of judgement. Human ownership in parts of the process is not going away anytime soon.

Ben [00:22:08]:
If people want to learn more about crooton, what you do, or potentially explore working or partnering with you, what should they do next?

Stephen Anderson [00:22:16]:
They’re very welcome to contact me directly — I’m Stephen Anderson, you can find me on LinkedIn or via stephen@crooton.com. Or they can reach out to Marc — that’s marc@crooton.com.

Ben [00:22:30]:
Perfect — www.crooton.com. Thank you so much. It’s really impressive to see how you’re helping employers manage volume, improve quality, and streamline their recruitment and talent acquisition processes. I also really like the way you’re going about it. Wishing you the best of luck, and thanks very much for sharing your story today.

Topics covered: how to find consulting clients, marketing for HR consultants, using AI in consulting, recruitment consultants, business growth strategies for consultants

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