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Catch of the Day: With Craig Howard of SourceFlow

  • Ben Fielding
  • 2 days ago
  • 5 min read

Why Most Recruitment Websites Are Costing Agencies Money



In Episode 2 of Catch of the Day, Holly Langley sits down with Craig Howard, Head of Sales at SourceFlow, for fish and chips and a conversation about the one bit of tech every agency has but few use properly: their website. They also get into AI, marketing, and what actually makes a recruitment business trustworthy.


Quick Bite

  • Most agency websites are treated as a credibility badge, not a revenue channel, and that's a missed opportunity

  • Craig's biggest bugbear: pretty websites that are clunky underneath and lose people in three seconds

  • AI is now embedding into websites and marketing workflows, effectively giving smaller agencies a "digital team" they couldn't have afforded before

  • The best-performing agencies in Craig's experience share two things: a tight niche and real investment in marketing

  • Craig's path into recruitment tech started with a lost tooth and a bag of chalk ice, the night before his interview

  • Verdict on the fish and chips: a nine and a half for the fish, six for the chips, eight and a half overall


Meet the Guest

Craig Howard is Head of Sales at SourceFlow, a company that builds websites and marketing technology specifically for the recruitment industry. Craig has spent close to 14 years working alongside his now-boss Darren across three different businesses, starting out selling recruitment websites and moving with the industry as that offering shifted into a full tech platform, one that now embeds AI to help agencies market and compete more efficiently. Connect with Craig on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craighowarduk/


Your Website Is Not Just a Website

Early in the conversation, Craig pushes back on a line a lot of agency owners tell themselves: "my website is just a website." For some businesses, he says, that's genuinely all it needs to be, something that ratifies who they are and gives a startup credibility when they're cold calling. But for agencies with real marketing ambition, a website can be a lead generation tool that does the work a whole team would otherwise be doing.


Craig's biggest bugbear is websites that look great and do nothing. Clunky sites, ones with a ten-minute video nobody watches past the first three seconds, aesthetically polished but built with no thought for whether a candidate or client can actually find what they need quickly. Holly's own bugbear lands on the same theme from a different angle: stock imagery, which she's banned from RE:STACK's site because recruitment is a people business and the website should show the actual team, not a generic man in a tie at a desk.


For an agency, this is the practical takeaway: your website is your shop window, and if it's not being used as a lead generation channel, it's a cost rather than an asset. As Craig puts it, if a client just wants an expensive website they never touch, that's not something SourceFlow wants to be part of either, because it doesn't add value.


AI Is Turning Marketing Into a Team Sport, Even for Small Agencies

Craig describes the change at SourceFlow over the last six months as huge, and says every recruitment business he talks to is seeing the same thing. Two years ago people were nervous about AI. Now SourceFlow has been embedding AI into the platform to help clients move faster, and Craig is candid that in recruitment, most of the value of AI right now is efficiency.


The bigger shift he points to is that agencies are getting close to being able to run a self-optimising website, effectively giving a single marketer a "digital team" built from agents behind them. Historically, marketing was often the first function to get cut when an agency needed to save money. Craig's view is that this now flips: a smaller agency with the right AI-assisted marketing setup can compete with much bigger teams, provided the content going out is genuinely useful, since tools like ChatGPT will pick up on regular, well-targeted content.


For an agency owner, the message is that speed and consistency of content now matters as much as, if not more than, having it perfect, because the tools to keep pace exist and are increasingly accessible even without a big marketing headcount.


The Businesses That Win Have a Niche and a Marketing Engine Behind It

Craig is direct about a pattern he sees across the recruitment businesses SourceFlow works with: too many are founder-led operations running on a laptop, a phone, and a little black book, with no marketing engine behind them. He calls this the "missing trick." In his experience, the best-performing agencies he sees have invested properly in marketing and have a strong brand, because people buy the brand before they buy anything else.


He backs this up with his own business's story: investing early in a proper marketing function helped SourceFlow become the go-to name in a genuinely niche space, and a rebrand earlier this year has driven a noticeable increase in inbound leads. Events have played a part in that too. SourceFlow's own events have grown from twenty or thirty people to close to a hundred, built deliberately as a no-selling environment focused on relationships rather than pitching.


For an agency, this reinforces something RE:STACK sees constantly: owning a niche and being known for it beats trying to be everything to everyone, and the tech and marketing infrastructure behind that positioning has to be there to support it, not bolted on as an afterthought.


A Human Moment: Chalk Ice, a Missing Tooth, and a Costa Interview

Before any of the industry talk, Craig tells the story of how he actually landed his first job in recruitment tech. The night before his interview with Darren, he bit into a chalk ice and knocked out a tooth, the same one he'd lost years earlier playing rugby. Rather than cancel, he called Darren, admitted he looked awful, and went anyway. They met in a Costa, Darren laughed, the ice broke (in more ways than one), and Craig got the job. Thirteen years and three businesses later, they're still working together.


On the fish and chips itself, Craig rated the fish a nine and a half but the chips only a six, landing on an overall eight and a half. Holly agreed the fish was the standout.


Watch the Episode / Links


Your Website Isn't the Only Asset You're Underusing

Craig's point about note-taking and getting call data into the CRM properly came up more than once in this conversation, and it's a problem RE:STACK sees constantly on the Bullhorn side too. If your consultants are capturing great conversations but that detail isn't landing cleanly in your CRM, you're not actually building the asset you think you are. That's exactly the gap a RE:STACK Automation Roadmap is built to close.  Get in touch at restack.uk/contactrestack

 
 
 

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