How Ivy Tech Recruitment transformed their candidate submission process with Floats

The challenge: a CV process that couldn't keep up

Ivy Tech Recruitment specialises in placing software engineers with clients across the UK and Europe. With a lean team led by COO Cameron Smith, they typically source around 45 candidates per project and submit 15-25 to clients each hiring cycle. Speed and presentation quality are everything in a market where the best developers are off the table in days.

Before Floats, Ivy Tech formatted every candidate CV manually using Google Docs. Each CV was pulled into a branded Ivy Tech CV template — a process that took roughly an hour per candidate. The results were inconsistent: fonts would differ, colours wouldn't match, and spelling would flip between US and British English from one document to the next.

“When I think about the CV process for us, the formatting of the CV process, because it was a Google doc, things would go out of sync, fonts would be different, colours would be different, spelling errors, some US English, some British English. Floats has made the CV very, very submittable for us in a very short time.”

— Cameron Smith, COO

Finding the right tool

Ivy Tech didn't land on Floats by accident. The team evaluated multiple CV formatting tools before making their choice — and none of the alternatives delivered.

“We found Floats is the only CV formatting that works. We tried out a hell of a lot of others before and they were all just absolutely useless.”

— Joe Wigoder, Recruiter

How Ivy Tech uses Floats

Today, Floats sits at the heart of Ivy Tech's candidate submission workflow. After sourcing and screening candidates through LinkedIn Recruiter and video calls, the team requests a full, up-to-date CV from each shortlisted candidate. From there, the process is fast and repeatable.

Each CV is uploaded to Floats in around 20-30 seconds. The recruiter then uses Floats' one-click anonymise feature, refines the auto-generated summary to make it more relevant to the role, and strategically highlights or excludes career history and technologies to match what the client is looking for. A quick preview, and the profile is published — typically targeting a Floats quality score of 90 or above.

“It's super quick to upload the CV and get my list of candidates that have already been pre-approved, that I've already screened. Traditionally we would have pulled that into an Ivy CV format, which probably took us close to two to three hours to get at least two or three candidates through. Whereas now it's probably close to two or three minutes because it's just extracting straight away. The time save there is massive for us.”

— Cameron Smith, COO

What makes the difference isn't just speed — it's control. Recruiters can strategically surface the technologies and experience that matter most for each specific role. Submitting a candidate to a FinTech client? Emphasise their financial services background and relevant tech stack. The same candidate going to a startup? Lead with their early-stage experience and versatility. This level of tailoring used to take significant effort; now it's built into a two-minute workflow.

Sharing candidates with clients

Once profiles are published, Ivy Tech generates shareable links and sends them directly to clients via email or dedicated Slack channels. For startup clients with active hiring channels, links are dropped alongside weekly recruitment reports, keeping everything visible and in context. The shareable format means clients can review candidates immediately without downloading files or navigating clunky portals.

The results

The impact has been clear across the business. Formatting time dropped from roughly an hour per candidate to just 2-3 minutes — a reduction of over 95%. Presentation quality became consistent across every submission. And most importantly, Ivy Tech started getting more candidates in front of clients, faster.

“I'd have to say Floats has probably been the biggest contributor to us getting more candidates across to the client.”

— Cameron Smith, COO

For a lean team managing around 40 active contractors and submitting up to 25 candidates per hiring cycle, those hours saved add up fast. Time that used to go into wrestling with Google Docs formatting now goes into what actually moves the needle: sourcing better candidates and building client relationships.