Now there are plenty of things that we should be shouting about in the name of self-promotion, but as we’ve been so busy with our nose down and delivering I think we’ll just put up a snap shot of some of the clients we’ve been working with and some of the nice bits we’ve been perfecting for them and then I’ll come back to fill in some more detail on some specific projects later.

So in no particular order (well, that’s not true, I’ve alphabetised them, so that’s very much a particular order isn’t it – but you know what I mean) for the past 12 months we’ve been mostly:

- Admiral : apart from building the site (working in conjunction with their Empl. Comms Agency – ThirtyThree) there’s also a nifty Group Interview Calendar working behind the scenes that brought some massive efficiencies and helpful MI to the telescreen process for the recruitment team.

- Andrews : a pretty new addition to our stable, this facility has a neat post interview feedback collation function to help HR  support managers across the Estate Agency network with their recruitment activity and delivering the best possible candidate experience.

- Ashley Kate : long standing client for whom we were delighted to create a mobile website to compliment the site we built a few years back

- BMIhealthcare : another careers site that we host completely, we’ve been doing some neat elements working with the team to help reduce their recruitment spend pretty significantly. Our most recent system enhancement is bringing their onboarding online – and whilst it’s still early days (as I type this) the signs are good that this will bring significant business efficiencies.

- Ceredigion County Council : making job search and apply facilities appear “as one” with the client’s site is something that comes second nature to us, but as well as stepping into the Public Sector this project offered the opportunity to further evolve our language switching functionality (first delivered for one of our China based clients) – and we’re pretty pleased with how complete a solution this now is. Client’s chuffed too.

- Clarks (North America) : having delivered the UK Clarks recruitment site we successfully pitched for the North America business. Now Clarks have a joined up international offering with distinct North America content as well as supporting Language switching. Other features behind the scenes include: eSigning (electronic signatures – provided by EchoSign); background check provider integration (provided by Creative Services Inc.); post interview feedback collation; distinct workflows for different parts of the business (inc. store level access).

- Greater Anglia : now this really is bringing us up to date – launched just a week ago we were very proud to work with another business where we’re big consumers of their service (others include: Clarks; Joules; Lloyds TSB; Majestic Wine; Monsoon Accessorize (me not so much Monsoon ). The careers site itself was built by one of their retained agencies (Jacob Bailey) and we then provide our legendary seamless integration with a system that also has: scored application forms for Drivers; Internal Careers Portal with distinct application process for Agency workers; an automated check and block (within specified time frames) of applicants to specific Regulated Roles; Vacancy Authorisation; Offer Authorisation; Line Manager Interview Feedback Collation. But best of all – I got to have a go on the proper train simulator

…  and that’s where I’m going to leave it for today. I’ll update within the next week what the last 12months looked like in terms of clients H -> T and then, as I say, may well come back and pick up some specifics on some of the projects – after all, if we don’t blow our own trumpet etc etc.

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 the longer I don’t get round to it that’s becoming 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) with some VERY smart bits within that supports their Line Manager population – 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 pretty 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 our homebuilt mobile version of the Monsoon internal careers portal (tied in with an internal poster campaign resplendent with QR code) and a particularly nifty way we’re about to enable BMI Healthcare applicants to partially apply from a mobile (‘cos the system knows they’re on a mobile you see) from which they then get a reminder to come back and fully submit their application by uploading a CV (although recruiters could progress without if they wanted). Petrofac is a nice little site and another China based campaign site for a new client Tiandi to add to the portfolio too. Ooooo – and we’re very pleased with ourselves over our latest Cost Per Hire reporting that’s tied everything up for Forward.

There’s definitely other nice stuff and clients I’ll forget to mention though. hmmmm.

Anyway – 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 continue to 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 it 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

“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 – 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

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

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