I recently shared a superb blog about the biggest headaches recruiters face. A survey conducted asked recruiters which problems hinder their success and there were common regular offenders. I have written a complimentary blog that provides solutions to these problems.
Standing out from the crowd
How do you differentiate from the competition? A problem experienced in every industry!
How do you get away from the worthy but samey promises of being; trusted, experienced, specialists etc; with a message that resonates and is believed? Then, how do you get that message out there and heard by your target market?
How cloud technology will help
Do something different from the norm! Create extranets and branded social networking sites to communicate with clients and candidates. Tailor clear messaging to clients and prospects. Use integrated workflows that automatically contact prospects who use key hashtags. You can capitalise on leads, communicate branded messaging directly to your target market and have an online platform to securely network.
Capitalise on co-authoring functionality to improve candidate’s CV’s in real-time. Build trust, unity and enhance your clientele’s résumé to increase the chances of closing job vacancies. You need to be good at improving CV’s of course!
Juggling daily tasks
How do you focus on core tasks when you are bombarded with email, inbound calls, management requests, and LinkedIn messages?
How cloud technology will help
Use cloud technology to automate administrative tasks – this reduces your workload, eradicates human error (we all forget sometimes), and keeps us focussed on our core tasks allowing for momentum in sales calls and sourcing candidates.
Guarantee you have access to your data and applications wherever you are and ensure you can share this information quickly and easily with relevant others.
Reduce commuting by using video conferencing. Increase your number of face to face interviews and speak with major clients regularly using technology rather than having to travel a lot.
IT downtime can be rife, costing businesses many hours and even more money.Ponemon Institute estimate billions of pounds! Get a cloud solution that guarantees uptime so that you are at your most productive!
Additional tips and resources
David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ for stress free productivity
The candidate interview process is my biggest bugbear
How do you keep interviews relevant, succinct, productive and ultimately gain credibility with the best candidates on the market?
How cloud technology will help
Three common mistakes made by many recruiters that instantly put candidates off; (1) too much form filling (2) repetition (3) wasted trips.
Filling out forms. We live in a world where data input should be achieved quickly online and the information will automatically sync with your CRM. If you don’t have this functionality, I imagine you are doing double the admin of those who do. Even more importantly, candidates first impression of your business is form filling.
Don’t ask the candidate the same question again and again as they are passed around the office from department to department. Use technology to share information and avoid repetition.
Meeting a candidate only to find out you can’t place them is hugely time wasting and leaves that candidate with a bitter taste about your brand (I have experienced this first hand regularly). Have a video call to quickly decide “can I place this candidate?”
Stop insisting on meetings for meetings’ sake and instead use video conferences to establish credibility and focus on those candidates who will make you money. Then meet them face to face; not everyone else.
Additional tips and resources
Jeff Haden outlines 12 Simple Steps and has many wider resources around this topic
Unsuitable candidates applying
A well written job specification will alleviate this somewhat. Never just copy and paste what the client sent. Instead, deliver a clear and enticing job ad. How do you distinguish between the wheat and the chaff of prospect clients?
How cloud technology will help
By using CV scanning tools and business analytics, you can match key competencies, skills and experience to filter to the correct prospective candidates. Sourcing the right person becomes targeted and the data cleansed so that you don’t have to scroll through countless CV’s.
Additional tips and resources
Steve Kneeland gives advice on how to avoid hiring the wrong person in his book Hiring People
Engaging candidates sourced online
Perfect, you have found a great candidate. But they are at work, being headhunted by a competitor or have never heard of you so are sceptical about engaging; what are you to do?
How cloud technology will help
You need to build rapport, you need to differentiate from the competition (we’ve covered this), and you need to gain credibility. The quickest way to do this without your sourced candidate having to take annual leave to meet you is to use a video conference and get to know them.
Additional tips and resources
Many of you will use Bullhorn daily (we know them from integration with our cloud solutions) they have written a helpful blog on this very topic.
Further Information
If you want further information about how cloud technology can help recruiters to make more placements, read my blog “The recruitment industry is missing a trick”.
For recruiters, it is imperative to match your candidates with the latest available job opportunities quickly and efficiently. Getting knowledge of placements ahead of your competition, understanding the clients brief and working efficiently will all give you the added edge to meet target and maximise your earning potential. As a former recruitment consultant myself, I understand the pressures and requirements needed in your sector. I have transitioned to cloud sales and wish I’d had my cloud knowledge and resource when I was a recruiter.
I meet business owners every week, many from the recruitment sector and many of them are missing sales because their business systems are hindering growth. To make things worse many businesses have already purchased the solution but they aren’t using it correctly and are therefore wasting money and losing leads month after month.
Recruiters are not maximising the cloud’s potential
The majority of recruiters have already decided cloud is the answer but they don’t know how to use this technology to its full potential. The recruitment industry is guilty of not using the cloud market wisely. Of course, there will be exceptions, but I’ve witnessed many recruiters who are spending their IT budget badly.
There seem to be two camps.
1. Flogging a dead horse
Recruiters who have legacy systems that they are desperately trying to trudge along with. A lack of investment in technology has meant they have old unsupported systems that are working but creaking loudly. Disaster for these companies is often imminent and I fear for people with this strategy.
2. Not using what you own
The other camp have bought a robust cloud solution such as Microsoft Office 365 but are using only a fraction of what is available and missing out on many features that can further their business.
With a few simple changes Cloud Direct can help you to;
- Make more placements
- Stay ahead of your competition
- Improve communication with your clients
- Streamline internal collaboration
- Work efficiently throughout the day
I’m not going to reveal the secrets online but I can tell you that using cloud technology to its full potential is a big part of the solution.
Cloud technology is mainstream
Surveys show that over 92% of businesses will use cloud services in the next six months and this is fast becoming a $500billion business.
Cloud technology is affordable
The world’s biggest companies are in a price war to get their market share of the $500 billion, therefore we have seen cloud consumption costs tumble.
Cloud technology should help the business as well as the IT department
Due to the enormous investment in cloud infrastructure we all have access to data centres that are hyper secure, compliant, infinitely scalable, accessible from anywhere and fine-tuned for elite performance.
Investing in cloud should be a business decision first and an IT decision second. It is about having infrastructure that drives your business goals, increases profits and mitigates risks. To ensure this does indeed occur you need to select a trusted cloud partner to help you navigate the minefield of cloud solutions.
For both camps (the dead horse floggers and under-utilisers), there is help at hand. If you want to ensure that your business has an IT strategy that enables your business strategy please give me a call for a free consultation.
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity,” said Albert Einstein. And he knew a thing or two.
When it comes to your IT systems, disaster can strike at any time. A virus, power cut, disgruntled employee or natural disaster can cause tremendous difficulties for an unprepared business. Hopefully, by now you’ll have taken advantage of our free Business Continuity Plan – template, and are well on your way towards good crisis preparedness.
Otherwise, for a small or medium-size business to turn a disaster into an opportunity might initially seem impossible. In the words of Winston Scott, director of Florida Space Port: “At the onset of an emergency, everyone’s IQ goes immediately to ‘0’”.
But with cloud services supporting your data and IT systems, you get the immediate advantage of availability and reliability. The agility that comes with this, means you also get to stay in the game – to keep competing with the big guns.
Five critical reasons for disaster recovery in the cloud
With business continuity and disaster recovery via cloud services, you get:
1. Comprehensive protection and back-up for your entire IT operations within minutes. This includes machines, hardware, operating systems, application software and data. Whether you’re suffering the loss of a single server, complete network failure or a building evacuation, for example, a hosted desktop and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) allows you to run your business as usual from the cloud.
And, of course, the more you move to the cloud, the less you need worry about managing and paying for hardware or infrastructure.
2. A fully managed service means your IT is protected 24/7, regardless of your existing business commitments and priorities.
3. The freedom to focus on your business and customers. Your focus can remain where it should be – on generating business revenue and keeping your customers happy.
4. Guaranteed data and IT systems recovery. A simple automated appliance can:
- Sit on your server and capture snapshots of it
- Convert them into virtual rescue images
- Test their integrity
- Test invocation and rescue
This process will ensure your business continuity through a disaster. But make sure you get a convincing SLA and guaranteed 30-day transition period, so your systems are fully tested in your environment before switching back fully.
5. Security. Your server snapshots should be protected during capture, transfer and storage with encryption and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technologies. However, for the highest possible protection of your data and systems, what you really want is overlaid end-to-end ISO 27001 security processes, which are independently audited.
Check out our Business Continuity webinar video to find out more about:
1. How to budget for business continuity
2. How technology can help keep your business in business no matter what
3. How to plan for business continuity
4. How cloud solutions can help.
If you’d like to find out more about how Azure site recovery can help prepare your business for GDPR, or for other GDPR/compliance solutions and certification, our GDPR consultants can help.
Microsoft Azure, is a cloud computing platform that runs your applications at scale on the internet. Azure lets you store your data securely and gives you the business intelligence tools to explore it. It helps you build applications, test them in a safe environment and launch them, knowing that performance won’t be an issue even if they are being accessed from the other side of the world. It will also help you build on your existing IT infrastructure, creating hybrid solutions that simplify your IT and reduce costs.
Microsoft Azure is essentially a growing collection of integrated services – analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web – that are flexible enough for you to use as and how your business needs them. With Microsoft Azure, you’ll move faster, achieve more and save money.
A place to build, test and deploy applications
Any developer or IT professional can be productive with Azure. Azure’s integrated tools, pre-built templates and managed services make it easier to build and manage enterprise, mobile, web and Internet of Things (IoT) apps faster.
An open platform
Microsoft Azure is a flexible and open platform that supports a broad range of operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, tools, databases and devices. You can run Linux and Docker containers; build apps with JavaScript, Python, .NET, PHP, Java and Node.js; build back-ends for iOS, Android and Windows devices. Azure supports the same technologies that millions of developers and IT professionals already rely on and trust.
An extension of your existing IT
Azure easily integrates with your existing IT environment through the largest network of secure private connections, hybrid database and storage solutions, and data residency and encryption features – so your assets stay right where you need them. You can even run Azure in your own data centre with Azure Stack. Azure’s hybrid cloud solutions give you the best of both worlds: more IT options, less complexity and cost.
A safe place for your data
Microsoft has made an industry-leading commitment to the protection and privacy of your data. It is the first cloud provider recognised by the European Union’s data protection authorities for its commitment to rigorous EU privacy laws. Microsoft was also the first major cloud provider to adopt the new international cloud privacy standard, ISO 27018.
A global network
Azure runs on a worldwide network of Microsoft-managed data centres across 19 regions. This fast-growing global footprint gives you more options for running applications and ensuring great customer performance.
An economical and scalable solution
Azure’s ‘pay as you go’ services can quickly scale up or down to match demand, so you only pay for what you use in one simple monthly bill. Per-minute billing and a commitment to match competitor prices for popular infrastructure services such as compute, storage and bandwidth means you’re always getting an unbeatable price for performance.
A source of insight
Azure’s predictive analytics services such as Machine Learning, Power BI and Stream Analytics are redefining business intelligence. Make smarter decisions, improve customer service and uncover new business possibilities from your structured, unstructured and streaming Internet of Things data.
Are you thinking of choosing a new, more cushioned loo roll brand for your business lavatories? Are you planning to trawl the Pacific just as a team of South African hustlers fly overhead with an old Russian plane full of skittish cattle?
These are glimpses of two of “Five weird and wonderful stories of business continuity” that I shared during my keynote session at Microsoft’s annual European conference: Future Decoded.
Here, I’ll share with you a few personal take-aways from the event, plus a brief synopsis of my presentation: “How cloud solutions are essential to your Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy”.
Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical for all regulated businesses. But it can be a real challenge to find a solution that is flexible, simple and secure enough to work for your business.
Will Rowley, Cloud Direct professional services manager and Chris Mulgrew, Microsoft engagement specialist, touch on these challenges and how to overcome them with Microsoft Azure, in this webinar recording.
Integral to an organisation’s growth is its ability to keep up with constantly evolving technology – new releases, updates and trends. Similarly, the consumerisation of IT means business users expect as engaging a user experience (UX) with their work IT as they do with their gaming or social IT at home.
So organisations have to step up to the mark if they want to keep an increasingly disparate workforce working together, productively. This blog explores how LiveTiles does this over Microsoft Sharepoint, Azure and Office 365 – adding even more cool to the cool new SharePoint features.
Moving up the priority list: a great employee user experience (UX)
Firstly, what is UX? UX is the quality of human interaction a person has with a system or site. As employees experience ever decreasing amounts of human interaction, the importance of exceptional UX is becoming a high priority for many companies right now. Why? Because they want to:
- Bring geographically dispersed teams together
- Promote communication and collaboration
- Create a digital workplace
“The true transformation in digital transformation isn’t the presence of technology where there previously wasn’t any; it’s the transformation of the way we interact with it. It’s the digital workplace and everything that we are able to affect within the frame of our virtual existence, bringing us closer to our colleagues, employers, and administrators in an instant.” 1
LiveTiles – the number one digital workplace
Companies of all sizes and industries can use LiveTiles to build UX focused digital workplaces. With it you can surface and organise scattered business apps, resources, files on a virtual pane of glass over Office 365, SharePoint and Azure.
The suite includes LiveTiles Design, Build and Blueprint. The products are bundled together into the LiveTiles SharePoint package bringing together everything you need to create your own custom digital workplace. LiveTiles have built this suite for Microsoft Azure and SharePoint because they believe it is the best of breed in business software. The idea, is that with this suite of products, you can evolve your current software and get ahead of the technological evolution.
“LiveTiles, in partnership with Microsoft’s Office 365 suite and SharePoint, is bringing the features you’ll need for collaboration, teamwork, intranets, and project management tools to your canvas. With digital design strategies from our team, your digital workplace can increase employee engagement and amplify your UX.” 2
The theory behind the technological evolution of LiveTiles
The theory of technological evolution, according to distinguished U.S. airman and author Masse Bloomfield, is broken down into three stages: tools, machine and automation. We can use this theory to explain how LiveTiles evolves the UX of your Microsoft ecosystem.
Tools: the tools behind LiveTiles
The emergence of technology was made possible by human’s development of the rational faculty; the ability to think, to ration things out, common sense, intelligence and judgement. This paved the way for the first stage of the theory: the tool.
Prehistoric man would use tools like an arrow or a hammer. Later, animal-powered tools such as the plough and horse increased productivity about 10-fold over the technology of the hunter-gatherers.
This is like your SharePoint software for example: using SharePoint as a tool gives your business the advantage of productivity by creating and sharing files online.
The machine: LiveTiles Design and Build
The second technological stage is the creation of the powered machine. The industrial revolution made machines like cars, trains, computers and lights mainstream. The machines productivity is tenfold over the technology of the horse and plough. This is also true of LiveTiles Design and Build.
Using these tools to improve your SharePoint’s UX you will increase productivity by having all your online assets in one place for your teams to be able to access anywhere at any time on any device.
Automation with LiveTiles Blueprint
The final stage of the technological evolution is automation. Automation takes away the human control element with an automatic algorithm. Using LiveTiles Blueprint to create master designs you can regulate and automate page designs across teams and companywide. Use Blueprint to send these designs out to be used on any SharePoint or Azure site. When something is great why change it? That’s how evolution works.
We still use all three stages of technological evolution to enhance, improve and automate everyday tasks that exceed the limitations of our bodies.
LiveTiles: changing the way we work
LiveTiles keeps you a step ahead of the technological evolution.
“The true transformation in digital transformation isn’t the presence of technology where there previously wasn’t any; it’s the transformation of the way we interact with it. It’s the digital workplace and everything that we are able to affect within the frame of our virtual existence, bringing us closer to our colleagues, employers, and administrators in an instant.” 3
How to achieve your business transformation with LiveTiles
LiveTiles helps you achieve digital transformation for your business in three simple steps:
1. Step One – LiveTiles Design
It organises scattered business applications and designs internal sites and intranets
2. Step two – LiveTiles Build
Create the foundation of site pages on SharePoint. Intuitively map out your SharePoint information architecture – quickly and easily.
3. Step three – LiveTiles Blueprint
Easily share large-scale SharePoint pages, templates and other information architecture information to be used company wide to give consistently good user experience. The whole suite is simple to use with drag-and-drop tools that save energy, time and resources.
For a free trial and to find out how LiveTiles can help your business, phone, email or the form below.
If your people are struggling or wasting time performing repetitive daily tasks in Office 365, you might be interested in Microsoft’s new automation tool – Microsoft Flow. It allows you to automate and integrate business processes and common tasks across Office 365 cloud products like Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive. So, let’s gear up and find out how we can go with the flow.
What is Microsoft Flow automation?
Flow is a new cloud service provided by Microsoft and, whilst still in technical preview, it’s now available for Office 365 users.
Essentially, the service enables you to create workflows which are fully integrated with the Office 365 suite, Dynamics CRM, PowerApps and now a number of external providers such as Twitter. It’s the same concept as IFTTT (If this then this) but applied to the Microsoft environment.
Flows can be triggered based on conditions or scheduled to run on a regular basis. There are already many templates to choose from, which you are free to customise. Or you can build your own from scratch. And, if you want advice from your peers, Flow has a strong community following.
Five ways Microsoft Flow can help your business
Well, here are a few real world examples.
1. Automatically store email attachments in a SharePoint library
This is handy for when you’re on the road and collaborating on a project and you want to send a file back for the team to work on. This flow provides a quick and simple way to share a document with the rest of your team. It could also be used to store CVs or job descriptions as part of an internal job submission process.
2. Automatically translate emails
If you sometimes receive emails in a foreign language, you can have them translated automatically and delivered straight to your inbox
3. Engage with your customers
Microsoft Flow can notify appropriate employees when a visitor posts on your Facebook page or responds to a tweet. Take this a step further, and you can add this information to a SharePoint task list for follow up, or create a lead in Dynamics CRM.
4. Get notified when a file is added or updated to a SharePoint or OneDrive library
This is useful if you want to make sure you always have the latest document to hand – such as a pricelist or specification sheet.
5. Track activity on Twitter
Set your Flow so you receive notification when a certain keyword or hashtag has been tweeted, or store them for future analysis in an Excel file within Office 365.
Microsoft Flow for Apple IoS
Microsoft has also recently released Flow for IOS. This enables the management and tracking of your automated workflows, anytime and anywhere. Flow can also provide push notifications enabling alerts in real time. For example, you can get a notification on your phone when a high priority email is received from your manager, or from an important customer without having to check your inbox.
Do less, achieve more
If you want to get the most out of your Office 365 investment, we can help. We’re a direct, gold Microsoft cloud solutions provider (CSP) partner so we have the highest level of trust from Microsoft.
“Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone”, says Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s satirical play The Importance of Being Earnest. Now, I’m no exotic fruit but, unlike Lady Bracknell, I’m all for education and learning. Just preferably not the hard way – which is often the way many organisations learn about the importance of professional project management when migrating to Microsoft Office 365. Here’s how to avoid the pain and experience a smooth migration to Microsoft Office 365.
In my role in professional services project management, people come to me with all manner of part-deployed Office 365 migrations. And the story is always the same: despair. Can you help us? they ask. Yes, we reply. But as any seasoned migration specialist will tell you: picking up a part-deployed migration is going to hurt.
The Dangers
Choosing Office 365 is a huge step forward for any business and, when managed well, it’s a game-changer. However, you MUST have a clear and precise plan for delivery. If you don’t, you’ll leave your company like Britain in the wake of the Brexit vote: in complete disarray. We’ve said we want to do this, but what next?
The key points of failure
Technology analysts at Bloor Research tell us that a massive 38% of cloud migrations fail. So where does it all go wrong? Here are four reasons that I hear nearly every week: