Transcription
Hello and welcome back to the Skills Provision podcast. On today's episode, we're discussing the Skills Provision partner and partnership scheme on today's podcast. There's myself, Francesca, and also Pete hi. So if you haven't already done so, please make sure you subscribe tune in on whatever platform you want to listen on. So we are available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Podcasts and other providers. Equally. You can find our podcasts hosted on our website on the podcast section of the homepage. So let's get started. So why was our new partner system introduced? Now when we're having this conversation and during this podcast, we're probably going to be looking at it from several different perspectives, from a recruitment perspective, from an online perspective, and also from a business perspective. So I might have some thoughts and then Pete will also have some thoughts. So from my perspective, when I look at it from the recruitment side, we needed something to allow us to best utilize and work with our partners, our range of international partners that we work with and manage the process in a better and more efficient way. That is one of the main reasons for introducing this new system that we have now available. Pete, would you like to offer up one of your first reasons? Yeah, I'd like to go back to the beginning, Francesca, if I may. In 2019, I started formulating the idea for an expansive partner system tying databases, recruitment systems and at the same time trying to facilitate scalable growth. Prior to this, many ideas have been thought about, contemplated and some things trialed. We never got to the stage of having a whole complete system. Chris's mandate was to keep things under one roof which provided technical challenges, but it was the right thing for him to insist on in terms of moving into the wise. Some of this will cross over from what I've already said is to help develop the to help develop the international employment network at Skills Provision by a multifaceted scalable system. In layman's terms to build on what we already had and to expand and grow in areas of weakness. International employment is massive because of that, and this may come as a surprise to many. It is a fairly unique online subject as a whole. The reason for that is it's just too big or it is very big, very vast and provides massive online challenges. Anything that's globalized is the same thing. Online you're battling against physicality, having someone located in every single area you want to operate in and then developing visibility the brand as such many ways, lifetime challenges, you may succeed and you may fail. You won't know till you've tried. So it's very difficult areas and partner system as a whole is one of the main linchpins to the development of globalization. No, and I think that's a good summary as to one of the main and kind of catalysts for driving it forward and the thought process starting in 2019, becoming a reality. Now, as you've said, covering the international market and giving that global feel is something that we here at Skills Provision are aiming to offer and become that international employment network. By having this new system in place, I personally do feel that it offers a better chance for individuals, businesses to be part of, in some ways a team. But this relationship and the new system has allowed for a better and more robust way of working from a management point of view and for us to be able to get the best information out to our partners. But also being supported in the best way possible by having the robust systems in place to allow for this to happen as there's no point having all these partners that we may have if we don't have the framework, if you will, behind the scenes to help support and allow us to complete primarily at this time recruitment tasks. So what are the fundamentals of the new system? One of the fundamentals that I'm going to start talking about is the ability for us to see all job seekers or candidates, people call them by different names that our partners may get registered on the Skills provision website. Now Pete will be able to offer a more technical explanation about the strength of why having job seekers registered on our website is so important. But from us in the recruitment team, in Skills Provision, we now have better visibility and being able to see where each of our partners are putting in that effort to get their candidates seen and support us on the recruitment tasks. Pete, do you want to just touch on why having candidates registered on the Skills Provision website is so important? I'd like to come back to that if I may. I'll run through my main thoughts on the fundamentals of the new system and then go back and cover some of these areas as well as why it's important that job seekers register on our website. But the main fundamentals are globalization, natural progression throughout Skills Provision, providing the tools for effective employee management, a motivational system I e. Rewarding strong performers, making better use of our internal assets, scalability and producing value for the group. Value can be measured in many ways. Before I touch on that, go back to what you asked, the question you asked about why is it important? Well, it's important for different people regarded in regards to what they're trying to achieve. For Skills Provision, it is important that people register on the website because it provides us with food to grow the website, the content being the food, the written words, the unique words. It also gives us the platform to showcase job seekers in the best light possible. And for the job seekers themselves, the obvious ultimate aim, which is to source employment. That's the main thing with profiles. In terms of the points I went through globalization without the system we would have to probably hire 10,000 people, all from different locations areas. The challenges that would entail probably is not possible I would imagine in terms of going down that road. So we had limited options. So globalization is a fundamental aspect of this system in the virtual sense, not in the physical natural progression throughout skills provision we'll get on to later in this podcast. There's a tiered system that allows for progression promotion as such if people want it, if they're deemed suitable and they are effective when they move up the ladder. Providing tools for effective employee management. Basically your side, how you manage partners, people, staff, your own employees, motivational, which we can touch on later in terms of the more people that you put into the pot, the more people that are placed, the more people that are showcased and are picked up by employers, the more money people make. Making better use of our internal assets, primarily the profile database and job database become more widespreadly, used internally which will lead to greater visibility externally scalability. There is no top end scale figure number as to how this can be grown. We can now in terms of staff and partners, we can now manage using this system an infinite number. Although you may disagree in terms of it would be very difficult and maybe impossible. But in reality, there is no top end number. But it's probably down some more as to how many people or how many businesses could you handle at one time before they suitable to move them forward. The potential is there for anything and that's the thing, isn't it? Now this has opened a door and it's a case of we can make that decision as to how many we let through the door. But the possibilities are endless. Yes, and the final one producing value for the group, which is unknown. Skills provision is growing dramatically, vastly in terms of visibility, numbers for visitors, exposure, brand awareness, we see this with the data in terms of the skills provision based keywords that are getting picked up in vast numbers daily is only happening because skills provision is becoming synonymous with international employment. Everything sort of ties into online. You don't have lines of demarcation as in you can't separate most things that touch on to something else and touch onto something else and it's a matter of understanding this when you develop things and then when you work with them. So understanding that probably from your point of view when you bring new people in that they have a solid understanding of the partner system inside and out before they start using it because a quick brief and this is what you do and away you go, is not going to pay dividends. And probably like anything, understanding those that have been third party sellers on Amazon for 20 years will be a lot stronger and better positioned and more effective than those starting out last week, for example and this kind of thing. And obviously those are some really important key fundamentals. If you're happy for me to I just like to explain maybe some of the key features about it that I personally from a management and usability function have found really useful and it's really helped enhance the recruitment process and also our relationship with our partners. So as we mentioned, we can now have the visibility of candidates registered by all of our partners more clearly within the database and the profiles that are created are then visible for employers globally and we do get inquiries from employers that will find specific profiles. Now having the facility which the technical team implemented where candidates not candidates. Sorry. The partners can now create unique URLs for either their general advertising or for specific jobs has meant that the process of identifying candidates for either a specific recruitment task or which can happen a lot, where candidates have perhaps applied for one role, say, in January of this year, and now we're in October, and another role comes up that they may actually be a fit for. So from a candidate's point of view, it is also allowing a better and more clear system that we can then see candidates that perhaps have been unsuccessful in previous roles, but further down the line may be successful for something. And we can then 100% confirm where that candidate has come from to ensure that we have the best working relationship possible with our partners. So you already sort of started leading on to this but what are the three tier in terms of the system? What is that progression that partners and within the partner system that are available? The system supports employees of skills provision, staff the next level down and partners the next level down from them. And partners are generally small, medium, large sized groomer agencies all have unique tasks, demands and needs and the system allows employees to asset manage and for staff and partners to work effectively and be financially successful. Absolutely, as you said. And what I think of my opening things was about the fact that with this new system, it allows for a clearer management and clearer understanding of how our partners and our staff are performing that we can now see. That those that perhaps are up that initial partner level, if they continue to perform and exceed targets, that they can then progress into staff and potentially then onto employees. Now, when we talk about partners, we have mentioned they could be recruitment agencies, they can also be individuals. But something that we are really keen on doing is working with individuals who have something to offer and are really engaged in the process. So it kind of leads me on to some key points and you may want to interject here, Pete, about what makes a good partner or a good member of staff or someone utilizing the system. Some of the biggest things for me is communication, ensuring that they are clear and engaged in the process and keeping their candidates, the system, the database, keeping it up to date, passion. There is nothing more rewarding, I suppose is a word I would use, but also from my perspective, to see someone who is genuinely interested in supporting not only us, but advocating for the candidates and trying to get those candidates into international employment. We have opportunities around the world and being able, from my perspective, something I find really nice is being able to offer those international opportunities and work with the partners and the staff to then facilitate and support those international job seekers. From your perspective, Pete, what do you think are some of the key qualities or key aspects that make a good partner or staff member? Perhaps? I don't work specifically with these people, but I do communicate occasionally with them in other areas. Intelligence, being online, savy, having the ability to read digest guidelines and act upon them. Work hard. The online arena has a way of developing people who want everything fast, quick, speed, easy. And when your database crunching and looking through thousands and thousands of entries, or trolling various job boards, social media platforms, et cetera, for certain people that are quite unique, hard to find, it's challenging. So it's almost like stickability sticking at something. Things that are easily achieved are not necessarily the ones that bring the greatest reward. My wife runs a cleaning business. She cleans. For many professional, not many, four or five professional footballers. They didn't get to that level by buying a football, kicking it against the wall and going, right, that's me ready. It was almost from childhood, every day and really putting it in, constantly putting it in when no one else was out there on the field, working at it. Single mindedness is a lot of the time and it's like it's the same in any environment we're working. Those that have the passion and single minded pursuit that they want to be better, to do better, to earn more, then there has to be a payback. Payback is the amount of work and the quality of it. A lot of people do fail to live up to their own expectations, I guess, when the hard work needs putting in and some people thrive on it, they're great systems and they are great levelers in a way. In terms of the systems that we have in place. I'll just go back and touch on some of the things. In terms of the difficulty in developing this system four years in the making was things like the affiliate links that you touched on earlier and working out that we needed more than one type of affiliate link and how to produce these links and then how to use them thereafter as separators in terms of who's doing what, where, how do we measure and all this kind of stuff. It were very complicated almost to the point where I wasn't sure I'll be able to finish the project, even get it started. We did. But it's almost fantastic level playing field where our system doesn't necessarily provide the best results for the largest or it could be a medium sized recruitment agency from Slovakia or something. And we've also got individual small recruitment agencies in Slovakia. They're all on the level playing field. Exactly. And it means it's going to be a matter of who puts in what is going to get out of the system. Exactly. It's a one size fits all, which is great in terms of the fact that there is no one that is being given preferential treatment or being considered more favorably than others. Because everyone just because someone may have 100 members of staff versus someone who's got two members of staff, the candidates that they're bringing to the table, the job seekers for the opportunities have equal merit. Every candidate has equal merit and just because they're coming from one type of organization or another shouldn't have any impact on whether they move through the processes. It should just be down to is the work put in, are they presented, have they followed the system? Are they providing the information? Are they supporting us accordingly? And just kind of going on from what you'd said about some of the qualities, I say a word that kind of encompasses all of those. In some ways it's just being engaged in the overall process because if you don't buy into all of the aspects and what we're asking and equally then what we are there to support you with is that it won't go very far. This is a two way system. Although it's obviously been developed for us at skills provision, it is just as important for the partners supporting us as it is us supporting the partners and staff members with the system and making sure that they are getting the best out of it for themselves, for us. As a business that is at the heart of it. I always think it's the candidates. People listening probably need to realize that this is not, in effect, a new system. No, it's not starting. It already works. There's elements of this that are already working. We have many partners, we have many members of staff, we have many employees. It's a new system. Yeah, it's an upgrade organization. It's not like this is going from a standing start and then we need to start filling the system up with we've probably got a waiting list of over 200 agencies that are interested in an affiliation of some description. We've just got to be careful on who we allow in. We don't need disruption, we need quality. It's like you always say to me though online, isn't it? There's never one version it's version one, version two and continual upgrades. I kind of consider this as almost a version two. It's a modified and improved system, definitely. So how do you see? You've kind of already touched on this, so we may want to move past it, but how do you see this facilitating corporate growth? I can obviously see it from again, for those out there listening, just in terms of context of where Pete and I sit within the business, pete is a technical expert and I'm much more on the recruitment and hiring side. So it's always good to get the juxtaposition of opinions and viewpoints and understanding because we do look at things from different ways. But we do have a synergy between us. So from my perspective, from growth, I'm looking at the physical ability of more candidates coming in, more placements, more revenue. Obviously that means which means we can further invest in things. It also means that hopefully more employers, which again allows us to having more opportunities to market, which then allows us to then have more opportunities for partners and then continually add more partners. So from a as people often refer to it, a more traditional perspective, that's how I foresee this new system helping to increase and add corporate growth. Now, from an online perspective, pete will be able to give us a bit more insight into that realm and into that I mean, from my side. It's compounded viral international growth achieved by providing a platform more ethical than LinkedIn, which allows small, medium and large recruitment agencies to showcase their talent, further develop their own businesses, and to generate much needed income. Revenue. And once the viral part comes, in terms of the snowball down the hill you part of there are many facets to this whole system and some of them are not easily identifiable or can be seen. And that is that almost like a tennis match. Everything is two way where the people doing the work have the benefit of the brand, the brand strength, awareness systems themselves to do their work and their work then becomes visible, which attracts more employer interest, more employment interest and everything. And the snowball continues to roll down the hill and get larger and larger. And viral growth, which is the holy grail for a lot of online entrepreneurs, is fine. And as we've seen ourselves, when it goes nuts, it's almost uncontrollable where you're like, what are we doing? How the hell are we going to we've had some Twitter spikes in terms of traffic, where the traffic's gone up tenfold at least, probably. Yeah, 1020 fold in minutes, an hour. And we've had many of these. So it's preparation for what can come, but also utilizing it as well and not being afraid of it. So it's this viral part of something and also of being the partners and the staff being able to fully utilize what they have behind them for us to teach, train, mentor. It's a bit like you sort of hit the nail on the head right at the beginning of this podcast with the Word team. It's one big team all pulling on the rope at the same time and not 700 individuals all pulling on their own little bit of rope. Yeah, absolutely. And there's no point having everyone, as you say, pulling in different directions because it helps no one and it doesn't achieve the end goal. At this current time, the main goal with the system is placing candidates into employment. So if people are trying to work in a way that doesn't help support that then they're not going to achieve those goals and unfortunately candidates miss out and they are the key. It's not just because of the area you work in. You tend to become a little bit one dimensional in your orthodox process. It's not just to put people into work, far from it. This system is also far reaching for employers. They would start taking more of an interest in what we do, how we do it, requesting technical demonstrations as to how skills provision can there's massive skills gaps all over the world, how we can start combating and how we are combating these problems. Because you work in that area of placing people you tend to think that that's the be all and end all as to what's going on sometimes and it's not and it's not what I'm working towards. That's a fair statement, I would agree. I do recognize that there are obviously the additional benefits but yes, I suppose selfishly from my perspective and what some of my obviously like aims and things within the business, it definitely, obviously helps me in a positive way in that respect. So where do we see this system going? What future developments do we see now from the development perspective that is very much more your niche, Pete, if you will. Obviously without giving too much away because we don't want people taking our ideas, are you able to shed any light as to where you see this system going in generic way? Yes, of course. The patent system will eventually be supplemented with an associate system and that will all be rounded up. We probably do a podcast on the associate system. When that's up and running and when that's in place, probably put together, that'll be the close of you should probably say, rightly, say version two. The whole ecosystem will be covered. And then down the road we will then have version updates of what we have, take feedback from users, our associates, our clients, and look to build on what we have in place. There's daunting and scary parts of putting together an international employment network and all the pieces of the jigsaw that slot together to formulate that. But as long as everything is manageable, scalable, you have the right people doing the right things and you continue the working towards progression and growth, everything's fine. But yeah, technically it's tough somewhere like say 2019 start of this, we're in 2023 now but we do other things as well. So it's not that this is probably worked on by myself in the background, maybe once a week, something once a fortnight, put some hours into it and see where it starts going. Like with a lot of the other stuff we're trying to achieve. In terms of further developments of the network massive plans, I don't really want to cover any of no, our future plans is not something I want to discuss openly, but we'll cover as each module becomes live and is useful for job seekers, agencies or employers. For our podcast, we'll write some literature and we'll get it out there. Yeah, absolutely. And that's an even more reason why people should subscribe and follow and make sure that they listen in. So for those out there listening that think I work for an agency or I'm an independent recruiter and I'm interested in working with you guys, and the potential to work with an international recruiter, how do you become one of our partners? So we do have a process where we will filter through partners and not every single person, as Pete mentioned, is necessarily the right fit for our organization. But if you'd like to have a discussion and have the potential to work with us, please email Francesca at skillsprovision co UK or Francesca at skills Provision.com. If you're listening to this podcast on YouTube, the details will be placed in the description box. If you're listening to this in any of the other platforms, please visit the Skills Provision website and place an inquiry on there. If there are no other means that you are able to reach us equally, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, any of those places I'm readily available or one of the Skills Provision team are also. Is there anything else you'd like to add, Pete? Yeah, I'd like to finish with the Skills Provision partner system will work fantastically well for those that operate solely in LinkedIn and use that as their home to work out of. The problem with LinkedIn, obviously, is the number of agents it's sole operators in there fighting over the scraps at times and can be difficult, whereas we provide an alternative that you can work. It's not that we provide a system that is an alternative for LinkedIn, but it is a system that can be worked supplementary alongside those that utilize LinkedIn. In terms of our database is growing massively, our reach is massive and you can earn money directly from our organization, whereas LinkedIn facilitates you doing the activity, finding the people and then obviously earning money from the fees that that produces. So both have strengths and weaknesses. We are in no way the size of LinkedIn. We never will be, but the closing varies tiny step by step, we're closing the gap. I believe we've got a much ethical system that's based more about the merits of the job seeker than corporate activity. Such and everything's got a money twist to it. But LinkedIn is good. I'm a fan of the system just believe that we're going to do something better, because I think they've reached their goal, their pot of gold has been reached value. The big guys have come in now and we are hungry, growing, and we're going to take a lot of business away from them and a lot of people away from them when we're already doing that. So that's my closing statement on the partner system, is we offer something for everyone in terms of agencies, in terms of location. I guess the only sticking point as such is that we would require everyone to speak or to be able to communicate in English, because we don't speak every language in the world and we won't be able to. Colombian agency that don't speak two words of English, it just wouldn't work. So English, being able to communicate effectively, we're a fantastic alternative. Yeah, we want to be able to support our partners as much as partners support us. And yes, absolutely, communication is key. Well, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to listen in today. If you haven't already done so, please make sure you subscribe. Follow save this Podcast share this Podcast spread the word and yeah, tune in for our next episode. Coming soon from me. Francesca. It's goodbye. Me Pete. Goodbye. Thank you, everyone. Take care.
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