Andy Weight, Group Client Services Director, Totaljobs Group, was recently interviewed for the CMC 2005 CRM Supplement which looks at the views of technology providers and technology users. Click here to view the CRM supplement.
1. Can you give us a brief description of your company and its main areas of business.
In five years totaljobs.com has built its position as one of the leading job boards in the UK recruitment marketplace. With over 2,000 customers placing 80,000 vacancies at any one time, totaljobs is unquestionably the UK's fastest-growing online recruitment business.
Totaljobs.com is part of Totaljobs Group Ltd, which is owned by The Reed Elsevier Group Plc.
The site caters for a wide range of recruiters, from larger multinationals to small regionally-based businesses, to recruitment consultants and recruitment advertising agencies.
Totaljobs jobseekers come from all areas of the UK, all industries and all functional roles. We have around one million unique users visiting the site each month with a jobseeker applying for a job every 7 seconds.
Year Established: 1999
Number of Clients: 2,413
Total Employees (UK): 208
Major Clients: GlaxoSmithKline, B&Q, AstraZeneca, P&O, T-Mobile, Carlsberg Tetley, PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM, Carphonewarehouse and Royal Bank of Scotland
Services Offered:
- Job posting, CV database search and employer branding
- Totaljobs direct - post a job instantly using a credit card.
- The totaljobs network - helping UK recruiters to fill overseas vacancies in 32 countries.
Totaljobs Group Ltd is the holding company for the premium brands in online recruitment; totaljobs.com, CWJobs.co.uk, Caterer.com, RetailChoice.com, catererglobal.com and Jobability.com. Totaljobs Group Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reed Elsevier Group plc, a FTSE 100 company and one of the world’s largest publishing and information companies.
2. When did your company first start thinking about CRM?
In 2001 when our customer volumes started to present real problems for us in tracking contact.
3. What key business issues were you hoping to address through CRM? Which was most important to the business and why?
We wanted to achieve a castiron method of ensuring a complete audit trail for all customer contact and develop efficient methods of intergrating our sales and marketing functions.
4. What results or improvements did you initially hope to achieve through a CRM programme?
We hope to replace our then current system Maximiser with as little disruption as possible.
5. How did you go about deciding which CRM system to implement? How long did it take you to decide and how many vendors did you contact?
We looked at several vendors over a 3 month period, finally deciding on Salesforce.com due to its ease of implementation and customisation.
6. When planning the implementation, who did you include on the team (sales, marketing, IT etc) and why?
We including the entire set of functions in our business and took representatives from all levels, it was important to us to feel that everyone was bought in to the final decision.
7. How much consultation and support did you receive from your chosen vendor before during and after implementation?
Support from Salesforce.com has been excellent, I cant say that every step has been painless but when it mattered Salesforce certainly stepped up to the plate.
8. What problems did you encounter during the process? How did you overcome them? What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome (i.e. board level support, budget restrictions, IT infrastructure problems, cultural change etc.)
We have had surprisingly few problems in implementing the system, user adoption was a concern but we adopted a "if its not in Salesforce it didn't happen" approach right from the start which made it pretty impossible for users not to get on board.
9. Did the implementation project finish on time and on budget?
Yes to both, implementation costs were minimal and if anything we couldn’t react fast enough to keep up with Salesforce.com's pace.
10. Now that it's up and running, does your chosen system meet your requirements? Would you recommend your current system to another company?
The system works very well, we have spent a great deal of time fine tuning it and adding new features and this has resulted in an excellent fit with our business. We would recommend it highly.
11. What have you learnt from implementing a CRM system in your organisations?
You don’t have to do it all in one go. Taking a phased approach means that you have more control, your users learn as you implement new features and most importantly you learn along the way which can change your views and result in a better implementation.
12. As we all know, implementation is just the first stage in a CRM programme. What are your plans for the future - further enhancements, staff training, cultural changes, delivering ROI in x years etc?
We are currently intergrating our 3rd party email marketing tool which provides sequenced messaging capabilities and will give us complete end to end ecrm functions. We are also considering integrating our Oracle financials system to incorporate billing control.
13. Do you have any other specific advice you'd like to offer to our members about the highs and lows of CRM, the benefits it can deliver and the process you need to go through to get there?
Be very specific with your vendor and make sure that they uncover all the potential areas you need to think about. If the vendor falls down at this stage you may not get the result you want. You may not know what you need to consider until it's a problem – implementing a CRM system in fire-fighting mode can be a nightmare!
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