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

This came up today in a little back and forth on Twitter & got me so agitated that I wanted to air it here too. The micro debate centred around the use of Flash (or at least the exclusive use of flash) in website builds.

Now firstly let me say that I’m a Flash fan and for a long time have been in awe of the experience you can get through flash sites. It annoys me that I can’t see them on my iPhone (nor could I if I had an iPad – but I don’t, so “whatever”), but at the same time I understand that we can’t always have everything on every platform (until HTML5 is here and everyone moves to that of course

In my day I have produced and overseen my fair share of Flash site builds – even Flash exclusive sites (about 8years ago I was responsible for building a multi award winning site for Codemasters where the target audience was Game Developers & the like – so if they didn’t have a decent internet connection speed and Flash then that was a pretty effective first sift criteria to fail). So if you’re confident that the target audience are absolutely going to have the set up to access the site and you don’t care about considering accessibility or SEO (both of which flash comprehensively fails at) then fill your boots.

But what REALLY pissed me off was a cross the bow shot of Adobe statistics (see them here). If you have a cursory look it’s pretty damned impressive. As of June 2010:

Flash player 8 & below has penetrated 99.7% of all PCs in Europe

Flash player 10 has penetrated 97.9% of all PCs in Europe

Now that’s all massively impressive. Until you have a little scratch into the methodology. Have a guess how many people they asked? Bear in mind that the UK has an estimated 46.5m people with internet access. (France 42.3m; Germany 61.9m). So go on – how many you reckon? out of a user base of 150.7million people?

1,050

No – not 1,050 in the UK. 1,050 in “Europe” (350 in each of the 3 countries that makes up Europe. Italians don’t have the Internet do they?). That’s, I reckon, a sample size of 0.0006%.

FFS – this is one of the worlds foremost software providers conducting research to try prove their global reach across the web. And they gathered responses from 350 people in the UK to give us a 99.7% figure. 350 people who I daresay are about as representative of the wider UK user as I am of 8stone females in their 20s named Alex. But that’s a whole other story.

So build sites in flash. Make them beautiful & engaging. Bask in smoothness, trickery and utilise all the cleverness Flash allows. But don’t justify your approach (to yourself or your clients) based on a user reach that is effectively not much better than made up data.

BTW – in a study this afternoon 100% of people thought my opinion in this matter was spot on. *

*I asked 4 people and my dog

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.

With the cherry blossom now thick on the trees and daffs pointing skyward everywhere the change of season is definitely here (at long last) and so with a spring in our step we moved into a new HQ for 3DMarComms (literally a hop, skip and a jump away from where we all live) at the beginning of the week.

It’s a modest little affair, but already feels like our space and I’m sure will serve us very well. And as the exact same office where Jobserve started off it’s got quite a pedigree in regards to web based recruitment businesses, so we’ll hope that they left behind a little magic dust in the corner somewhere.

You are of course more than welcome to pop in for a coffee and a biscuit, but Tiptree is hardly the centre of anywhere so we won’t be holding our breath

Office sweet office

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Two hellos / welcomes from us today.

Firstly I’d like you all to meet Amy. “If it seems too good to be true then it most probably is” is something I’ve often heard said – well we’re hoping that Amy proves “them” wrong. A trilingual Project Manager with specific Recruitment and Start Up experience, who’s already spent some time using HARBOUR ATS and has experience of other ATS’ to bring to the party too. Oh – and she lives in our neck of the woods. I’ve had to make some tough calls in setting up this business – but I’m sure you’ll agree that this hire probably had to be one of the easiest. This is a great hire for our clients (existing & potential) as Amy can not only assist in delivery but also bring fresh perspective and relevant experience to the table, but I’m mostly hoping she’ll help maintain whatever shred of sanity I still have left 

Secondly – say hi to Kimberly. Kimberly Clark that is (of Kleenex and Andrex (amongst others) fame).

Screen grab of Kimberly-ClarkGraduate.com - Graduate recruitment site underpinned by HARBOUR ATS

www.Kimberly-ClarkGraduates.com – A nicely integrated grad recruitment site underpinned by a quickly turned around HARBOUR ATS – it’s so beautiful when things fit together so nicely it brings a tear to my eyes (reach for Kleenex – as the strapline says “it’s time to let it out”).

Quite a perky start to the month of March really

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.

Towards the end of last year we set about recruiting to expand our development capability (which has, thankfully and with some great results & delighted clients, been working flat out for some time). I can confirm what I’ve read other people reporting to be true, in that irrespective of the swelling ranks of the unemployed, when you’re looking for talent you’ve still got to search damned hard (although ironically in this instance it turned out we actually hired one of the very first applicants).

I have to say as well though,  the quality of many of the applications was appalling. I wonder if anyone could create an index for the %age of job seekers who deserve to stay where they are/without a job on the basis of number of random applications outside of skill set they make (many have a clear inability to read a simple job description), terrible overall presentation (be that CV or answering questions in legible English) and overall seeming apathy towards life?!  :-/

So firstly let’s welcome Brett on board. A few weeks in and he’s clearly a nice guy who, I think, has settled in well (certainly there’s plenty to keep him occupied) and quickly become part of the team, but most importantly he clearly “LOVES code” – which is what you want in a developer in our opinion. We all spend more than enough time doing our day to day, so having a passion for what you do makes such a difference to both your life and the end result, so here’s to many years of keeping his passion stoked and delivering great facilities and service for our clients.

Secondly – I thought I’d just share with you some of the recruitment MI, because that is, after all, what we built HARBOUR ATS to do, and because it’s good to share .

The media channels used were: our website; twitter; google docs; PHP forums; Gumtree; CWjobs; Planet Recruit (& Hot Group network); Jobserve.We paid for CW Jobs, Planet Recruit and tried the new Pay Per Application model with Jobserve (limiting it to 10).

The specifics were that this was a Junior Developer role in North Essex (although we were pretty flexible about remote working).

The applications came from:

• 3dmarcomms.com – 3
• Jobserve – 6
• Gumtree – 9
• Planetrecruit (et al) – 12
• CWjobs – 35

The campaign MI headlines are:

• Worth testing: Planet Recruit – 1; 3DMarComms.com – 2; Jobserve – 3; Gumtree – 5; CWjobs – 15
• Telephone interview: Jobserve – 1; Gumtree – 1; 3DMarComms – 2; CWjobs – 2
• Talent Banked: CWjobs – 2; 3DMarcomms – 3
• Hire: Gumtree (specific cost = £0)

My personal feedback:

I thought that Planet Recruit was, to be blunt, absolute bobbins. The team there were very nice and tried hard (with a lot of additional collateral), but for this role I was very disappointed with such a poor response (particularly in quality – but also in volume, which may, considering the quality, have been a blessing I guess). My conclusion is that Planet Recruit (& network) has a very poor for Junior PHP Developer reach, particularly in the East of England.

I didn’t take to the Jobserve experience at all really. The lack of ability to integrate directly into an ATS (something I’ve long rallied against as a real barrier to use on this site) proved an issue here where out of 10 applications I paid for (on the PPA model) 4 then couldn’t be arsed to complete a simple application form I directed them to (although of course I’m sure some bright spark at Jobserve will try and sell this as a useful “motivational fit” sift :-s). However when you’re on a Pay Per Application basis, that kind of lazy candidate reflects very badly on the site. The lack of human involvement I also found made it a poor overall posting experience & actually as it all worked out rather expensive for only 3 OK applicants (despite the filters set in the Jobserve facility) who were even worth inviting to partake in our online test. On this experience (and if I can make the time I’ll blog some more on this for sure ) – Pay/Cost Per Application isn’t a model I’ll be looking to use again (or at least certainly not on the Jobserve site).

I have to admit to always having like CWJobs as a site – but perhaps the thing I liked best about it was the fact that it generally delivered for my clients in the past. And I wasn’t let down this time either. Good service that delivered good volume and decent quality of applicants. Thanks guys.

And what can you say about Gumtree? Well for me it just emphasised what’s so difficult about the crowded web, proving that you have to do your damndest to think like a candidate in a very noisy market place – in this instance thinking local to “get our man”.

I also, of course, had quite a lot of interest from recruitment consultants trying to sell me their “stella” candidates. There’s probably a blog post there too in regards to how important it is to get the attention to detail right first time every time, particularly when you’re trying to open a door that’s pretty firmly closed anyway. All I can say is there are a lot of Recruitment Consultants out there who will rightfully (and hopefully) go out of business if their terrible attempts to win my business accurately demonstrates their overall integrity, ability & professionalism. However, it’s always good to find the exception that proves the rule – and I was so impressed with Kirsty Brewer’s quirky, personal & through that ultimately stand-out approach (she’s from Senitor (although god knows their website needs some serious overhaul!!)) – that I’ve made sure I’ve kept her details just in case.

Anyway – that’s more than enough reminiscing about how we stepped into this year. It’s back to the grind stone, but all very much feeling glad that we have a grindstone to return to and that it’s thankfully seeing some serious action already this year

Before we all get swept up in the New Year we thought we’d just salute an evergreen presence in the HR/Recruitment blogging community who won through (for the 3rd year running no less) as the Best UK Recruitment Blog of the rather testing business year that was 2009. Yup, Peter Gold & his Hire Strategies Blog did it again in the UK Recruiter blog awards – the X Factor of the Recruitment Opinio-rati.

Peter’s blogging style may often be quite “marmite” and he certainly likes to stir things up to “stimulate” the debate, but his retention of the crown for a triple is great credit to his stamina and dedication to blogging (and having a wheelbarrow full of opinion and observation to share). We were pleased to sponsor the awards this year and so hopefully by now Peter’s already received (and ideally sunk before his other passion, rigorous physical training, undoubtedly re-starts in the new year) his very own competition Champers courtesy of HARBOUR ATS

Best UK Recruitment Blog 2009 winner - Peter Gold's Champagne

As far as we’re concerned at 3D MarComms the first generation of blogging has seen far too much blogging “wallpaper” being produced. So here’s hoping Peter’s style of “telling things how he see’s them” from a perspective of first hand professional experience will long continue and come to epitomise the style of personal and professional commentary and engagement that will rise to the surface as we embark into the next decade.

Well done Peter.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks (hence the recent silence on here and other social media avenues) whilst we’ve been ridiculously busy turning around a brace of significant requirements with near impossible timings. Not that I’m in anyway complaining because, especially in these times, we know all too well you have to seize every opportunity that comes your way – & we’re just a hairs breadth away from pulling off something I think will have been massively impressive by anyone’s standards, giving us some great names to add to our portfolio too.

But amongst it all – whilst trying to keep new business plates spinning and a couple of other nearly completed negotiations progressing too – an email popped in from Claire at Sculptured Sweetness (read about the project here).

Let’s be straight – this was project for a friend, but when you get a testimonial sent back like this, whoever it’s from, it makes you remember why you do what you do. It’s what we started the company to do – taking pride in a job well done, no matter how modest or how sophisticated. And with top listing in Google and a nice professional site with an easy to administer CMS, I think even at our most modest we’d say we’re happy with that!

“3D Marcomms listened carefully to my business plan and were very effective in helping build a website that catered for my fledgling company’s needs perfectly.  From the start to our current position, 3DMC explained everything clearly without using jargon and ensured that I knew how to manage my website on a daily basis.  3DMC are always at the end of an email should I have any questions and requests and have always been very helpful.

I find the Harbour CMS very easy to use and very clear, enabling me to keep my website fresh and up to date.  I am thrilled with the design of my website and how much traffic it has generated.  The website has played a major part in getting my business off the ground and presenting my business to prospective customers. It has achieved results in a very short space of time.  It looks professional and works quickly and smoothly for my customers which in turn promotes a professional appearance for my business.  I am happy to recommend to anyone thinking of using 3D Marcomms that by trusting Alex and his team, you will get the results that you are after as they certainly do not disappoint.”