Lengthy hiring delays

Brennan IT has been serving Australian businesses for over 20 years, offering a bespoke service that encompasses networking, end-user services and infrastructure as well as IT security services.

When Adam Crofts first joined Brennan IT over two years ago, the business had been using antiquated talent acquisition methods, with a time to fill extending to 68 days. 

Adam’s remit included both talent acquisition and engagement, encompassing induction, onboarding, earning and customer satisfaction and so introduced JobAdder as he had been using the platform in previous roles. 

“Now we’ve got an average time to fill rate of 28 days and we’ve only got about 4% of people leaving within the probationary period,” he said.

Working through inefficiencies

Adam noted that the main challenge was around inefficiencies. “We’d place an ad and just see how we went. Which doesn’t work.

“We had a system that was terrible. Everything took three to five clicks to get to one spot instead of a simple user interface. Within JobAdder, you’ve got individual job management and then, candidate management within that job. All in one spot. You don’t have to log into multiple systems and from a pure administration perspective, it saves you time and effort,” he said. 

The other part is the approval process. Adam explained that getting the approval could take up to a week and a half, requiring a physical signature, email and scanning. “Because it had to be emailed to that person who then had to find the time to do that, print it out, sign and send… it was just a nightmare,” he said, adding that there was very little compliance, despite the business having ISO accreditation. 

“JobAdder has saved us literally hours of work every single week because we don’t have to chase people up, the system does it for us.

“Just the fact that you don’t have to go and log into another system; it’s all from the one source of truth. When you’ve got one source of truth, everything gets done through there. So from a time perspective, purely on admin alone, let alone usability, every single person has saved several hours a week by implementing JobAdder. It was a huge increase.”

Talent attraction challenges 

One challenge Brennan IT faces is from an attraction perspective. Firstly, Brennan IT competes against other managed service providers (MSP), big and small. “So from an MSP perspective, we are competing against them but we’re also competing with every internal IT team – as almost everyone has an IT department. 

“Most of the MSPs are where we want to get our people from because of the sense of urgency, so we’ve got additional challenges. We need the best talent to enable us to be faster and more cost-effective.”

With service level agreements (SLAs) in place for well over a thousand customers, Adam explains that employees are across multiple environments all day with a great deal of complexity. “We need really great people who are intelligent, have a great skill set and can actually solve problems for our customers immediately.”

Brennan IT addresses this through the use of talent pools across the areas they recruit for including infrastructure and network support, security, cloud and professional services. “We can directly engage with them and have their whole history, every email correspondence, one source of truth. 

“We know exactly who’s available, when they’re available, what they’re looking for. We know what would actually encourage them to leave where they’re at because that talent pool isn’t necessarily people that have applied for a job with us.”

When it came to convincing management of the need for a new system, Adam said, “to be honest, it was a pretty easy sell. I didn’t have to try very hard. It was more about finishing up our contract with the other company, which we actually finished six months early. We’d paid for the entire year but I said ‘enough’s enough, I just need a system that works. Otherwise, we’re never going to achieve what we need to achieve.’”  

A significant time-saver 

And the team certainly achieved. “I would think [we’ve saved] close to 3-4 hours per person in the team. With four people, you’re looking at two days a week. It’s a significant saving there. And the beauty is, you can add that value elsewhere, whether it’s running training, strategic planning or forecasting with our leaders. 

“So if you can save as much time on the admin and the automation processes, and have all that fed in and being driven by one primary system like JobAdder, you can actually save a lot of time, add value and increase your worth to the business as a team,” he added.

“We’ve got an in-house automation team, so everything we’re doing is all about making our lives easier so we can service our customers more effectively. When we focus heavily on automation to drive customer interaction and customer value-add, systems like Jobadder that have the same mentality really help,” said Adam. 

When recommending JobAdder, Adam focuses largely on the time-saving element, because “every single talent acquisition team is under-resourced,” as well as the ability to build talent pools. Then there’s the ease of use. “It’s not complicated; it’s easy to use and really delivers on what it needs to. JobAdder is allowing me to do my job effectively and allowing me to add more value to my stakeholders,” he said. 

The frequent updates to the platform were also highlighted. “There’s a new release every other week and you don’t charge upgrade fees. Everyone always says ‘it’s in development’ and with JobAdder it actually is. You say you’re going to do something and you do it. For me, the ROI for JobAdder above every other system out there is second to none.”  

With multiple service provider of the year awards under their belt due to their exceptional customer service and an average NPS score in the early 80s, the future is promising for Brennan IT.