Mark Lowrie and Alan Rose run Twentysix Recruitment, REC Member and a specialist catering and hospitality agency. As a very busy and successful temp business, they went through four previous CRMs before finding the ideal match for their agency in Voyager Infinity.
Here are their thoughts on their search for the technology product that will allow their firm to grow further. Videos recorded at the Recruitment Agency Expo 2022 in London Olympia.
Alan Rose: We are a very busy Temps orientated recruitment agency in the Catering and Hospitality sector, and are currently busier than we’ve ever been, but with having Voyager Infinity as our recruitment CRM, we are able to keep on top of everything really well. I use Voyager Infinity every day, and I love the simplicity of the software, and how accurate the searches are, so I know I’m reaching out to the best candidates each time.
We’ve used various CRMs since I started working for TwentySix Recruitment 7 years ago, but Infinity is by far the best CRM I’ve used. Since going live with Voyager in July 2021, the business has also invested in (and have just gone live with) Voyager Mid-Office to run alongside Infinity, which is something we didn’t feel confident doing with other CRM providers in the past. I would highly recommend Infinity!
Mark Lowrie on the decisions behind investing in Voyager Infinity – watch the video, or read the transcript below:
Mark Lowrie: We asked ourselves some simple questions around investment. What will give us more time, and time to be more productive or maybe allow us to develop the business further? What will improve the efficiencies of our business? Faster fill rates, faster billing? How can we reduce mistakes, not just operationally, but financially and commercially? And what will make us more professional in our approach, our outward facing brand? How can we improve a better experience for our clients, workers, and those that make up our supply chain?
Now, all the answers had the same thing in common, by a technology at the core. And this is the thing that we focused on, quite simply. And our brief became very, very simple: to automate or streamline as much of our work processes as possible, reducing human intervention and therefore, the scope of error. So that was our brief on investment.
So, we looked at CRM, because that there is the orchestra. It’s the conductor of the orchestra, of any business, of any recruitment company.
We’re on our fifth CRM now. So, you don’t learn quickly. I think we learned over time and at cost, but you find out that you don’t know what you need until you don’t have it. And that was it, wasn’t it? “Oh, we should do that, oh no – two-year contract!”
It’s clear we needed a system that would connect our front office operation of candidates, client management, placements and bookings through to a Mid-Office system for raising our invoices and processing our payroll, pushing through to our back office system for our accountancy package and then on to reconciling our founding arm. Does such a system exist? That was the question, and also at a cost that doesn’t bankrupt the business.
What does it need to do? Well first of all, it needs to manage temp recruitment because while there are lots and lots of CRMs out there, and not everything will do everything you need it to do. So, you have to make sure that you’re road-testing these things in the right way.
Does it allow configuration to fit into our current business processes? Will it accommodate the automation of timesheets submissions? Really important these days. Does it cope with compliance of AWR and IR35 now? So, that was the challenge that we set ourselves.
Now, most products that we road-tested would do some, but not all, as I said. But we weren’t about to settle for anything short of what we saw as our vision moving forward. Now, we approached Ikiru People, the guys that are in charge of, that oversee the Voyager Infinity product.
I’ve got to be honest, we did it with the same amount of scepticism and cynicism as we did approaching any other software provider, because we know they show you the best things, the things that they can do. But we were incredibly lucky. We discovered that we now have a system in Voyager Infinity that provides all of the above. We have found ourselves a strategic partner, and I do believe that they will help us deliver our vision for the future, supporting the 360 life cycle, both our clients and our candidates, and the scope to facilitate our growth.
