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

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

It’s odd to think that only a year ago we were approaching the end of year 2 of 3D MarComms and feeling all grown up moving into a proper (relatively speaking) office. No more clearing out the home office because the Mother In Law was coming to stay and needed the space (formerly known as a spare bedroom).

But now, a year later and a few more people onboard it was blatantly clear that we had outgrown our space again. And whilst a quarterly rent that didn’t break 4 figures was very nice, there’s a certain comfort that you need in your day-to-day space that just wasn’t possible with 5 of us in our little room. So the hunt began – and (thankfully for me) ended pretty much where it started, just around the corner.

It’s a very smart office property that was built just before the recession hit (unfortunately for the owners) and had been left unoccupied ever since. I walk the dog past it several times a week and have always looked at it daring to dream “maybe one day!” Well like something that was just “meant to be” it waited for us to be ready and this week we moved into 20 Station Rd.

There’s work still to be done in as much as we have the ground floor and so the floor and a half above are available to rent to other parties, so walls and doors will be put up to make our space all the more visibly ours, but as you’ll see from below there’s quite literally more room than we know what to do with – but… well… it was just right on so many levels.

So if you do find yourself in deepest most Northern Essex then do pop by for a coffee. We now have somewhere to receive and entertain guests. Who knows, we might even have a coffee table by then too (although having been schooled by ThirtyThree it’s quite possible that a beer fridge and pool table would come before anything as practical as a coffee table

Before:

After:

OK – so things are busy.

Damned busy. You know they (whoever they are) say “it never rains but it pours”, well at the moment I’m delighted to say we’re seemingly stepping into monsoon season. That’s why I think it’s time to be realistic with myself. Because whilst it might not show it, writing blog posts often takes me ages. Certainly far too long considering what else I should/could be doing and the number of early morning finishes I’m currently clocking up most weeks. But it’s good to talk. I certainly believe it’s good to blog, because it’s good to keep people up to date with what we’re up to (well, my Mum at least), so perhaps it’s time to change the way I use this ‘ere particular web 2.0 (does using that expression date me?) medium and see if that works better.

So I’m going to try and keep it succinct. I’m gonna TRY OK? No promises, but lets see.

For starters a pop quiz. I’ve just come off a call to a prospective customer. The technology of the web meeting didn’t go so well TBH, but we muddled through. Anyway – the feedback on our core product (HARBOUR ATS) was very encouraging. This person had been using a “leading global talent management software” facility in their previous role as well as having undertaken a very extensive ATS provider market assessment a year or two ago. So see if you can spot which comments related to HARBOUR ATS and which the other product(s):

• “Wow, I love it”
• “Clearly execution is informed by good digital principles, which is refreshing to see”
• “Love the intuitiveness”
• “It looks sh*t”
• “Streets ahead of anything [sic. other ATS'] that I’ve seen”

And for an extra bonus point – see if you can tell me which other ATS a soon to be announced customer was describing when they said that “using it is like rolling over a corpse to try and find a candidate”.

No prizes – all for fun – but answers on a postcard please

It’s all been a bit busy of late, which is why my blogging has been neglected (what? you didn’t notice! , but there are some things that you just have to stop and acknowledge. And what better to acknowledge than us moving into our 3rd year of trading.

2 years old eh?! Where the flippin heck did that evaporate to? It wasn’t long after we started out on this little (ad)venture that the news turned to the somewhat cataclysmic global economic tailspin – the worst since the 2nd World War they said. Oh great. Brilliant. So we start a business that services the recruitment sector at one of the most difficult economic times for a century. Just fan-bloody-tastic.

And apparently it might not be over yet. But whether or not we hit the much talked about double dip recession, it’s still a tough climate to be operating in that’s for sure – and you’d think the long established ATS vendors have probably had a royal sized kick up they’re collected backside too. So over the coming months I expect the competition to be doing all that their bloated, legacy-code-limited carcasses can to raise their game too. Interesting & challenging times for sure – but when you’ve known no different then I think it could be argued that these are indeed ideal times in which to start a business. Certainly we know how important every single client relationship is – whatever their size or spend.

Sure, we still lose out from time to time for being “too young a business” and therefore in some people’s eyes a risky proposition, but despite that our portfolio has grown exceptionally well by anyone’s measure, proving our delivery credibility long the way. Our clients are giving great feedback, each one willing to stand as a reference, and with every new requirement HARBOUR goes from strength to strength. I mean who’d have thought that 2 years in we’d have brands such as Heinz, Weight Watchers, The Environment Agency, Kimberly Clark & Comic Relief being delighted by what we do. Not to mention having a server established in China just waiting for our first full project there to get the sign off.

There’s been plenty that we’ve learned the hard way, and there’ll of course be plenty more to learn over the coming years. But it’s with lots of excitement that we look ahead. Having our own office has been a great leap in the right direction (let’s just say the novelty of home working very much lost its shine for me). We have a support team in place who have so quickly become embedded with the business it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t here – or indeed consider how the business would run without them being there. And some wonderful client relationships blossoming, with a couple more (fingers crossed) very close to being announced.

In some ways Tony & I of course feel like a proud Parents looking at what we’ve achieved, but at the same time it’s as much us who are the toddler here, so the luxury of standing back and admiring isn’t one we can really afford – it’s about concentrating on the next step and the next and the next – ensuring we continue our progress smoothly and without coming a cropper on the corner of a coffee table that we didn’t spot.