In April 2010, Witan Jardine one of London’s longest standing, and award winning, executive recruitment consultant companies, was renamed Ambition. In 2008 it became part of the Ambition Group, a specialist recruitment firm with complementary international offices covering Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. This has made it one of the few recruitment firms that can offer both local expertise and global coverage. The name change was initiated this year to reinforce the company’s pedigree.
Ambition Group has a policy of ensuring that it focuses on consistently delivering a service quality above expectation. A sentiment reiterated in its mission statement ‘To continue to develop as a major, quality recruitment consultancy, providing superior value by sustaining and building on long-term relationships with high calibre clients and candidates and continually training and developing all our people.’
One route to help the London office consistently deliver a quality service has been to update its recruitment software solution from the previously used Bond Adapt V8, an over configured system that consultants were finding difficult to use. The system also lacked many modern features, such as integrated email and candidate texting. Kirsty Bridgewater, IT manager at Ambition, explained in more detail: “If anything, the Adapt system was too customisable! Over the years it had become more difficult to use. We also had to rely on an external company to support the system and to help us make even simple system changes. It really was becoming a burden. It was complicated to use, time-consuming for our consultants and expensive to maintain. We needed a better solution.”
Kirsty continues: “Recruitment is, basically, a simple process that does not require over-configured solutions. We wanted a system that could be administered in-house on a day-to-day basis and one that would give us better visibility of the business and that would free our consultants from laborious and time consuming administrative tasks.”
When Kirsty joined Ambition, early in 2010, the hunt was already on for a new software system. However, she was very pleased to see that ITRIS Recruitment Software had already made it onto the shortlist. “I had been using ITRIS since 2004 at a former company and had always been impressed by its functionality.”
There were many other ITRIS advocates at Ambition too and eventually it was decided that it was the best solution, offering the desired business visibility and accurate reporting functionality. It also offered the best functionality for the consultants, who would be using the system every day. “In a company employing 70 people, 40 of them are consultants, so it really was their needs that were at the top of our list of priorities,” said Kirsty.
ITEC, the creator of ITRIS, is a proactive company and is constantly developing upgrades for ITRIS to meet the changing needs of the industry, “The company is keen to listen to suggestions about possible mini upgrades and usually lets you have these at no extra charge,” said Kirsty.
Having made the decision to change to ITRIS, the directors at Ambition wanted a fast changeover so that they could quickly experience the benefits of improved visibility of business activities that ITRIS could offer them.
ITRIS went live in a head-spinning 12 weeks. Kirsty explains the implementation process: “The first stage was to extract information from our existing system and turn it into data that could be used by ITRIS. This was undertaken by a third-party, who liaised with ITEC. Then we undertook a data mapping exercise with ITEC, followed by a dry run data import, testing and finally a live data import.
“The support offered by ITEC during this rapid implementation period was good,” said Kirsty. “Craig Hillsdon at ITEC, who was responsible for the migration, is very good at what he does and was always available to offer us advice. It was mostly achieved remotely, but we did have two members of ITEC’s support team present on the day we went live, to support our consultants and help us iron out any issues that might arise.” All in all, a painless process. All of the Ambition consultants undertook around six hours of training each on ITRIS on the lead-up to, and after, roll out of the system. Ambition did this in-house using its own knowledge of the system.
One month on from going live with ITRIS and the consultants at Ambition are impressed. Senior consultant, Lisa Solomons, is very happy with the system. She said: “It is very user friendly. Everything is easily accessible and when I know exactly how to navigate around it is going to save me so much time.”
Philip Diamond, administration support, is also a happy man: ”Generally, its speed and efficiency is good. There is no three second delay when navigating into a document and then back to ITRIS, a problem that we experienced with our old system.”
Neil Phillips, associate director likes it too. He said: “I love the colours! Seriously, I think the ability of ITRIS to integrate with Outlook, and its time saving benefits - not having to duplicate lots of work – really make it a great solution for us.”
“We are in a much better position today thanks to ITRIS, than we were before we installed the system, “ said Kirsty. “It is light years away from our previous system in terms of business visibility. It also has some great front line functionality and it has really given us back control. One of the most important features of ITRIS for our business is its integration with Outlook. The automated recording of tasks is also a big benefit and the consultants do not need to duplicate tasks, which can be time consuming for them.
Today, recruitment consultants need to have as many tools immediately available to them to help identify potential candidates to fill positions quickly. With the increasing use of the Internet this task is getting tougher and competition is hot. Any time-saving advantages that a company can give to their consultants is a huge benefit. ITRIS can also ensure the retention of intellectual property when a consultant moves on.
ITRIS Recruitment Software was inspired by recruiters. It is a robust, scalable, feature-rich system. It is an extremely flexible and powerful recruitment software system that contains all the functionality needed ‘off the shelf’ regardless of the type of recruitment you are involved in. However, that doesn’t mean that it is a One-size-fits-all solution. It is also configurable on a user-by-user basis, so that you are only exposed to the functionality you really need. If your business needs change you can easily switch functionality back on again. There are no extra charges for additional modules or ‘configuration’ charges.
Concluding, Mike Brind, operations director at ITEC Systems, said: We put a large emphasis on investing in our in-house technical skills, covering both development and support, which means we are well placed to successfully meet the challenges posed by fast migrations, such as was required by Ambition, and to continue servicing their needs. Our client services team and trainers are all ex-recruiters, so they understand what customers go through when changing systems.”
