• Customer: throxy
• Headquarters: London
• Company size: 100 employees
• Uses Metaview for: Pipeline sourcing with fillmore; Personalized outreach Maintaining high hiring bar; Recruiting efficiency

throxy is Y Combinator's first AI native outbound sales agency that books qualified meetings for B2B companies. In just 12 months, the business grew from six employees to nearly 100, creating enormous demand for exceptional sales and engineering talent across teams in London, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.

Talent leader Alistair Russell was tasked with finding enough great candidates to sustain that growth. The company has an unusually high hiring bar, and traditional sourcing tools couldn’t identify the distinctive backgrounds and achievements Alistair looks for.

Alistair was first introduced to Metaview after EMEA Director of Sales Dan Yeates appeared as a guest on throxy’s Inside The Pipeline podcast. 

Today, throxy uses fillmore by Metaview to find exceptional candidates, automate outreach and scheduling, and scale recruiting capacity without adding more manual work.

Finding the top 1% of candidates beyond conventional recruiting filters

Before joining throxy, Alistair spent four years in venture capital. "One thing we used to obsess about in VC was looking for outliers. If you're going to build a very successful business, you need to make sure you’re finding those 1% hires."

Alistair looks for a founder mentality, exceptional drive, and evidence that they've achieved something remarkable. throxy's team includes a top-40 golfer in South Africa, a national-level water polo player, and many exceptional academic achievers.

"Our top performers had evidence of high performance in sport, music or acting."

But finding these candidates is harder than you’d think. Sporting backgrounds aren’t usually a feature of LinkedIn profiles. 

With Metaview, Alistair can describe the characteristics he's looking for in natural language, including specific sporting achievements or unusual career backgrounds. The sourcing agent then researches potential matches beyond conventional LinkedIn filters.

It’s a sourcing strategy that’s both broad in scope and highly targeted in outcomes. And all without costing additional recruiting hours. 

Automating everything from sourcing to scheduling

When Alistair first took responsibility for recruiting at throxy, he was managing hiring alongside his operational responsibilities. As the company expanded, the workload became increasingly difficult to manage.

"Automatically sourcing candidates is great. But if I've got to manually reach out to those candidates, it's a serious time cost to me. And I didn't really have that time."

He needed to automate the entire top of the recruiting funnel. And that’s exactly what fillmore does.

Working directly in Slack, fillmore manages candidate discovery, research, personalized outreach, follow-ups, and interview scheduling. Instead of managing each stage manually, Alistair can concentrate on speaking with candidates and deciding who meets throxy's hiring standards.

The process also improves as Alistair learns more about the candidates coming through.

"If I interview candidates who clearly aren't right for throxy, I feed that back into the Slack engine very quickly and make sure that we don't book any more meetings with that profile of candidates." fillmore adjusts its targeting to avoid scheduling more candidates with similar profiles.

Alistair eliminates repetitive tasks, but also builds a recruiting operation that continuously identifies, engages, and schedules promising candidates. And it just keeps getting better.

Sending tailored outreach that actually hooks candidates

Getting top level candidates to respond may be even more challenging than finding them. Particularly when they aren't actively job hunting. Each message must be carefully crafted, which is near-impossible at scale.

fillmore automates the whole thing. It investigates each candidate’s background and uses relevant details to explain why they would thrive in the role. fillmore reaches out through LinkedIn and email, using accounts and sender identities connected by throxy's team.

Alistair has spoken with people who were so surprised by the details in their outreach messages that they agreed to an interview partly to understand how throxy had discovered them.

"I've been on calls with candidates where they said, ‘we'd have never taken a call, but the level of detail in your outreach amazed me. I wanted to get on the call to find out how you even found that out about me.’"

The result is outreach that feels genuinely researched, even when the recruiting process is operating at scale.

This personalization is a major reason for throxy's strong candidate response rates. More importantly, it helps the company reach people who might otherwise never have considered speaking with the team.

Turning a sourcing hire into another full-time interviewer

As throxy's South African sales operation expanded, Alistair needed to interview more candidates. But he also couldn’t lower the company's high hiring standards.

So Alistair hired talent community manager Jeremy to source the pipeline.

And then fillmore changed the plan entirely. 

"His mandate was to fill my calendar with as many interviews as possible each week. But fillmore is doing that for us on its own.” 

With sourcing, outreach, and scheduling already automated, Jeremy could spend his time interviewing candidates alongside Alistair, effectively doubling the team's interview capacity. “He's been able to take 80 to 100 interviews a week, because he hasn't had to do any sourcing work."

Rather than adding another person to manage the top of the funnel, throxy could put more human attention into evaluating candidates and making hiring decisions. 

Complete recruiting control directly in Slack

throxy’s hiring bar is very high. Alistair estimates only one in 30 or 40 candidates receives an offer. So automation can’t come at the cost of control or quality.

With fillmore operating directly in Slack, he can check progress, request outreach statistics, provide feedback, and adjust candidate targeting without waiting for manual reports or coordinating with an external recruiting team.

Alistair saw that several successful employees had previously worked in retail. He decided to test whether retail workers across South Africa could be a promising source of sales talent.

With fillmore, he launched the search, monitored outreach activity, and saw how candidates were responding. After a week or two, he had enough information to decide whether to continue targeting that group.

Rather than committing to a sourcing strategy and waiting for results, Alistair could evaluate its performance and make adjustments as the search progressed.

"I could quickly see the stats of how much outreach we'd done to them, how those conversations were going, and then make an informed decision a week or two later whether I kept those filters going."

The combination of automation and control is critical. fillmore handles the repetitive recruiting work, while Alistair retains ownership of the hiring strategy, candidate criteria, and final decisions.

Getting up and running in days, then expanding into new roles

For a company growing as quickly as throxy, a lengthy software implementation would just create another problem. Fortunately, Alistair found getting started with fillmore remarkably straightforward.

The team set up its Slack channel, shared the requirements for its sales roles, and began sourcing candidates almost immediately. 

And throxy's ambitions for fillmore extend beyond sales recruiting in South Africa. The team has already started using it to support engineering hiring in London, with plans to expand into other functions as the business grows.

What began as a solution to a pressing sales recruitment challenge is now a central part of how throxy builds its team.

"I'm a big fan of what Metaview is doing. It's massively helped us with our growth plans."