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Catch of the Day: With Sevonne Eliyahu of Woo.io

  • Ben Fielding
  • 6 days ago
  • 5 min read

Owning Your Niche, Your Data and Your Tech



Holly Langley kicks off Catch of the Day, RE:STACK's new podcast, by sharing a plate of fish and chips with Sevonne Eliyahu, Chief Revenue Officer at Woo.io. Six months into recruitment tech and already fluent in its biggest problems, Sevonne talks niches, tech adoption, AI-powered search and why speed is about to separate the agencies that win from the ones that don't.


Quick Bite

  • Why owning your niche and your network is the real competitive moat

  • How the gap between AI-adopting agencies and the rest is turning slow data into a liability

  • Why you should review and drive adoption of your tech like you'd manage an employee

  • How better data and AI search can claw back the 14.5 hours a week recruiters lose to searching

  • Why someone has to own the tech, data and AI agenda end to end, and what happens when nobody does

  • It was Sevonne's first ever fish and chips. She gave it an eight out of ten, and had never met tartar sauce before this conversation


Meet the Guest

Sevonne Eliyahu is Chief Revenue Officer at Woo.io. She joined the company at the end of 2025, after more than 20 years in tech, and describes Woo as a data layer that sits underneath an agency's search, workflows and AI agents, rather than trying to be the AI agent itself. As she put it on the show, Woo lets everything else "work strongly" by getting the data right first.



Owning Your Niche Is the Real Competitive Moat

Asked for the single biggest challenge facing agencies right now, Sevonne didn't hesitate: owning your niche. Not just picking one, but protecting it. Who are you? What are you better at than anyone else? And what do you need to do to make sure that stays true?


Holly agreed straight away, pointing to her own best clients as proof. The agencies doing well right now have a genuinely specific set of services, in a specific location, covering a specific set of roles. The days of "we do recruitment in the UK" are over. As Sevonne put it, you need "that real specific item, title, definition of what you cover" if you want to get ahead.


For an agency reading this, the takeaway is blunt: broad and generic is a liability now, not a safety net. Niche is the moat.


Treat Your Tech Like You'd Treat an Employee

One of the sharpest moments in the conversation had nothing to do with AI. It was about basic management discipline. Sevonne pointed out that most agencies spend more on their overall tech stack, phone systems, CRM, email and everything bolted onto it, than they do on a full-time employee. And yet nobody runs a Monday morning meeting about it.


You'll have a weekly catch-up with your team, a quarterly review of their performance, real scrutiny of whether they're delivering. Your tech gets none of that. It just sits there, and you assume it's working.


Sevonne's point was that the shift agencies need to make isn't necessarily buying new tools. It's adopting the ones they've already paid for: understanding them, reviewing them, spending the time to actually use what's there. Holly's own version of this, "you can have the best tech in the world, but if your team don't use it, it becomes expensive dead weight", landed as one of the more quotable moments of the episode.


The 14.5-Hour Problem

Sevonne shared a stat that stopped the conversation for a second: the average recruiter spends 14.5 hours a week searching for candidates. Fourteen and a half hours, on top of whatever an agency is already paying for LinkedIn.


Her read on where the biggest near-term win sits wasn't "AI" as a headline. It was specifically better search, powered by better data. Typing something like "I need a gas engineer in Shoreditch" and getting a usable list back, without wrestling with Boolean strings or worrying the underlying data is wrong. Holly backed this up with a live example from her own client base: agencies now running searches, auto-shortlisting candidates, and asking them if they want to be put forward, all within 20 minutes.


The message for agencies: the win isn't AI in the abstract. It's AI sitting on top of data that's actually trustworthy, pointed at the specific, tedious task of search.


Someone Has to Own the Data and AI Agenda

Threaded through the whole episode was a theme Sevonne had picked up from a recent conversation about M&A preparation: agencies need to know their network, own their data, and think lean about their processes and workflows. As she put it, that means asking whether the technology you're using is actually moving things forward, and whether you're allocating time for adoption, not just assuming it happens on its own.


Both Sevonne and Holly returned to the same warning a few times in different words: the gap between agencies who've got this and agencies who haven't is going to get wider, fast. And AI only makes that gap worse if the data underneath it is wrong. Sevonne's example was simple: if the system thinks your candidate lives in London when they actually live in Scotland, the AI will happily act on that mistake, and you'll waste your own time, your candidate's time and your client's time chasing it.


The fix isn't complicated to describe, even if it's hard to do: someone inside the agency needs to actually own tech, data and AI, end to end. Not as a side project. As a real, resourced responsibility.


A Fish and Chips First

This was Sevonne's first ever fish and chips, eaten with a "big giant ketchup blob" at Holly's insistence rather than the on-the-side dip she'd normally go for. Tartar sauce was an even bigger mystery ("it looks like ranch," she guessed, not unreasonably). Verdict at the end: an eight out of ten, with the caveat she has nothing to compare it to yet.


Beyond the food, Sevonne is chasing the Northern Lights and a hiking trip in South America, and was getting her first ever tattoo the following day, the lyrics to Club Tropicana in her best friend's handwriting. Her dinner party guest, if the table had a spare seat, would be Taylor Swift, less for the music and more for what her kids see in her. Holly's own dinner party lineup landed on her granddad, comedian Greg Davis and David Attenborough, which she admitted might make for an "eclectic mix."


Watch the Episode / Links

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvgUcc6YsIU


Ready to Own Your Data?

If you recognise the pattern Sevonne described, tech nobody reviews, data nobody's sure they can trust, and no one person actually responsible for any of it, that's exactly the gap a RE:STACK Bullhorn Audit is built to close. Get in touch at restack.uk/contactrestack.

 
 
 

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