UK-based firm Xpertise Recruitment are no strangers to technology. With extensive knowledge across the IT & Digital sector, they place .Net Developers, Digital Architects through to Data Scientists and senior IT Leaders. With a huge increase in people opting for a job in the technology industry, Richard Harrison reveals the demand and their successful recruitment journey.
Why did Xpertise Recruitment decide to specialise in IT recruitment?
I founded Xpertise Recruitment after previously creating a successful IT recruitment practice for another large IT recruitment consultancy in the capacity of Sales Director. I had 15 years of expertise in the IT recruitment market which meant there was instant credibility in the marketplace to be able to develop the Xpertise IT recruitment brand.
With the technology industry continuously evolving, where do you see Xpertise Recruitment in 5 year’s time?
As with all successful businesses you need a little bit of luck at the right time but Xpertise was founded 3 years ago with a clear strategy and we have implemented that strategy in a way which has enabled us to grow the business ahead of plan.
In these 3 years, we have built a business with 17 heads, a strong offering across both the Midlands and London marketplace, moved into an office with room to double this headcount further, developed clear career frameworks for career development, developed a top internal training academy to ensure our recruiters have all the skills required to be successful, and we are on track to have 100 contractors out working for us during 2016.
The 5 year plan is to continue to follow our strategic plan and grow the business organically by hiring and developing new and existing staff within our specialist practices, grow our contractor base, maintain our focus on continuous improvement both internally and externally, continue reinvesting the profits in order to grow the business quickly whilst improving our profitability year on year and ensure we continue to have fun in the workplace ensuring we continue to build an aspirational company to work for.
Has the Cloud’s popularity impacted the roles that you recruit for?
Cloud systems have been around for many years but technology innovators have embraced SaaS models openly in recent times which in turn has created an army of software businesses who know they can develop annuity income if they can build better, faster, more innovative products.
In markets where on premise software houses have not innovated, those organisations have been caught out and have often lost substantial market share.
The result for Xpertise is this wave of new technology businesses that has created ever increasing demand for software Developers to build those software products. Combine this trend with a strong economy that means end user organisations are once again investing in their technology, a genuine war for talent and high demand for this talent has been created.
What are the most sought after skills in the IT industry?
At Xpertise, the most in demand skills are for .Net development skills although UK market intelligence tells us the most in demand skills are JavaScript skills because both front-end and backend developers usually need to develop using JavaScript.
How important is CRM to keeping your candidate data up to date?
In our view, no recruitment business could operate successfully without a strong CRM system. Add to this that the most important commodity a recruitment business has, baring its consultants, is the talent within those CRM systems, it is extremely important that we have an up to date database.
One of the best advantages we have over our competitors is that our database was created from scratch three years ago so we have by default built a totally up to date database. Part of our challenge is keeping that up to date for the future.
How does Ebsta help you achieve your ‘customer always’ approach?
Ebsta is fundamentally there to speed up the capturing of candidate and client contact data for our CRM system, Bullhorn. We want to be able to capture our client and candidate conversations quickly and efficiently. Using Ebsta allows us to do this at the click of a button within Outlook. This means that we can immediately capture all customer conversations which in turn builds’ our knowledge of our customer behaviours. Previously, we were more reliant on consultants cutting and pasting these conversations into Bullhorn so the information was more readily available.
How has Ebsta increased your recruiters’ productivity levels?
Ebsta is there to speed up the capturing of candidate and client contact data for your CRM system. Productivity is the key point when choosing a solution like Ebsta. Recruitment consultants spend a large portion of their week speaking to and capturing candidate and client contact data so being able to speed up the admin processing time so consultants can update candidate records faster, for example, has enabled us to maintain our highly up to date database which in turn means we can touch more talent in less time whilst upping the quality of candidates we supply to our clients. Less time on admin makes us more efficient meaning consultants can focus more of their time on hiring activities rather than admin.
What is the biggest benefit of using Ebsta for Bullhorn?
It allows us to capture top talent and potential hiring Decision Makers data quicker than we would otherwise be able to do using Bullhorn directly. This means when we market candidates to our prospects, we can capture more prospect data in the same time period than we would otherwise have been able to do. It’s an efficiency gain for our consultants and for the business basically.
We like how quick Ebsta is and how easy it is to use. From a training perspective, you can cover how Ebsta works very quickly with new consultants as it’s very intuitive to use.
Xpertise Recruitment and Ebsta
Xpertise Recruitment source the clients and Ebsta keeps the data up to date. They value the innovative developments in technology like the ability to solve productivity issues and keeping an accurate CRM database.
With Ebsta, they can change their recruiting process effectively and easily. As technology changes, recruiting for Information Technology changes too and the future is looking very promising.
Check out our 3 Ebsta for Bullhorn tools that can get your recruiters working at hyper-speed: Ebsta for Chrome, Ebsta for Outlook and Ebsta for Word .
