Kelly Robinson and the business of getting an afternoon back

Kelly Robinson wanted his recruiters to spend more time talking to people. The internet was making that surprisingly difficult. A vacancy could reach several job boards, but somebody had to put it on each one. The machine that promised access to more candidates had acquired an appetite for the recruiter's afternoon. Robinson saw a business in giving that afternoon back.

Broadbean emerged from his recruitment operation in 2001. Its premise was easy to explain: enter a vacancy once, distribute it widely, then see which channels worked. Robinson would take it from Britain to America and through two changes of ownership. After leaving, he founded RedDot, returning to the question that had occupied him all along: what, exactly, is this recruitment activity achieving?

The vegetable that survived the naming meeting

Before there was Broadbean, there was a proposed name: Firebean. Robinson's wife intervened. “You can't call it Firebean,” she told him, suggesting Broadbean instead. A company concerned with moving job advertisements around the world acquired the name of something you might grow in an allotment. The domestic naming committee had done its work.

The modest name suited a very concrete irritation. Robinson had spent more than a decade recruiting and managing recruiters. He understood the value of time spent with applicants and clients, and the cost of repeatedly feeding vacancies into separate websites. The original appeal was practical enough to survive a demonstration. A recruiter could recognise the chore before anyone finished the sales pitch.

A young colleague buys into the idea

Robinson's story also belongs to the people who helped build the business. Dan McGuire joined at 21 and borrowed money to acquire a quarter of the company. For the first two years, the operation ran on a £35,000 overdraft. There is something clarifying about an overdraft: it makes the distance between an interesting idea and a paying customer particularly easy to measure.

McGuire became managing director. Broadbean won a global agreement with Manpower and established offices in London and Amsterdam. The partnership paired Robinson's experience of recruitment with a younger colleague willing to put borrowed money behind the product. The early business required both kinds of commitment. Its software promised to make recruiters more effective; the founders still had to persuade recruiters to buy it.

October 2008: an exit, with Monday still to come

In October 2008, Associated Northcliffe Digital, DMGT's digital consumer division, acquired Broadbean. The company then had more than 50 employees, over 1,000 clients and a network exceeding 700 job boards. More than 25,000 individual users relied on its systems. A repetitive task inside a recruitment business had become a substantial operation in its own right.

The arrangement kept the management team, employees and Broadbean name in place. Its headquarters remained in Canary Wharf. That detail matters to Robinson's career: selling the company did not immediately end the job of running and expanding it. The transaction provided a larger owner's resources for an international plan. An exit can sound wonderfully final until the diary reminds you about next week's meetings.

That same month, Robinson received the London and South East Recruitment Awards' lifetime achievement accolade. He had already started and grown three recruitment businesses. The award recognised work across the industry, and he described winning it as a surprise. America was still ahead of him. “Lifetime” turned out to leave considerable room in the schedule.

A lunch becomes employee number four

When Rayanne Thorn approached Robinson, she was trying to sell advertising space on RecruitingBlogs. He was newly arrived in Newport Beach, launching Broadbean's American business. They went to lunch. As the conversation developed, she explained her consulting work helping smaller businesses with marketing, branding and social media. Robinson heard a potential colleague.

Thorn thought he wanted a proposal for her services. He wanted a full-time marketing director. Three months later, she became employee number four at Broadbean US. The anecdote offers a more useful glimpse of a founder than a list of management adjectives: he went into a sales conversation and came out trying to recruit the seller.

It also gives the international expansion a human scale. Before an overseas office becomes a headcount or a market share, people have to decide to join it. Thorn brought experience that Robinson wanted inside the company. An ordinary lunch supplied an opportunity that a carefully specified vacancy might have missed.

Learning the distance between London and Newport Beach

Robinson landed at Los Angeles airport on Friday, 13 March 2009, carrying the expectation that a shared language would make America familiar. The first year required changes to the product and to his assumptions about the market. A British business could cross the Atlantic rather faster than its habits could.

By December 2013, the Newport Beach operation had 40 employees and 500 clients. Across Broadbean, customers were present in 65 countries, and advertisements reached 183 countries. Those are different measures: where a customer operates and where its vacancy travels need not coincide. The distinction helps explain why a business built around distribution could become useful across borders.

Robinson's American chapter was therefore more than a new address on a company website. A local team and hundreds of customers had accumulated around the original proposition. The launch required adaptation; the later numbers show an operation that had become established.

A job board buys the business between job boards

CareerBuilder acquired Broadbean from DMGT on 1 April 2014. The price was undisclosed. By then, Broadbean combined job distribution with candidate sourcing and analytics. CareerBuilder brought its own recruitment software and labour-market intelligence. For Robinson, the deal joined a business built around connecting channels with an owner already deeply involved in online hiring.

The transaction illuminates how far the original product had travelled. Sending an advertisement was the beginning of a chain: a person sees it, applies, enters a recruitment system and may eventually be hired. Software sitting between those steps can learn something about the journey. Distribution had created a reason to care about measurement.

“We've always been committed to making sourcing and recruitment simpler, full stop.”

Kelly Robinson, announcing a Broadbean partnership in 2015

The copy still has to earn its click

For all the plumbing behind a job advertisement, Robinson kept writing about the words candidates actually read. His advice was unglamorous and useful: explain duties and pay, make the advert easy to scan, describe expected outcomes and shorten the shopping list of desirable qualifications. A vacancy can be widely distributed and still be hard to understand.

In a separate article on advertising mistakes, he argued for clear calls to action and against stuffing postings with keywords. Search visibility has limited value when a human reader gives up. This is a telling interest for someone who built distribution technology. The network can carry an advert; it cannot rescue every sentence the employer puts inside it.

He also wrote about recruiting graduates, arguing that candidates starting their careers require a different assessment of skills and experience. The recurring concern is the person encountering the process. Even when the topic is software or advertising, Robinson returns to what the candidate is being asked to do.

After Broadbean, another unfinished job

Robinson's Broadbean tenure ended in 2017. He founded RedDot late that year as a recruitment advertising agency, describing a business representing employers rather than job boards. The distinction put the buyer's advertising spend at the centre of the proposition. He had helped build the means of distributing vacancies; he was now working on how companies bought and used that distribution.

Other ventures widened the picture. Content App, which he co-founded, helped recruiters share company news and industry material on social channels. He subsequently became known as a co-founding partner of Paiger and the founder of JobSplice. The connections run through recruitment's daily work: communicating, distributing, integrating and making sense of the results.

RedDot's present services combine advertising strategy, technical integrations and reporting. The company describes work linking recruitment systems and improving visibility into campaign performance. Robinson remains concerned with the gaps between products, where data and administrative effort tend to collect.

The question after the application arrives

On his public LinkedIn profile, Robinson now describes distribution as a largely solved problem for modern Workday teams. His attention has moved to the relationship between advertising costs, spending approvals and the quality of people hired. Counting applications leaves a further question unanswered: did the spending help the employer make a useful hire?

There is continuity here, without pretending the work has stood still. Broadbean reduced repeated posting. RedDot addresses what employers can learn and change once campaigns are running. In a 2020 podcast conversation, Robinson was already discussing poor visibility into the origins of applications and hires. The concern has outlasted more than one company name.

His career offers a practical way to think about recruitment technology. Follow the task that takes too long. Then follow the information that fails to arrive with it. Somewhere between the advertisement and the person, there is usually another piece of work waiting for somebody's attention. Robinson has spent much of his working life finding it.