– James Toovey MD @ Langley James
In recent years the Recruitment market has changed. Whilst our loyal clients took shelter from the storm, we opted to offer them a friendly umbrella – a long-term view I’ve always believed in. The strongest of business relationships have been built during the toughest of times, but our approach to Recruitment also brought its own challenges.For 12 years the expanding team at Langley James has specialised in providing top quality candidates to top quality employers within the IT sector. Here REC member James (Managing Director of Langley James) offers an insight into the issues he’s faced with technology and explains why he’s pleased he chose to review the Recruitment Software market.
We’ve grown by an average of almost 90% annually over the last three years and so we’re not the small start-up we once were. Last year we reviewed the recruitment software market fully and chose to implement Voyager Infinity, a free licence upgrade as part of our support and maintenance agreement.
Whilst we’ve been delighted with the results, I wanted to share our story with the wider REC members and highlight why I’m pleased I chose to step away from the paperwork and review the market in search of a smarter, more joined-up way of working - and how our technology partners helped in the streamlining of our business and reduced our costs.
Like many Recruiters we had areas of the business we wanted to improve;
- ‘Going Social’ - LinkedIn, Facebook/twitter/Xing, hidden CV’s, job-posting and smartphones
- To improve our ‘time to fill’ and reduce advertising spend
- A modern interface integrated to job-posting, calendar, smartphone, SMS, e-marketing etc
- Proper workflow with automated business rules (which suited our unique operation)
- Visualised reporting – with configurable ‘dashboards’ (I’m no excel fan)
I’d noticed how LinkedIn had crept into my business when I started to get expense claims from staff for their membership! Every member of staff had a LinkedIn profile and were almost living entirely within their ‘own network’, something that concerned me - pooled knowledge was at the heart of our success and this needed to continue, but I didn’t want to challenge a more modern way of recruiting.
Extending searches to LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, Xing and indeed any social site you choose from within the application is now something all staff do. We no longer search manually, we search everything. Infinity has facilitated a faster and smarter way of working for all staff, you can even search the CV Pool, a repository of CVs that you didn’t want to put on your database at the time.
Unlimited and automated CV parsing was also an essential requirement from our new solution. CV volumes had become overwhelming and required a huge administration effort to process. Seemingly, only the desperate were applying for jobs and the net impact was a drop in quality and an increased volume – an expensive problem.
We now approach and ‘head-hunt’ the best talent easily with all CV’s automatically formatted, parsed and appropriately logged the second they hit an inbox. Infinity has saved me £1000 a month in administration alone, has reduced the need to advertise, increased our response times and put us ahead of the competition.
The LinkedIn integration is an extremely impressive leap forward - but I’m not going give away all our secrets! With the contacts we’ve nurtured I can see us returning to a smaller, better quality database and reinforcing our core values on quality, further reducing our advertising spend.
It’s worth highlighting that I really had no real issue with our previous processes only that they were slower and more difficult to manage. Technology has dealt with the admin issue and the staff carry on as they did before with more time to focus on the actual recruitment and account management.
On the whole of Langley James now benefits from a more flexible and ‘joined-up’ way of working which has seen improvements in every area of our business. Noticeably a ‘sales and service’ focus has returned amongst staff and Recruiters are quicker in their activities. Recruiters also tell me that it’s the best product they’ve ever used.
I’m particularly proud of our response times, tight processes and with an increased clarity on pipeline, our administration burden has been reduced to almost nothing.
Taking a leap into the arms of a new technology partner can often be a leap of faith.
As a Managing Director who also bills I’m close to the coal face but I was flabbergasted to discover that our previous database had almost 5 million records (candidates/clients/CV’s/emails/attachments etc) and so migrating needed some careful thought and planning. Voyager managed the upgrade and migration, offering help and assistance along the way. Their support has been 110% - phenomenal. I am pleased we managed to maximise the use of our old data and we now ‘harvest’ our contacts professionally with Infinity facilitating the use of a larger pool of data, yet retaining a focus on what is current and valuable to the user. It’s unique.
Infinity is light years ahead and allows us to work quicker than ever before. While the Infinity ‘hub’ integrates seamlessly with MS Exchange, smartphones, job-posting, SMS, reporting, etc the flexible interface allows individual users to see the information they require and even pick the screen layout, skin and data-fields that they want - the Recruiters do literally have it the way they like it.
Looking back, I don’t know how I found the time to get my head out of my inbox. Imagine getting a normal days work done by lunchtime.
If you’re a Recruiter and burning the midnight oil, consider reviewing your technology and processes – you might find a smarter way of working.
“Voyager Infinity facilitates a faster turnaround for our customers, a smarter way of working for all staff and saves me £1000 a month in admin”
REC Member James Toovey, Managing Director
