Why we built Recruitly in Manchester and moved to Dubai

Recruitly started in Manchester. Not in a slick office. Just a small team building a recruitment CRM because every option we looked at was either overpriced, overcomplicated, or both. We wanted to build something an agency could set up on Monday and be productive by Wednesday.

That was the idea. Build the whole recruiting stack in one platform. Not just an ATS. Not just a CRM. Everything. Sourcing, campaigns, WhatsApp, calling, AI, leaderboards. One login, one price, no bolt-ons.

Manchester gave us the foundation

The UK recruitment market is mature and demanding. Agencies there have seen every CRM on the market. They've used Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder. They know what works and what's fluff. Building for that audience forced us to be practical. No feature survived unless recruiters actually used it daily.

Growth came through word of mouth. One agency would tell another. No big marketing budget, no salesforce. Just agencies recommending us because the product actually helped them bill more. That's still how most of our UK customers find us.

Manchester also shaped how we think about pricing. UK agencies are cost-conscious. They've been burned by vendors who charge per module, per feature, per integration. So we made everything flat. One price per user. Everything included. That hasn't changed.

Why we moved to Dubai in 2025

We kept getting customers in the Gulf. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha. Agencies set up by people who'd relocated from the UK, Australia, South Africa. They picked Recruitly because they knew it from home, or because a friend recommended it. And they kept asking for features that made sense for the Middle East but that no CRM had built.

WhatsApp integration was the first one. In the UK, email is the main business channel. In Dubai, WhatsApp is. Candidates reply to WhatsApp in minutes. Emails sit for days. Every agency in the Gulf wanted WhatsApp inside their CRM. None of the established players had it. We built it.

Then salary package breakdowns. UAE salaries aren't a single number. They're basic plus housing allowance plus transport allowance plus education allowance. A CRM with one "salary" field doesn't work here. Visa status tracking. Gratuity calculations. Multi-currency across AED, SAR, QAR, and six other Gulf currencies. Each feature made sense for the Gulf. None of them existed in CRMs built in Boston or London.

At some point it became obvious. The Gulf is where recruitment is growing fastest. The market is international by default (85% of the UAE workforce is expatriate). And nobody was building for it. Every recruitment CRM on the market was designed for the UK or US first, with the rest of the world as an afterthought. So we moved.

Dubai now, India for engineering

SOO Group is now fully based in Dubai. The executive team works from here. We're in the same timezone as our Gulf customers, we attend the same events, we understand the market because we live in it.

Our engineering team is in India, in our own physical offices. Not outsourced. Our team, our offices, full-time engineers who've been building Recruitly for years. That setup gives us the speed of a well-resourced tech company with the market proximity of a Dubai business. When a customer in DMCC asks for a feature, it goes from conversation to production without crossing three timezones and a project management layer.

What being in Dubai taught us

Building in Manchester made us practical. Moving to Dubai made us international. When your customers recruit across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, the Philippines, and the UK from one office, your platform has to handle all of it. Multi-country sourcing, multi-currency reporting, multi-language communication, global job board integrations.

That ended up making the product better for everyone, not just Gulf agencies. Our UK customers benefit from the same international sourcing. Our Australian customers benefit from the same multi-currency support. Features we built because a Dubai agency asked for them are now used by agencies worldwide.

The operating system idea

From the beginning, the goal was one platform that replaces everything. Not an ATS that integrates with a CRM that integrates with a campaign tool that integrates with a dialler that integrates with an analytics dashboard. One system. We call it a recruiting operating system because that's what it is.

AI sourcing and matching. Email and WhatsApp campaigns. Sales leaderboards and TV screens. Sales CRM. Job board distribution. CV parsing and branding. GDPR automation. All built in. All included in the price.

That matters especially in Dubai, where agencies are often smaller teams with tight budgets. Paying for seven separate tools when you're three people in a DMCC flexi-desk doesn't make sense. One tool that does everything for $25/user/month does.

What's next

We're doubling down on the Gulf. More features for GCC recruitment. Better Arabic support. Deeper integrations with regional job boards. We're also expanding our AI agents to handle more of the repetitive work that keeps recruiters from doing what they're good at.

If you're setting up an agency in Dubai, we wrote a guide for that. And if you want to talk, book a call. We're in the same city.