Innovation in Career Management

Careerpassport is an innovative online recruitment management system designed to touch all the aspects of recruitment and to help companies to revolutionise their HR recruitment function. It is headquartered in the warmer climes of Malta but operates with an international footprint.

I interviewed Christina Medici, the Head of International Business Development at Careerpassport, to gain an insight into how the company encourages and sustains innovation in the fairly traditional area of HR.

I cannot pass on without playing “Career opportunities” by The Clash first:

Peter Cook: How have you innovated within recruitment?

Christina Medici: Being a recruiter is tough work.  Searching for the right candidate is even tougher.  You waste time copying and pasting on different job boards.  This leads to unsorted CV’s from different sources.  Short-listing candidates is also stuck in the 19^th Century.  You interview candidates, take notes etc.   If these are not processed quickly you can lose valuable date in a pile of mismatched notes. You also need to give the candidate feedback, and share notes with your colleagues.  So everyone loses if the process is inefficient. At careerpassport, we asked ourselves, ‘How would recruitment be if it were to be re-invented today?’  Here were our answers:

1.    From the company’s perspective we provide an innovative platform, which exploits the web and social recruitment to give a company a fully integrated career site with its own choice of brand / URL.  The recruiter’s job is simplified as all job applications come through the system. We use KANBAN methodology to simplify communications with applicants and allow the recruiter to spend time on the more crucial parts of the job.  Companies can manage their own CV bank, enabling them to write notes on candidates, which can be easily shared with colleagues.

2.    From the candidate’s perspective, all they have to do is to create and maintain their Linkedin profile. This then helps to automate the process of applying for jobs, saving them time and helping them target the right opportunities very efficiently.   We’ve estimated that it takes candidates 39 seconds to create a profile for a job application.  Candidates are alerted when a new job matching their preference becomes available online, which helps them compete effectively.

The result is an efficient and streamlined recruitment system with improved chances ofemploying top talent at a considerably reduced cost.

PC: Innovation in technology can often be copied or appropriated quickly.  How have you built in adaptability, continuous improvement to make the system sustainable?

CM: Unlike larger players we migrate into the latest version of software available once they become available. This enables us to attract the best talent and give our clients the possibilities newer technologies give us.

PC:   The proof of any innovation is in the uptake / adoption by clients.  What do they say?

CM: Live bookings, one of the UK’s 50 fastest growing online companies has recently adopted careerpassport with a saving in their recruitment expenditure between 2011 and 2012 of 68%.

KONNEKT, one of Malta’s leading recruitment agencies, was looking for a highly flexible and customizable platform to fit its philosophy. By using careerpassport, KONNEKT improved client and candidate relationships significantly.  Independent research ranked it first in terms of service and website functionality. As a social media oriented platform, careerpassport has also enabled the company to attract candidates who were not connected directly to them.

Alison Grech, KONNEKT’s Operations Manager said “the implementation of careerpassport helped us simultaneously achieve multiple objectives we had set at the beginning of 2011. Other social networking sites give you access to candidates but careerpassport went beyond that by better positioning our business to deal with candidates who approached us on opportunities they were genuinely interested in”. She added, “although increased effectiveness and improved service ratings where enough to justify the cost of the system, careerpassport was also a significant contributor to our overall performance. Following the implementation of careerpassport at the end of Q4 2010, it took us only a few weeks to generate the momentum required. From as early as the 6^th week, we started to experience improved results and sustained higher billing during all of Q2 2011”.

PC: Please summarise how you have innovated in the career management space?

·      Because the technology is scalable this means that investment is always proportionate to the level ofgrowth of the client’s business.

·      careerpassport modernizes the entire recruitment process from advertising the job vacancy, manage candidate relationship, interview to hiring stage with technical assistanceprovided throughout the entire process.

·      careerpassport adopts a ‘Data Liberation’ policy (similar to Google) which means that the database of candidates migrated to the careerpassport system is still the property of the client, we simply own the platform and enable our clients to use that data more efficiently.

Editor’s note: For more details or to explore the careerpassport system, contact Christina Medici at christina.medici@careerpassport.co.uk T: +(356) 2122 8

image credit: careerealism.com

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Peter Cook is Rock’n’Roll Innovation Editor at Innovation Excellence.  He leads Human Dynamics and The Academy or Rock, and provides Keynote speaking, Organisation Development and Business Coaching.   www.humdyn.co.uk and www.academy-of-rock.co.uk.  You can follow him on twitter @Academyofrock