The Changing SaaS Recruitment Landscape

Before I launch into the changes SaaS has caused in certain recruitment markets, it's probably a good idea to help you understand exactly what SaaS is.

SaaS stand for Software As A Service. So, what's the difference?

Well, in the past if you wanted highly functional systems to run your business you needed your own IT infrastructure. The size and complexity of needs of your company gave way to the size of the It infrastrcuture you needed.

The 70's - Mainframes

Go back to the early 70's and IBM supplied huge maniframes bigger than tanks that ran clunky Cobol and Assembler programs that put green screens on everyone's desks. They were hard to use and certainl;y not user friendly and only the biggest blue chips could afford them. Whether they delivered a competitive advntage through systems could be argued for a long time!

Then Unix boxes arrived and software got a bit lighter. Then quickly on it's heels Windows and networking allowed desktops to be used. But networking was difficult and it often went down.

The Cloud and SaaS

Things gradually got better until some ten years ago when the first Saas or Cloud applications begane to be delivered.

Initial offerings were not very functional, and were slow due to Internet speeds. The real game changer was when high speed Internet arrived and gave access to these cloud applications to every one man band. All of a sudden you didn;t need a dedicate line at the cost of thousnads of £££ to run cloud applications.

Compettitve Advantage

Small sales organisations got hold of SalesForce at around £20 per user and they could suddenly compete with the big boys. It was a brave new world. Apps like Quickbooks quickly came to the party and enterprise level software was available to the man in the street. More importantly available at LOW cost!

Nowadays, if there is an application that has been written it can be transferred to the SaaS environment. And that has spawned a whole new start up and venture funded sector on business.

You see the people with money have seen the huge success of the likes of Sales Force and they want a slice of the action. Consequently they are prepared to fund pretty much any SaaS start up.

Specialist Recruitment

Harvey Thomas are a recruitment agency that specialise in supplying this subset of the wide Saas market.

"We supply software engineers, customer success and software sales staff.", it's a fast-moving and vibrant market place he says.

"We have to know all of the projects in our market initmately. If they are in trouble, we need to know because we'll be needing to help their staff move on to pastures new if required. The same is true if they need to ranp up and we need to find staff urgently".

"It's a balancing act, and we have to know where all the parts are and what their given situation is ant any point in time. This in depth market knowledge makes us more than just a recruitment company, we are like market consultants who just happen to move people around when the need arises".

Quick Reactions To Market Changes

"And, if something does happen, for example, a company loses their funding, we could suddenly be looking for work for 30 or 40 people. Generally if that happens the slack is quickly taken up. Indeed most of the time the market is so vibrant we are looking to find people to supply projects".

"It's a busy, busy market and a very rtewarding one to recruit in. We have really deep relationships with our clients and there is a large degree of trust on both sides, we like that. It gives us and the clients a security of supply it's difficult to get in other recruitment markets".

You can find Harvey Thomas by clicking here if you are a Saas Developer, Customer Success consultant (at any level) or Pre and Post Sales and Gneeral Sales of SaaS software. Get in touch.

Online Marketing In Today's World

One thing is for sure, the rise of Online and Digital Marketing has been as rapid as nit has been surprising.

Rapid Progress And Weath Generation

If you consider that as recently as fifteen years ago, Google, Amazon and Facebook didn't really exist. Now these online behemoths value at well over $2.5 billion between them. Quite remarkable considering that has all happened in the last fifteen years.

It has to be the greatest generation of wealth in the history of man!

However, what that has lead to is an amazing plethora of new employment opportuinities - across the globe. Even so-called thgird worlk countries are now experiencing the rush to Digital Marketing as mobile and 4G expand apace across the world.

With 5G relatively imminent, and a stead rollout, jobs abound for these amazing new skillsets.

Incredible Job Functions

Who could have possibly thought that, even five years ago, we'd be hiring for job vacancies for roles such as Growth Hacker or Location Marketers. And thgis demarcation of job roles has been caused by the incredible advances we have seen in technology.

For example look at the role of Analytics and Research and Customer Journey / Acqusition jobs? It is only the in depth monitoring and tracking softwares available that makes these juobs as detailed as they are. Concepts such as Magix tracking, pixels and the such like were in their infancy five years ago.

As they have grown in complexity so the insights available to the eCommerce organisation are more in depth. This enables customer targeting, journey monitoring and exit startegies to be so much more precise. This enables the savvy organisation to "know" and understand their customers to a much greater degree.

Better Everything

It allows better product targeting and influencing. Better product relationships and more laser like taregting of products. It allows for precise targeting of ads and partiuclarly the use of retargeting.

Combine all of these factors and you achieve a stunning growth in eCommerce.

But above everything else, you achieve competitive advantage. It's alsmost got the stage of tarding systems cutting edge. I used to work on low latency teading systems and we would work tirelessly to enable our systems to execute a trade, even, a nonosecond quicker than the competition.

Why?

Simple, that miniscule time advantage meant we could take better advantage of arbitrage situations (where price differences appear the instant before or after a trade).

The better competitive advantage you gain through these techniques, the more you profit on the back end.

Indeed, organisations are now trying to gain that Digital Marketing edge in everything they do and that includes recruitment of staff. Whilst the recruitment process outsourcing of the past decade has provided cost savings, it has also held back the recruitment of the right staff.

Advantage Through Recruitment

The top eCommerce organisations now recognise that it is vital to be fleet of foot with the recruitment of online marketing staff. The employment of specialist agencies to find the right people is once more in vogue.

Intelligent People were one of the very early adopters of Digital Marketing as a specilaist niche.

Doug Bates a Director and co-owner recognises the changes the market has gone through and confirms the massive chunking down of job roles into much more specific tasks and jobs.



"We've grown and adapted to the market", he comments. "I think we add a new job title to the database almost every week", he smiles.

For all Online Marketing Job and Vacancies visit Intelligent People