Looking towards the future

As a global recruitment and HR advisory company with a distributed workforce across Mauritius, South Africa and America, Founder and CEO Vanessa Flynn knew that she wanted to build a digital-first business. 

“I didn’t want to create something that was location-specific or tied down to a certain territory. I wanted to have a digital-first business. I needed to invest in the right technology where everybody can connect and work freely.” 

“I actually wanted to offer something that I felt the world was going to need, where lives are changing and talent is moving globally all the time. Unfortunately, in this day and age, it’s predominantly women that are moving and giving up their careers because they’re either having children or their husbands are being transferred to different parts of the world.”

“To have the benefit of working, adding value and having an impact in the world without having to be in an office from eight till five every day, not having to make those tough decisions of whether you put your business or your family first. So I had this dream of creating that, and I wanted a business where you could live anywhere in the world.”

Thriving during a crisis

This digital-first approach served Bolt Talent Solutions well during the coronavirus crisis, as recruitment moved online and the rapid adoption of new technologies proved crucial. 

“JobAdder was great, they suggested who we should reach out to based on their experience of working with different integrations. We did a full analysis of different vendors and then we went ahead with Spark Hire as a one-way automated video interviewing tool. They implemented it within a week and it integrates with JobAdder.”

This allowed them to set up a video platform before the coronavirus hit South Africa and Mauritius and offer it to their clients for free when they needed it during lockdown. 

“We wanted to let our clients know that we’re here to help, ensuring they can protect their HR departments, automate their processes and be part of the digital transformation that’s happening. During COVID-19, we went from three employees and we now have 10. And we’ve grown our revenues by over 200%.”

By already working virtually and moving quickly on video interviewing, Bolt Talent Solutions were able to grow during the crisis, which Vanessa says was powered by technology.  

“We wanted to help our clients embrace virtual because we’ve been doing it for two years already. So that was our saving grace. The other important things were quickly adopting automated one-way video interviewing and having JobAdder, that’s amazing at being able to integrate with systems. We wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without it. Partnering with the right technology organisation that can be agile and help you is so important.”

The start of a long partnership

When Vanessa was first looking for an applicant tracking software (ATS) in 2019, she knew what she needed. 

“I needed something that was going to be highly customizable and affordable and that could scale and grow with me. I wanted it to be able to quickly integrate with any system that I wanted. I knew what our roadmap was going to be and I knew it needed to integrate with LinkedIn, Xero and one-way video interviewing. When JobAdder was presented to us, we  saw the customization, flexibility and speed.”

Once Vanessa decided to go with JobAdder, the implementation process was simple. “It was incredibly easy. Basically, the first stage was meeting with the sales team to do the presentations and demos, and they answered all the questions that we had. They were very professional and we got a really good vibe about us being able to work with the kind of culture that JobAdder has.” 

“We were blown away at how quick and easy it was to just integrate and that we could integrate things ourselves. Like we didn’t have to wait for somebody to integrate Google G-suite, or we didn’t have to wait for somebody to integrate our Calendly. It’s like, they gave you videos step-by-step of how to do things and you could do it all yourself. It took a week and we had a full system rolled out and we had users in South Africa, Seattle and Mauritius already working on a system within a week. I’ve never seen that before. We couldn’t believe how easy it was.”

As the partnership has progressed, Vanessa has found it easy to work in JobAdder and navigate her way around the system. “It’s highly user friendly. Anyone can pick it up, and if you don’t, there’s a video for something that you’re not sure of. It’s pretty intuitive.” 

“When our new recruiters are hired, every time we’ve recruited a person to join our team and we do the demo and we start training them on the platform, the feedback that we get is that they’re so impressed by us being such a small agency and that we’ve invested in a solution as professional and as great as JobAdder. So, it helps our brand. When we present what we’re doing to our clients or to potential clients or recruiters joining us, we’re very proud saying that this is the system that we use.” 

The value of your recruitment business 

While Vanessa and Bolt Talent Solutions have seen significant success and growth in recent years, she says the true value in any recruitment business is its data and its ability to utilise that data. 

“The value of your recruitment system is not how much you earn, because that’s so variable on so many different factors that we have very little control over. But what you can control is the quality of your data within your applicant tracking system, your candidates are your product, and if you have phenomenal IT talent from all different countries in all different types of programming languages at different levels, then that’s crucial.” 

“If you’re able to show the growth of your talent database and how you pipeline, how you manage that database, how you can report on that database and how you can use artificial intelligence to match talent to the right opportunities, that’s the shareholder value. Your ability to not only hire the right people, but to also track your numbers, show your placements, show what you’ve built and that you’ve really adopted virtual ways of scaling a business is so important. That’s the value of your recruitment business; it’s based on the quality of the people you have, and being able to quantify this, which starts and ends in your applicant tracking system. That’s why I chose JobAdder.”