On 25th May 2018, today’s Data Protection Act (DPA) will be replaced with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This checklist highlights the 11 most important steps you can take now to make sure your data and processes remain compliant.

According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), if you’re already DPA compliant, then most of your approach to compliance will remain valid come May 2018. However, there are some differences in GDPR, which means you’ll have to do certain things for the first time and some other things differently. Before we get into the specifics, here’s an overview of the GDPR and what it means for businesses and individuals.

What is GDPR?

The point of the GDPR is to provide clarity and consistency for the protection of personal data. It imposes new rules on organisations that offer goods and services to people in the European Union (EU), or that collect and analyse data tied to EU residents, no matter where they’re located. The GDPR establishes:

• Enhanced personal privacy rights
• Increased duty for protecting data
• Mandatory breach reporting
• Significant penalties for non-compliance

What are the key changes with the GDPR?

There are four key focus areas of difference between GDPR and DPA compliance.

Personal privacy

With GDPR, individuals have the right to:

• Access their personal data
• Correct errors in their personal data
• Wipe their personal data
• Object to processing of their personal data
• Export personal data

Controls and notifications

The new regulations are amended in terms of:

• Strict security requirements
• Breach notification obligation
• Appropriate consents for data processing
• Confidentiality
• Recordkeeping

Transparent policies

GDPR requires that organisations provide transparent and easily accessible policies regarding:

• Notice of data collection
• Notice of processing
• Processing details
• Data retention/deletion

IT and training

Businesses will need to invest in:

• Privacy personnel and employee training
• Data policies
• Data Protection Officer (if your business has 250+ employees)
• Processor/vendor contract

So what do you need to do to make all this happen? We have supported businesses of all sizes become GDPR compliant. Find out how we can help your business. 

Here are 11 areas the ISO flags as being key areas to review. We also help businesses similar to yours stay compliant

11 things you must do now for GDPR compliance

1. Raise awareness across your business

The ICO urges businesses to start planning for GDPR as soon as possible, so you have time to address budgetary, IT, personnel, governance and communications implications.

Key people and decision-makers need to be aware of the new legislation, so they can understand the potential impact and identify areas that require attention for compliance. Start by looking at your risk register, if you have.

2. Audit all personal data

Document what personal data you hold, where it came from and who you share it with.

The GDPR updates rights for a networked world. It makes organisations responsible for proving they comply with the data protection principles, for example by having effective policies and procedures in place.

For example, if you become aware that you’ve shared inaccurate personal data with other organisations, it is your responsibility to inform the other organisation about this inaccuracy so it, too, can correct its own records.

3. Update your privacy notice

When you collect personal data, you probably use a privacy note containing DPA compliant information such as your identity and how you intend to use their information. Under the new regulations, you’ll have to tell people some additional things compared to the DPA. For example, you’ll need to explain:

• your legal basis for processing the data
• your data retention periods
• their right to complain to the ICO if they think there’s a problem with how you’re handling their data

So you’ll need to review your current privacy notices and put a plan in place to make any necessary changes by May 2015.

4. Review your procedures supporting individuals’ rights

The new legislation covers the same principles as the DPA, but with significant enhancements. The key thing here is to make sure you have the procedures in place so you can comply with, for example, an individual’s request to provide them with the data you have on them electronically and in a commonly used format.

The main rights for individuals under the GDPR are to:

• allow subject access
• have inaccuracies corrected
• have information erased
• prevent direct marketing
• prevent automated decision-making and profiling
• allow data portability (as per the paragraph above)

5. Review your procedures supporting subject access requests

Depending on the type and size of organisations, subject access requests could generate a logistical/administrative headache for many businesses.

Under the new rules, you are unlikely to be able to charge for complying with requests, and will have just a month to comply, rather than the current 40 days. There are also different grounds for refusing to comply with a subject access request, and if you refuse a request you need to have policies and procedures in place to demonstrate why the request meets these criteria.

You may want to consider conducting a cost/benefit analysis for providing online access to individuals.

6. Identify and document your legal basis for processing personal data

Under the GDPR, some individuals’ rights will be modified, depending on your legal basis for processing their personal data. For example, they could have their data deleted where you use consent as your legal basis for processing. So you need to understand the various types of data processing you carry out, identify your legal basis for carrying it out and document it.

7. Review how you seek, obtain and record consent

If you rely on individuals’ consent to process their data, make sure it meets the standards required by the GDPR. If not, alter your consent mechanisms or find an alternative to consent. The GDPR is clear that data controllers must be able to demonstrate that consent was given. So you may need to review the systems you have for recording consent and ensure you have an effective audit trail.

8. Review the data you hold on children

For the first time, the GDPR will bring in special protection for children’s personal data. So if your organisation collects information about children under the age of 13, you will need parental/guardian consent to process their data lawfully.

9. Establish procedures to detect, report and investigate a personal data breach

The GDPR requires that all organisations notify the ICO of all data breaches where the individual is likely to suffer some form of damage, such as through identity theft or a confidentiality breach. So you need to set up processes to detect, report and investigate breaches.

Note that failure to report a breach could result in a fine, as well as a fine for the breach itself.

10. Review your processes around Data Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIAs)

You may be required to carry out a privacy impact assessment (PIA) in a high-risk situation such as a new technology deployment, or where operations are likely to significantly affect individuals.

To prepare for such an eventuality, the ICO recommends you familiarise yourself with their PIA Code of Practice so you can work out how best to implement DPIAs in your organisation. Think about where it might be necessary to conduct a DPIA in your organisation. Who will do it? Who else needs to be involved? Should the process be run centrally or locally?

11. Appoint a Data Protection Office (DPO)

If your organisation employees 250 or more people, is a public authority or is involved in the regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale, you should appoint a data protection officer. The DPO should take proper responsibility for data protection compliance and have the knowledge, support and authority to do so effectively.

To find out how cloud IT can help you streamline your processes for GDPR, check out this blog: How cloud IT can help you prepare for GDPR

 

Talk to a GDPR expert.

Want to find out how you can keep your business GDPR compliant? Complete the form below and a member of our team will be in touch shortly.

Protecting vital information is critical to your survival—no matter what the size or type of your business. Recent studies show that 93 percent of organisations that lose data because of a disaster go out of business within two years. Increasingly, businesses are adopting cloud backup solutions to address data protection challenges. Why?

The reason is simple: protecting data is difficult, expensive, unreliable, and unmanageable with traditional tape backup methods.

And the explosive growth of business data only increases the problem.

Cloud data protection solutions that combine the latest advancements in disk-based backup with secure, integrated, cloud technologies offer organisations fast and assured recovery of their critical enterprise data, while reducing costs and freeing the IT staff to focus on more mission-critical projects.

Cloud server backup solutions also reduce the burden of tape management and backup operations, by automatically storing the data safely offsite to protect for disaster-recovery purposes. Consider these ten reasons to move to the cloud for data backup and storage:

1. Achieve disaster recovery with secure, offsite cloud backup

You think you’re doing everything right. You back up your data on a regular basis. You check to see that your backup equipment and configurations are up-to-date and working properly. You test your restores. Yet, when a pipe bursts in your building and spills water over your servers and backup media, you still lose all your critical data in one night. Even if you’re extremely careful about backing up your data, that’s only half of the process.

To truly protect your backup data, you also must move it offsite. Too many organisations store their backup media onsite, needlessly exposing their data to risk from fire or flood. The time and money that you must spend to recreate lost data can be costly, not only in terms of lost productivity, but also in terms of lost revenue and customer good will.

On the other hand, disk-based cloud server backup uses the cloud to automatically transfer data offsite for disaster recovery. Your backup data is immediately off-premises only minutes after being updated. No matter what type of disaster strikes your organisation, you can restore data from moments before the disaster occurred.

2. Free yourself from manual and complex tape backup tasks

The unpleasant reality is that tape-based backup is time-consuming and tedious. While organisations know that they must protect their data, those with limited IT staff would prefer to focus their time on more strategic projects central to the business, rather than monitoring the progress of manual backups, reviewing logs, and troubleshooting problems. “Set-it-and go” cloud backup solutions reliably and automatically offload these functions, freeing staff to work with a more direct impact on your business—competitive advantage, productivity, and profitability. These solutions also standardise and automate the backup process throughout your organisation, without requiring IT staff at each location. A single backup application can protect both virtual and physical servers.

Besides freeing IT staff from manual chores, these solutions also provide IT with Web-based tools to manage and monitor all aspects of their server data protection. In addition, these solutions remove the burden of managing both a backup infrastructure and data protection process.

You can implement cloud backup solutions on a subscription basis from reliable third parties who offer them as managed services. The best of these managed services offer cloud backup with 24×7 coverage, proactive monitoring of data, instant scalability, predictable pricing, and no capital investment in traditional backup and recovery technology.

3. Get predictable costs and simpler budgeting

Cloud backup services are uniquely suited to address server data protection, including predictable monthly budgeting, and costs. The service is completely automated, providing immediate backup of server data to an offsite location, and leveraging the vendor’s infrastructure and expertise. This also frees IT personnel to become better aligned with business goals.

The charge for cloud backup is a known monthly service fee, rather than the capital cost of acquiring software licenses for specific servers. This allows for simpler budgeting and predictable monthly costs. There are no costs for software, backup hardware, maintenance, or media with cloud backup. The service provider bears the cost of the infrastructure and storage devices—now and in the future—as its customers grow.

4. Count on reliable, guaranteed data recovery

If lightning strikes your building tonight, you must ensure that you can restore that day’s data. Unfortunately, if you rely on a nightly backup process, restoring that data completely is impossible.

How often do you test your internal backups? Could you fully recover your data?

Cloud backup solutions solve this problem by automatically transmitting changes in files and databases to a secure, off-site facility for more continuous backup. Your staff can achieve this level of backup with minimal effort—just set it and go—greatly increasing reliable protection of your organisation’s data.

The best cloud server backup solutions not only protect recently changed files that are closed, but also capture changes in open files and databases, which can represent some of your most important enterprise data. Such solutions do so without disrupting your process flow. In addition, they provide guaranteed recovery in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

5. Minimise the risk and cost of downtime

Data protection is not a single activity or a one-time event. It’s a complex workflow of interconnected processes that extend far beyond simple onsite backup, including the following steps:

Backup replication of critical data to another device

Transfer of the replicated data to an offsite location to protect it from human-made or natural disasters

Storage that both protects and organizes the data so that you can recover it easily and quickly

Recovery of replicated data from storage whenever and wherever needed.

If your current data protection solution doesn’t address all of these steps, your organisation risks unacceptable exposure from partial protection that easily could result in costly, crippling downtime and the loss of irreplaceable data. Cloud server backup solutions offer a single low-overhead solution that addresses each step in the data protection workflow—and actually reduces the risks and cost associated with each step. These solutions provide the following benefits:

Choosing the right supplier for your business technology is often a challenge. But one sure way of getting a good idea of whether they’re jokers or saviours, is to hear what their customers say about them. Here’s what our customers say about us, our Dynamics 365 partner and buying Dynamics 365.

What Cloud Direct customers say about us

“They’ve been an absolute pleasure to deal with from start to finish.”
Edmund Carr

“They understood our questions, they understood our infrastructure, they understood our challenges…they’ve reduced costs and kept us on top of cutting edge technology.”
Crondall Energy

“Great customer service. Any issue, big or small, is dealt with efficiently and promptly.”
Warranty Wise

What our Dynamics 365 partner’s customers say about them

“They provide excellent advice for our organisation’s changing needs with a wide range of support, both technical and training. And they are always open to new ideas.”
Mencap

“Their technical knowledge of the Microsoft Dynamics platform is second to none.”
Ramsac

“We’ve always found them most helpful and have really benefited from their CRM guidance and advice.”
John Lewis Partnership

 

Want to talk to an expert?

We have a team of experts waiting to share their knowledge with you. Simply click the button below to get in contact with us. 

From your first customer contact to post-sales support, Dynamics 365 gives you and your customer a great user experience. It combines sales, marketing and servicing tools to give you a clear view of all your customers. Yes, we think we’ve found the panacea for all CRM ills. Here are our top 10 ‘cures’.

You will:

1. Nurture customers for life

Your customer experience feels seamless, as Dynamics 365 integrates data across sales, marketing and services, connecting everyone to a single source of client information. This gives your customers consistency, unifying how they experience your business.

2. Catapult your business efficiency

Automate processes for lead qualifications, service issues and other business processes. This reduces the tedium, waste and risk of manual processes, freeing people’s time for more productive work.

3. Do business anywhere

No matter where you are, you can keep productive and up to speed with your customers. Tablet and mobile apps come free with your Dynamics 365 licences – this includes for Android, iOS and Windows.

4. Make timely, informed decisions

With Dynamics 365, you get clear insights from your business data. This comes down to Microsoft’s predictive analytics and digital intelligence, supported by machine learning.

5. Integrate easily with Microsoft Office 365

Have a great user experience, with deep integration between Dynamics 365 and Office 365, bringing together business processes and personal productivity. All your familiar tools will connect, such as Outlook, Excel, Word etc.

6. Manage all your relationships and business processes

Dynamics 365 easily adapts to your specific business and industry. It will manage all your relationships and all of your processes in one, connected application. This gives your business great scalability to fuel growth.

7. Adapt quickly to market changes

Dynamics 365 works in an agile cloud environment with built-in digital intelligence. This allows you to respond quickly to customer and market changes, keeping ahead of the game.

8. Safeguard your customer data

No matter where you do your business, Dynamics 365 keeps your customer data secure, and compliant with strict data privacy regulations.

9. Integrate all your data/applications into a single interface

With Dynamics 365, your accounting database, email marketing, websites, surveys and so on are all centralised into a single user interface. Everything’s so much easier.

10. Always have the latest CRM technology

Microsoft frequently updates Dynamics 365 with more and better features, to help you keep and grow your customer base. No organisation invests more in research and development than Microsoft, to make sure your customers benefit from the best technology out there.

Dynamics 365 is available as a cloud service, installed on-premises or as a hybrid partner-hosted service, so it fits each unique business requirement – and adapts as your priorities change.

Hear what our customers and our partner, Preact’s, customers have to say in this customer testimonial blog.

Choosing the right supplier for your business technology is often a challenge. But one sure way of getting a good idea of whether they’re jokers or saviours, is to hear what their customers say about them. Here’s what our customers say about us, and our Dynamics 365 partner.

What Cloud Direct customers say about us

“They’ve been an absolute pleasure to deal with from start to finish.”

Edmund Carr

“They understood our questions, they understood our infrastructure, they understood our challenges…they’ve reduced costs and kept us on top of cutting edge technology.”

Crondall Energy

“Great customer service. Any issue, big or small, is dealt with efficiently and promptly.”

Warranty Wise

What our Dynamics 365 partner’s customers say about them

“They provide excellent advice for our organisation’s changing needs with a wide range of support, both technical and training. And they are always open to new ideas.”

Mencap

“Their technical knowledge of the Microsoft Dynamics platform is second to none.”

Ramsac

“We’ve always found them most helpful and have really benefited from their CRM guidance and advice.”

John Lewis Partnership

“From good to great”

Users of Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s cloud CRM system, benefit from numerous sales dashboards and views, which sales teams can customise to fit each individual’s needs. Highly flexible, these report right across the selling process and show the status of your sales pipeline.

This is good.

However, if you want to be really great, then our advice is to drive sales performance by gaining crucial insights from the sales data you already have in Dynamics 365, by connecting it to Power BI.

Our sales and marketing teams have been using Power BI since the summer of 2016, and the depth and simplicity of analysis have transformed the business. That’s because Power BI offers significantly greater reporting power, so we can visualise performance, understand trends and discover fresh and valuable insights. We can act quickly on these insights, amend our campaigns, and easily find out if they’re working or not.

This is great.

Why boost your CRM with Power BI?

Let’s take a look at how Power BI  Sales Dashboard can improve your sales analysis by looking at these four key areas:

What do you want from your CRM system? To help you deliver a great customer service, streamline processes with automated workflows, increase your sales conversion rate and to give you clear insights that guide your decision-making.

If you’re reading this, chances are your CRM system isn’t ticking all those boxes. Here are four signs you urgently need either to develop your CRM system, or scrap it and replace it with a CRM system that will help your business compete and grow.

1. You don’t trust your CRM reports

Your CRM system is only as good as the data it stores. If your reporting is flaky, you’re risking business critical processes relating to sales, marketing and, of course, customer servicing by making flawed decisions based on guesswork or hours of inefficient manual graft – and the risk of human error that goes with that.

If data is suspect, incomplete or just plain incorrect, you need to find out why. Likely, it’s due to either a lack of user training, or a poor CRM layout that is confusing or liable to result in data entry inconsistencies.

2. You have to access multiple systems to build up a customer view

It’s 2017, people. It’s standard to expect a single customer view without having to jump between various systems to get a clear picture of each customer and processes.

If your CRM system doesn’t give you a single view, just think about how much time and effort your business is spending as people check and update the same customer details across multiple systems in unconnected silos.

If this is the case, it’s worth investigating now either how you can adapt your existing CRM system to combine the data and processes from these disparate packages or how you can integrate these systems so that complete customer data is finally accessible to everyone from a single CRM interface.

3. Your CRM system doesn’t fit your processes

This bugbear raises the question: should CRM fit your processes or vice versa?

If it is the case that your proven business processes already work well, then it could make complete sense to configure your CRM system to replicate these.

However, the chances are that your business originally implemented CRM to:

• Improve data quality
• Enhance the efficiency of your processes
• Reduce admin costs
• Improve customer service

Without careful planning, covering these objectives within the framework of your processes, your CRM system will struggle to handle it all, and confused and frustrated users will likely fall back on legacy systems and risky, time-consuming manual processes.

Create a process map for your CRM system

One of the most important components of your CRM project is to develop a process map that defines each step of each process. The process map forms a blueprint that maps to your CRM system.

This applies to regular processes including managing sales leads and service issues. It also applies to workflows specific to your market and company, such as managing applications, events, training courses, contracts, assets and many more.

Map out your timeline for each process and include the rules and logic that you want people to follow. A CRM partner can help translate these workflows into your CRM system, using automated controls including:

• Duplicate checking
• Stage gating
• Calculated fields
• Branch logic
• Email alerts

This is just a sample. There are many more potential CRM functions that will make your process run smoothly and contribute towards a better user experience.

4. You can’t send personalised marketing emails using your CRM system

If your CRM isn’t integrated with your marketing automation system you may be able simply to connect your existing marketing solution with CRM, or switch to a new package such as dotmailer, Click Dimensions or MailChimp.

If, however, you’ve already deployed an integrated marketing system, but you still can’t send personalised emails, then data quality will be a factor.

This is a problem if you want to personalise email messages with CRM field data, which might include, for example, inserting a simple salutation or adding content that adapts dynamically, based on CRM data.

One thing’s for sure: if CRM and marketing automation are to deliver, your marketing team will need to address data issues quickly. They may want to set up a telemarketing campaign to verify and collect data, using behavioural data (for example, which link your customer clicked on) tracked in CRM from earlier emails. You can target messaging and use web forms to encourage recipients to share more details.

Other causes of data entry errors can relate to a need for user training and/or adjustments to the design of your CRM forms. To further improve CRM data input you can customise the following:

• Mandatory fields
• Reposition fields
• Adjust some field types – eg drop-down lists
• Declutter the layout
• Configure guided processes that prompt users to ask questions and collect data.

If you want to find out the best next steps for your CRM system, get in touch. We can help get you on track for tangible success by either improving your existing CRM system, or implementing a new one, with Dynamics 365.

According to the Merkle Group, 63 per cent of CRM initiatives fail. Gartner predicted that 50% of CRM strategies would continue to fail. Typical consequences are a poor ROI for the business, and a poor experience for the customer.

But why do CRM initiatives fail? Bluntly, because of weak, or non-existent, implementation strategies. So let’s look at 10 simple steps for developing a strong CRM implementation strategy that will address your business requirements and help you retain and grow customers.

1. Set up a project team for cross-business buy-in

User adoption is essential for CRM success, so make sure you get buy-in across the business. Build a project team that starts at the top with board level management support and filters through to the teams on the ground.

Make sure it’s cross-departmental, too. For example, sales, marketing, finance, support and services will use CRM on a daily basis, so you should include them in the early planning stages and maintain this involvement. They will help shape your strategy, define its goals, and ensure ongoing cooperation and acceptance.

Your CRM project team should include:

• An executive sponsor
• A project manager and CRM administrator
• A key user from each department

2. Define your CRM vision

Ask yourself why you want a new CRM system? What do you want it to achieve?

Identify these and set high-level goals that will act as your benchmark for the project. Then work out how you can measure the success of these goals.

In terms of defining objectives for your CRM campaign, businesses usually want their CRM project to:

• Provide a single view of each customer relationship
• Improve the quality of management information reporting
• Make business processes more efficient
• Increase lead generation
• Improve account retention and service delivery

3. Prioritise and map your CRM objectives

Take a phased approach, beginning with quick wins, rather than trying to achieve everything at once.

Some objectives will be more important than others, so prioritise them and map out your processes. Make sure your plan is realistic, both in terms of budget and the human and financial resources you’ll need to deliver on your objectives within your time-frame.

4. Identify how you want to report and present your measurements

Specific measurements should be attributed to your specific CRM goals. Think about how you want to present them in terms of reports, charts and dashboards.

5. CRM data capture for tracking purposes and data quality

Define the fields you need to track for each CRM record so you can hit your CRM objectives. This includes working out what type of fields will be used. For example identifying the options you want in your drop-down fields, and which you want set as mandatory to ensure consistent data quality.

Be wary of going overboard here. Early adopters may feel intimidated, confused or frustrated by an excessive number of field requirements. Plus it will add to your administration overheads.

6. Prepare your data for migration to your new CRM system

Don’t avoid or underestimate this stage or it could all go horribly wrong. You need to work out the resources you require so you can consolidate and prepare your existing data for migration. Think about these six questions:

• What current data needs to be imported?
• How good is the data quality?
• Does it require data cleansing?
• Where is current data stored?
• How many years back do you need to go with historic, relationship data?
• What duplication rules need to be set?

7. Plan for CRM integration with your other business applications

Work out which applications your new CRM system will need to integrate with, and which direction the data needs to flow. This could be integrating with your email marketing, web forms, SharePoint or ecommerce platform.

So, if one of your goals is to create a single view of each relationship, integrating your new CRM system with external data sources is likely to be a high priority.

In terms of flow, your CRM will pull data from other applications as well as push them to other sources. For example, when a CRM sales opportunity is converted, it can create a new order in the back-office ERP system.

8. Manage user security, including permissions and controls

Flexible CRM solutions, such as that within Dynamics 365, will allow you to create advanced user permissions. This can include team and regional management, so you can control precisely which records users are entitled to access and what controls they can use.

For example, if you work in recruitment, you may not want every CRM user to be able to export data to Excel.

So make a list of the users, roles and groups that will have CRM permissions, and define their levels of access.

9. Identify the risks to your CRM migration

Work out what could possibly threaten the success of your CRM migration. How significant are these threats? No project is without risks, and it makes sense to be as prepared as possible for when things go wrong.

For example, your CRM migration could be at risk if:

• The CRM technology database isn’t flexible enough to adapt to your processes
• It lacks the scalability required to meet your business growth plans
• You have failed to define support processes or identify existing gaps
• Your people are poorly trained, under-resourced or simply make a mistake

10. Work with the business to develop a CRM user adoption plan with buy-in

Technology such as Dynamics 365 is a brilliant enabler of CRM. But this can be irrelevant without user adoption, understand and support. Without those key elements, even the greatest system in the world will struggle to deliver the desired results for your CRM programme.

There are four key things to remember when developing a CRM user adoption programme, as follows:

• Make sure users understand the reasons behind implementing a new CRM system
• Listen to their ideas, needs and concerns
• Provide ongoing training and support
• Measure usage that focuses on positive reinforcement

So there you have 10 things to consider when you’re writing your CRM plan. If you’d like to find out how we can help your business, please get in touch.

Recruiters have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. The successful recruiters have continually found ways to adopt technology to remain relevant, enterprising and unique in a congested environment.

A brief history of recruiters using the cloud

Historically, the recruitment industry was a paper-based trade. Staff used advertisements in the paper, Rolodex, letter writing, face to face interviews/meetings and smart suited appointments.

Then technology changed everything. The cutting-edge recruiters used email to contact more people and get their candidates details to clients quicker than the competition. The industry replaced Rolodex with on-premise CRM but sadly found that this left them open to internal theft. Many a recruitment company has been started with a USB stick full of data from your previous employer! Subsequently, a move to hosted CRM systems gave rise to a more secure platform to store and share data. The sector developed bespoke systems to increase security and capture competitive intelligence.

The introduction of job boards such as Monster revolutionised the industry. Many other sectors have never experienced such a transformation, yet recruiters saw the opportunity and ran with it. But this revolution didn’t last long – soon new technologies, new routes to markets, new ways to be the ‘best in the sector’ arose. LinkedIn is heavily utilised, Twitter, Facebook and other social selling sites keep recruiters well connected with their target market. Blogging, vlogging the list continues of how this fast-paced, dynamic sector has grabbed technology with both hands and driven its functionality forward in the business world.

What are the next technology opportunities for recruiters?

Evolving cloud applications: The application suite available through Microsoft Office 365 provides a dozen+ evergreen applications that offer multiple routes to market for less than a tenner per month.

Intelligent Data Analysis: “Data Scientist was the most in-demand job of 2016”. Understanding your data allows you to accurately predict how to spend your time, where to invest in your business and what trends work for your business.

The Internet of Things: Enterprising entrepreneurs are using the resources around them to capture data to drive their business.

How can I adopt these technologies?

Every IT company worth their salt are selling Microsoft Office 365 but the vast majority know very little about it other than reading a few FAQ pages on the tardis that is the Microsoft website. What you need is a partner who understands the technology and makes it their business to keep up to date with this fast-evolving technology. Many recruitment firms own 365 but most of them only use 20%. The other 80% is very valuable and most of your competitors are not using it!

How is your client behaving and changing? Who is going to be your next quarter’s worth of valuable candidates? What is the next growth market? Using data analysis that integrates with your CRM, social media and LinkedIn will become vital to your role. Microsoft have purchased LinkedIn so you need to understand how to use Power BI (their data analysis tool) to get the most out of LinkedIn.

The Azure platform is a powerful, secure and infinitely scalable platform that is being used by businesses, not just for IT but for core business functionality. Machine learning is allowing businesses to take everyday information and turn it into actionable outputs for business growth.

It is easier than it sounds

The vast majority of you have done this all before – you have adopted new technologies (often cloud technologies) and harnessed them to make more placements for your business. Utilising cloud applications, Power BI, the Azure platform are the latest developments in your exciting history of cloud adoption. Cloud Direct can help you on this journey by guiding the process, pointing out pitfalls and giving tips for success. Together we will trail blaze new ways to be fantastic recruiters and over-achieve targets in the meantime! Happy hunting.