Last week was spent at the Recruitment Agency Exposition at London’s Olympia. The weekend was spent recovering! TVision shared stand space with our partner, Cirrus Nova, and the end-to-end Microsoft Dynamics proposition proved extremely popular with recruitment agencies.
I confess that I approached this event with what proved to be unfounded pessimism. In recent years, trade exhibitions have been mind-numbingly boring events, with exhibitors out-numbering visitors and most visitors proving to be the competition in disguise, smugly glad that they had not forked out the cost of a stand. Rec Expo changed my mind. From the moment the show opened on the Tuesday until its close on the Wednesday, we were kept constantly busy.
A big draw was the 100% Cloud based Dynamics CRM solution, Prism. Not surprising as many of the visitors represented start up and small agencies looking for cost effective entry level solutions. A major benefit of Prism is that it is fully featured client, candidate and vacancy management that can be hosted from £70 per user, per month with no set up fees; an excellent quick start for new agencies that can grow to a 500+ user on premise solution.
No surprise then that Prism proved popular, agencies no matter their size need sophisticated CRM solutions that can address candidate management, profiling CVs, providing strong searching tools and integrate with job boards etc. In other industries start ups can usually get by with basic systems, Excel, Outlook and paper even; all fine if you’re shifting product from A to B, not so good when you need complex profiling. The “Microsoft Factor” is compelling for the start ups as it minimises training requirements.
The “Microsoft Factor” also proved compelling to the larger agencies who have suffered from lock in with niche suppliers. Niche suppliers to the industry have struggled to keep pace with standard technology (a well-known front office provider has yet to produce a version that truly works with Microsoft SQL); are often too localised, unable to provide support for overseas operations and too frequently complacent in their attitude to clients’ needs, safe in the knowledge that the clients would need to change systems to change suppliers. The Microsoft factor means that neither Prism nor Agency Time suffers from these draw backs. Whether it’s leveraging technology or supporting global requirements, Microsoft’s investment in the Dynamics solutions at the heart of Prism and Agency Time mean that for us it’s a given (SQL compliance, producing documents / interfaces in Chinese, local payrolls; you name it, either Microsoft or a local partner will have already addressed it).
For all sized agencies, one of the biggest benefits of the Microsoft Factor is, sadly, the support network; sadly because it is a reflection on the poor levels of service experienced to date. I am pleased that Rec Expo has proved me wrong on the popularity of exhibitions; not sure how pleased I am to be proved right about poor service; yes, it’s a great opportunity for us but it does mean that many of our prospects will be entering a relationship where one of the biggest attractions is the ability to easily leave it. Our challenge is to make sure our clients never want to!
