We’ve just delivered two nice little projects that I thought we should just tell you about – and as modest as they are (we’ll have a biggee to announce hopefully any day now – if size is your thing) they’re both still exciting and pleasing in their own right and for different reasons.

If you’ve been following our exploits then you’ll hopefully remember that one of our early successes was and on behalf of Weight Watchers (our instant ATS underpinning media activity by Beyond Interactive – assisting in processing over 500 applications and, through the hires made, the client reckoned saved them an estimated £30k that would have otherwise been spent through Recruitment Consultants).  This led to us building a more permanent solution – WeightWatchers-jobs.co.uk. And that’s all ticking along quite nicely – the client’s even starting to pull off speculative applicants for consideration in their current recruitment, which of course will send the ROI through the roof, which is nice

So that was for those employed by Weight Watchers. But the public face of Weight Watchers is perhaps most often associated with the meetings (helped by Matt Lucas I’m sure) and the se;f employed/franchise type Leaders who help motivate the attendees to succeed in their pursuit of weight loss. Well the team responsible for recruiting the Leaders were so impressed with what they saw we’d done for the other side of the business they wanted their own site and application facility – NO MORE TREE KILLING with paper application forms!! So WeightWatchers-leaders.co.uk was created. And whilst it’s a nice little site in itself, what we’re most pleased with is the fact our work got noticed and referred within the business – that kind of vote of confidence means the world.

The second piece of new business to tell you about came through the award winning digital team at Penna TCS. We’ve been chatting for a while, but an opportunity came to work together and show what we could do (at pace). Aviva have an arm of their business (or will do when this partner becomes as one as of April 1st this year) called Asprea. What do they do? well they’re the “property household claims management” side of the business. Anyway – Penna TCS built the site and we underpinned it with HARBOUR ATS at  www.fixhomesbuildcareers.com – and I challenge you to spot a join

But what we find most exciting about this particular project is that, even for this very “entry level” version of HARBOUR, we’ve worked (and I’d like to think pretty effortlessly from both our perspectives) with the Penna TCS Campaign Tracking team. So we’re getting to see first hand our facility working in conjunction with fully tracked campaign to give the client some very accurate and conclusive media source reporting – from qualified click thrus to actual bums on seats.
I love it when a spreadsheet comes together

Someone commented to me before Christmas on how, having won a mile-stone piece of business, they were surprised that we didn’t seem to allow ourselves any time to enjoy the moment. It’s true – we barely acknowledged let alone particularly celebrated the success.

The reality is that time for reflection and self congratulation is, as a start up business, something I consider to be a luxury, all be it one we’re working hard to earn. And whilst I can’t tell you whether this is something that is reflective of the current economic market or just the way that I approach building a business, what I do know is that right now just about every moment we have is about delivery (not that I’m in any way grumbling of course, but this also explains the tardy blogging of late too).

But it was in creating a presentation for some potential new business at the end of last week that I allowed myself a little swell of pride as I added a new slide to the now quite estalbished “About us” section. Up until now our client references have always had to be about the clients we’ve worked with in the past – something we termed our “pedigree”. And rightly too as we’ve delivered site’s and systems for some pretty impressive brands over the years (as displayed on our About Us page (note to self – make time to refresh that now as well)).

Since HARBOUR (our Applicant Tracking & Content Management  platform) was “born” and became pretty much the sole focus for the business, we’ve been working pretty damned hard to both evolve the system and build a portfolio – it was prepping for Friday’s meeting that helped me realise we’re probably not doing so bad, all things considered. Our first HARBOUR ATS facility went live back in August, and since then, through the worst economic depression since the second world war,  here’s who have used and proved it to date:

HARBOUR Clients (so far)

So whilst we rub our bleary eyes coming out of a very busy January and muster the energy for what could be an even busier February, during which we’ll also hopefully bolster our team with a new member, I hope you’ll allow us a bit of a public smile to ourselves. And if you don’t hear me waxing lyrical about how we’ve done this for these and that for those and delighted such and such over something or other – don’t mistake it for me not being immensely proud of all that we’ve done so far within our business – we’re just building a client at a time and know we’re only really as good as our last delivery.