Well I’ve never written a blog post at c.37,000 feet before, but this seemed an appropriate time to reflect. I’m currently sitting on an American Airlines flight to Boston and watching the film New Year’s Eve which in itself is gonna get some serious reflection going anyway (well – no doubt helped by a couple of small bottles of complimentary Merlot

So other than an overly sentimental (but perfectly harmless & quite enjoyable it has to be said) movie there are a number of other reasons to have a peep back & little look forward:

1. We’re screaming in on the end of year 4 of this little ‘ole business : and goodness gracious me, what a ride it’s been. Let’s put aside that we’ve just lived  through the worse depression since the 1930’s (or are we still living through it? I’ve given up watching 24hr news channels as I believe they’re as bad for your mental health as smoking is for your physical health and should come with an appropriate health warning) so 4 years and still here is something to celebrate in itself  I reckon. Probably write up more on that in about 6 weeks time though

2. We’re in the process of sprinting past the double figures threshold in terms of employees: yup – as I write this we’re just over a week away from welcoming on board a new member of the client facing team and perilously close to expanding our dev team too (there’s been a lot of “frog kissing” of people who really don’t get close to cutting the PHP mustard TBH, but we’ve finally got some decent looking prospects). It seems to me though that it doesn’t matter wether you’d producing sprockets or screwing on oojimaflips, in most instances it’s who you employ that makes a business. We “do software”, but without the best people to code it, the right people delivering solutions and then attentive & empathetic support we may as well pack up right now. Whatever your business it’s the people (or lack of them) that can break your business and as virtual as the world seems to become it’s very much people who will always be at the heart of any success. Here’s to learning lessons hard learned over the past few years, to not letting those lessons make us too hard hearted and to continue hunting out and then bringing on the very best people we can get our hands on – our future success depends on it.

3. This trip could well represent a significant step up for HARBOUR – or not of course, but it still feels pretty big to be doing our first North America installation. This at a time when our Asia partner is seeing some significant growth themselves & investing in a sales push, so who knows, maybe, following on from Tesco & Microsoft in China, in the year when the world comes to East London it’ll be the year when we really step into Global service provision proper.

4. I’m 40 at the end of the month – nuff said. And no – no big bike or little sports car. I’ve often said that 3DMarComms is my mid life crisis – so here’s to whatever that may mean

So think that’s just about enough reflection for now. Just wish that the film didn’t have SJP in it – still, have to say that life and business is pretty good even with the odd horse face spoiling the view

I do see that one day there’ll be time to update people on what we’ve been up to. No really.  ’Cos there’s loads to tell. But that’s the problem – where the heck to start?

There’s the small matter of completely re-engineering and radically transforming  the Clarks recruitment process (ClarksJobs.com – nice site built on our CMS too) – oh – and I need to tell you about the really cool calendarisation of telescreen interviewing we’ve done for Admiral (AdmiralJobs.com – again all hosted by us). Then there’s a smart site our ATS is seamlessly underpinning for OvoEnergy as well as another CMS & ATS site for Omnifone. I also mustn’t forget to make a big fuss about a truly mobile version of the Monsoon internal careers portal and a particularly nifty way we’re about to enable applicants to BMI Healthcare to partially apply from a mobile before getting a reminder to come back and fully submit by uploading a CV (although recruiters could progress without if they wanted). Petrofac is a nice little site and another China based campaign site to add to the portfolio too for Tiandi.

But then there’ll be other cool stuff and clients I’ll forget to mention. hmmmm.

Should also tell you that we’ve recruited a newbie in the form of Jared – he’s a junior Web Dev. And we’re still very keen to recruit someone like him with a few more years under the collar (although we’re very picky and really are struggling with the quality TBH) – so if you know an out-and-out deep coding, LAMP stack loving, PHP dev and they’re in the North Essex or Reading/Newbury area then be a love and send them this link would you -> VERY good PHP people needed

We also sadly lost a team member (c’est la vie etc etc) – but have picked up another along the way, so can’t wait for Alex (great name ) to join us as our new and sparkly Project Manager  next week.

However we’re also on the look out for someone really good to come and bolster our Account Handling team (not least to free me up so I can write proper business blog updates!) – so again, if you know someone who might fit in and can get passionate about delivering exceptional customer service (and knows where Tiptree is), then fling ‘em this link if you’d be so kind -> people people with a thing for the web & an eye for detail.

Well – there you go. A kinda-sorta-ish update plus a plea for some great people as we go from strength to strength. Anyway – this isn’t getting the paying clients work done is it, so it’s back to the grindstone  and hopefully won’t be too long before I check back in – fingers crossed to tell you how pleased we are to have more hires on the horizon

Just in case you missed our Christmas message then trot along to HARBOUR ATS Christmas and help us decide on exactly what to do with our Christmas charity pennies.

“Goodness me.” As we approach the end of the year at Mach 2 then that’s probably the politest way to describe the past year. I’ll almost certainly reflect more philosophically over the Christmas & New Year period, but for now I’m just going to list some of the most recent work we’ve been turning out (in brief), just in case anyone’s passing and interested – you never know with these blog type things do you

乐购 (know who it is?)

What – you’ve not heard of them? Think you’ll find you have. 乐购 are, as I now know, Tesco in China. Anyway they’ve got some pretty big plans over there and needed some pretty big hires to help with, well, planning it all – step in HARBOUR ATS via our partnership with Oxus (China based Employer Branding experts). Built on our China based server (all the better for fast local connections of course) it’s a simple facility and launched with 5 senior level vacancies – language switching and ‘Apply with LinkedIn‘ (excellent to get those airport lounge job surfers) functionality to boot: tesco.hrinbox.cn

Tesco.HRinbox - China recruitment

Glam’ing it up

Many many many years ago I remember a very long trip from Portsmouth Poly to play Pontypridd Poly  in the Poly Cup on a typically Welsh weather kinda day where it was P’ing down. Think we lost (so I was probably P’d off before getting rather P’d myself – which was what it was mostly about anyway ). Either way it was nice to return on a sunny day a few weeks back to finalise a really nice win this time – building (what is now) the University of Glamorgan an Applicant Tracking System. Challenges on this one were making sure that our usual seamless integration could happen with a very complex in-place nav set up, but then also creating seamless interfaces for 2 further educational institutions (Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and Merthyr Tydfil College (although Merthyr will go live at some point in the future)) that came under the same HR team who, understandably, wanted a single system to administrate all.

We love something to get our teeth into (as, I seem to remember, so too did their prop I came up against that day :-] ) : jobs.glam.ac.uk & jobs.rwcmd.ac.uk

Glamorgan University & RWCMD job search pages

and an FA final for us

Now some clients have nice offices. Others less so. But I think it’s hard to beat having your meetings at Wembley Stadium (and that’s said even as a Welshman! Although I was there in 1999 for this). Nice careers site put together by BlackBridge (who were also clearly blown away by the stadium too) underpinned with good ole HARBOUR ATS bossing the midfield (perhaps – football metaphors really aren’t my strong point :-s ). jobs.thefacareers.com “Back of the NET!”

job search page/section - FA careers site

So – that there was some of our November delivery. Fireworks from beginning to end really

I won’t even count up how long we’ve been waiting for this little launch – but suffice to say we stopped holding our breath about this time last year.

But this is a client who wanted everything just so (and why not). They’ve also been busy themselves in rebranding and moving offices and the like. Sometimes there are just more reasons why something can slip down the to-do list than would force it to the top (particularly if what was there already wasn’t all that broken).

Anyway <cue fanfare> – we’ve made Ashley Kate (market leaders in HR Recruitment) a new shiny site that is now open for business. We think it looks pretty nice as it goes (and yes – we would say that of course, but then we do take extreme pride in a job well done every time), but built on HARBOUR CMS and with some simple but effective back-end functionality and integration with their existing candidate database it’s nice to step out of our usual stuff and build skills and experience elsewhere every once in a while

Hope you like – they’re a really nice bunch too and seem very knowledgeable about their specialism, so if you’re looking for your next job in HR then go have a peep and drop them your CV  :-D

Things have been busy here at HARBOUR HQ.

Hell – things have been REALLY busy! But there’s no complaints (well – other than from my wife a bit ) – particularly in the current economic climate we do know how good it is that we are seeing very positive growth (I stop short of calling us a “success story” just yet, but as we approach the halfway mark in our 4th year the signs are looking promising ).

Anyway – it’s been a full on couple of months with a couple of really big projects and many many littler ones – but each needing a good share of attention and loving to get out of the door and then look after whilst it, and the new users, bed in.  I will post again (probably fairly soon) about some of the recent work, but what’s also important to us is never losing our  focus on those clients that have been with us a little while as well. I’m a bit hard on us in regards to that – and I never want to take for granted that we have a better supported facility than any other ATS vendor our clients have worked with (or so they tell us). There’s always room for improvement and when there’s some particularly all consuming delivery going on it literally keeps me awake at night worrying that we’re not servicing our existing clients well enough.

So with all that said – you can’t believe how cheered I am to get forwarded a screen grab from within a closed group on LinkedIn where one of our clients has just posted the following answer to the question “Does anyone have any advice or feedback on systems they have used in the past, both good and bad?”

“Recently we renewed our ATS. Having experienced many of the big names we opted for Harbour – Bespoke to your needs by http://www.3dmarcomms.com/. I would highly recommend this system and the post implementation support.”

So thank you Craig at Yell – I really am beaming with pride for the guys and gals here. We’re not perfect, but by god we work hard to be the best we can be and make sure HARBOUR grows to be the best ATS on the market, but at all times with the best support that there is!

We’re a small but merry and dedicated band here at HARBOUR HQ. We generally prefer to keep things pretty low key (publicity wise) and just get on with our job, building the business one client at a time, doing the very best we can every day. We’re quite late coming to the ATS market, which we believe has great plusses for us (no unwieldy legacy codebase; no expensive infrastructure; years of learning from others mistakes) but also means that driven 95% by client needs (under our guidance ) we don’t have an R&D arm to play with sexy stuff and launch “industry firsts”. And I’m not grumbling – just saying that’s all.

Anyway – the other week we picked up that LinkedIn had been refining a new feature with a couple of US based ATS. In short “Apply with LinkedIn” allows an applicant to circumvent the standard application form and puts their profile into the ATS – in this instance replacing the application form and/or the CV. And we thought “well that’s pretty cool – how about we integrate that?”. So we did.

Now I’ll be straight and say that it’s definitely not for everyone – and even then it’s frustratingly limited (the ability to load your own screening questions, ideally dynamically according to which role is being applied for, would be a boost rather than the limited “set it once” check box facility that’s offered for us to use – although we think we may be able to work around that given some time), but it’s still a very interesting development.

Does it make it “too” easy for people to slap an application in without considering their appropriateness for the role? Yup.

Does this mean the CV is dying? Nope – not at all. Well at least not IMHO. Great post about this (& other related stuff) with good comments (& one from me) here: http://garethjones.me/2011/09/06/linkedin-profile-vs-the-cv-face-off-2/

So what’s so great about it then? Well firstly I firmly believe that you shouldn’t knock something ‘til you’ve tried it (well – for most things that is). And if Recruitment is about kissing frogs (you know, to find your Prince and all that – nothing xenophobic intended in that analogy!) then who knows, maybe you could pull in that application from that very busy certain someone who could be your ideal candidate. And of course if the persons not right then you’ve got access to their LinkedIn profile to see if someone they know might be  :)

But the biggy for me – the real game changer – is what this means to people accessing your careers pages and application facility from a mobile platform. Now I’m sure I don’t have to wax on about how mobile is changing the face of our internet interaction, and whether you’re a “mobile is 100% where it’s at” or more a “it’s a channel with massive potential, but still very much just part of the mix” kinda person then we all agree that it has to be considered more and more. And the problem to date is “how do you get someone to apply when they don’t have their CV on their phone/iPad/Tablet?” Well here’s an answer. Simples.

What you'll see accessing yell.jobs from your mobile/tablet

And with a bit of clever behind the scenes magic we’ve also configured the page so that people accessing the site from a mobile don’t even get the option to “Apply” in any other way – why add to their frustration when they wouldn’t be able to upload a CV anyway (which of course they can always do from their PC by sending themselves the job using the “send to a friend” facility)

So – there we have it – a nice little feature for one of our nice clients (and one or two more to come close on the heals) – and you can see it all here: www.yell.jobs

Oh – and our claim to being the first? We don’t know of another UK based ATS that has yet got this running for any client. We like to think that’s because our size and focus and all round awesomeness means that this kind of quick turnaround and client / candidate focus sets us apart. But if you know of another UK ATS that has done this then do let me know – pretending we’re something we’re not or claiming kudos for something that isn’t deserved really isn’t our style. We’ll leave that for the competition

No – not mine! This is a request for you to spend two minutes giving a vote to a business of which I am a big fan. Of the product, the packaging, the service, the owner and particularly the product (yes – I know that was twice ). But this vote is not for any of that (although I’m sure Kate wouldn’t mind if you voted for her for any of those ) – it’s for a competition looking for “… the most resourceful, original, exciting and disruptive small businesses in the UK”. Let me see if I can explain why I want you to vote Gower Brownies:

Gower Cottage Brownies is in every sense a cottage business. Running from the back of her family cottage on the Gower, Kate Jenkins makes IMHO the worlds best chocolate brownies (clearly Kate went to the Cuprinol school of branding ). Just a few years ago Kate thought she’d see if she could sell a box or two of her home made brownies in her local community co-operative shop – today she’s turning over in excess of £120,000, has plaudits as long as my arm and celeb fans that include amongst them John Barrowman, Emma Forbes, Andi Peters, Phil Jupitus, Jeremy Vine and plenty of people who know food – such as Gary Rhodes, Delia Smith and Gregg Wallace. Oh, and they’re a pretty big hit with many members of the Welsh and English rugby squads!

So why the vote? Well Kate’s done this pretty much singlehandedly. Not always all the production and packaging bit – she’s got @TheBrownieBitch in the evenings and weekends and nowadays a couple of “Brownie Elves” to help out more and more, but what has impressed me is the way that Kate  has truly leveraged social media (and in particular Twitter) to build the business. With nearly 3,000 followers and 43,987 tweets she has spread the word, built a face for the brand and used her loyal following network to propel the business and it’s profile. From her followers hounding Phil Jupitus to “stop by” when he’d tweeted he was having a day out on the Gower to making Kate aware that John Barrowman was filming down the road and passing on the info that he’s partial to chocolate.

The product’s good. I mean reaaallllly good – Kate has many awards and is becoming a regular star attraction at the Good Food Show. The service is great, the packaging classy and the delivery prompt. And you need all of these things to make a success in a very crowded marketplace. But:

-        Is Kate resourceful? Having spent £0 on advertising and marketing the brownies have been reviewed from the Guardian and the Sunday Times to the BBC Good Food Guide and Kate’s had spreads in Ideal Home and Woman & Home (with more in the pipeline).

-        Are brownies original? I don’t know, but you’ll never have tasted better & I believe they do make an original gift (unless you work with me, in which case it’s no longer original)

-        Exciting? This business is, in my opinion, at that point where it could go through the roof. Hell, John Barrowman is trying to get Kate to send them to his family in the US -  so yes, I’d say it’s exciting.

-        Disruptive? Kate’s use of twitter has definitely broken through barriers and propelled the business far beyond that which would have been possible pre-social media, breaking into the gift market and beyond, so I think that’s pretty disruptive.

-        And this is definitely a small business!

So there you have it – my case (as long winded as usual) as to why I think that Gower Cottage Brownies deserves your vote in the Smarta 100 for 2011. So please take a minute or two and follow the link through. Help a small business and a lovely business lady. And you never know – if you haven’t tried a heavenly Gower Cottage Brownie then maybe voting here will bring that moment all the closer for you.

[N.B. voting closes 20-9 @ 6pm – and if you think that what you’ve read makes this a worthy nomination then please pass the link on. Ta.]

It’s (probably) a little known fact that we share the same rural location (all be it separated by the village of Tiptree) as a direct competitor in our space – Hot Lizard (now of the JobServe / Aspire Media Group stable).

Nothing particularly blog worthy about that – although I did have a little smile to myself when little ole us won Yell’s business off them. So imagine my surprise when a good friend of mine reported the following conversation:

“Just had an interesting phone call from Hot Lizard. Who, it transpires, apparently designed and built the Yell.com careers website.  …. Thought I might mention this to you as, if I’m not mistaken, TMP designed their site, and you built the ATS. ….  According to the sales moron who just called me, they do the lot – still.  Because I asked him.”

My friend was of course right – TMP did indeed design the site (as they did the previous iteration of it, not HotLizard even then) and now we host it on our CMS and, of course, provide the underpinning ATS. And we have done so since HotLizard switched off their solution back at the start of July.

The conversation was made all the more farcical by the fact that this friend of mine works at a Recruitment Communications / Advertising agency that has not so long back relaunched their own site and over the years produced some very high profile and often critically acclaimed employer recruitment sites for their clients – so imagine his mirth when the lies were accompanied by a request to speak to the person who “looks after your recruitment” as apparently they could help them design and build their new recruitment website. Classic Muppetry.

I know that for many organisations New Business is about kissing as many frogs or chucking enough muck at a wall – and best of luck to this individual and the business he’s “promoting” off the back of ignorance and lies, but I really hope any bites he gets follows up by connecting to one of Yell’s resourcing team to find out the truth about their experience of the HotLizard solution and service.

Ah well – at least I know to look a bit further than the other side of Tiptree if I ever want to recruit a New Business Sales person type. :-]

No – this isn’t a summary of a mad last weekend, but rather a top line on what we’ve been up to since moving office. And it’s also very much the reason as to why we’ve been so quiet on here. So once again I find myself apologising for neglecting my blogging duties – bit of a broken record that now isn’t it. Sorry <must do better Hens!> :-/

If you’d asked me 4 years ago where I might have hoped to be today (having not long ago entered our 4th year of trading (that’s right – YEAR 4!!!!)) then in all seriousness I would have settled for  ”still trading”. And that still holds. I don’t want to ever take anything for granted – least of all our clients! But as I await the official reckoning from the accountant from the last financial year I’m pretty gob smacked as to where we’re at right now. And God knows there’s plenty still to do – but let me just touch on, in terms of clients and our work, what we’ve been up to since last I blogged. In a world that seems polluted with over-promotionists and big hype sales teams I hope this speaks more of what we’re about than any self glorifying promotional BS piece.

BMI Healthcare - the UKs largest independent healthcare employer (I know – I had no idea either).

FiveRivers – leading independent Social Enterprise.

G4S – you’ve probably heard of these guys as they’re literally everywhere as one of the world’s largest employers. We helped them with their graduate recruitment  in Kenya.

GAIN – the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition – an organisation doing some incredible work in the world.

Majestic Wine – a favourite brand in our house I can tell you! (nice to be back too – we worked with them 1st c.7 years ago )

National Trust - a brilliant training scheme from one of the UKs biggest charities.

Newport City Council – obviously I don’t have favourites (highly unprofessional ), but if I did then I’d wax on about how I love the spot-on creative concept married to simpleness of execution that generated highly effective results for this campaign site.

Orione Care - it’s not all about big names – am very proud to offer highly efficient entry level solutions that clients genuinely love.

Yell - still early days and the system is bedding in after a rather speedy  build -> deploy, but a nice and clean execution with the focus on back-end efficiency to really help the resourcing team.

We were also very proud that a site we built (www.ThinkPowerSector.co.uk) got through to the shortlist for best website at the CIPD’s Recruitment Awards recently.

So as you can see – we really have been busy bunnies of late – and over the next few weeks I’m pleased to say there’ll be no let up with some great enhancements to existing clients and some new ones in the wings too, all whilst we’re also working behind the scene’s on one or two particularly large projects that will be hitting the streets much later in the year.

Once again I will try my hardest to not be such a stranger on here – but if you do want to know more about what we do or what it looks like or why clients such as Heinz, Comic Relief, Weight Watchers, Safestore and LSG have been happy with us as their ATS partner well into their second year (and I can assure you it’s not because we tie them into 3 year horror contracts) then don’t hesitate to get in touch: Alex@3DMarComms.com