An all-round software success for Spinnaker!

Spinnaker is a recruitment consultancy that specialises in permanent recruitment for technical, commercial and professional positions within the global shipping industry.

Phil Parry, Chairman of the company, explained how the shipping industry offers an accurate barometer for world trade. When the global recession took hold in 2008, recruitment in the shipping industry took a dive too making 2008/2009 a very tough year for the company. However, Phil is now cautiously optimistic for the future, and shipping industry recruitment in 2009/2010 is almost back to pre-recession levels.

Before the global recession took hold, early in 2008, the company made the decision to upgrade from its bespoke SQL-based business database solution, which it developed in 2002. This system was becoming more and more difficult to manage. It really had outlived its usefulness,” said Phil. “We started the process of finding a successor for the system, and as part of our extensive research, we found some useful information about the ITRIS solution in The Recruiter magazine, in one of its regular software features.”

Eventually, the company narrowed its search down to a few systems, which it felt would be able to meet its needs and it thoroughly road tested around seven different systems. ITRIS finally proved itself to be the best software solution for Spinnaker, having all the necessary features required by the company. “Its usability particularly impressed me,” said Phil. “It appeared to be a simple system that would be easy for the consultants to pick up. For me, however, its most impressive feature is the ability to ‘keyword’ a range of candidate skills that are very specific to the shipping industry. It also gives us the ability to automatically ‘alias’ further words to our keyword search. This greatly cuts down on the set-up time required to initiate a database search and also gives us a more thorough search.”

Another ITRIS feature that impressed Phil was its management reporting capabilities. “This allows for easy database interrogation to enable the management team to keep track of the productivity of consultants. Traditionally, this has been a manual process which can be very time consuming.”

Yet another feature that helped convince Spinnaker of the suitability of ITRIS was its integration capabilities. Phil explains: “ITRIS integrates easily with our web site, which we built at the same time that we installed ITRIS. ITRIS is able to download information placed on our website by candidates directly into the system. This negates the need for any re-keying of candidate details. The process of managing information fits well into our working practices,” said Phil. “We needed a flexible business software solution for applicant and shortlist management. ITRIS has certainly offered us this.

“ITEC, (the company which produces ITRIS software) is of a mentality whereby they genuinely respond to requests for system changes to make our lives even easier,” said Phil. “No system is perfect, so obviously we do have problems with the system from time to time. However, ITEC has always been able to resolve issues quickly and effectively.”

ITRIS can be set-up to run automatic system updates on a timescale to suit the user - daily, weekly or monthly - the company also sends patches for any specifically requested changes that can be either updated to the system immediately or left to update on the next automatic system update.

Another feature that has greatly impressed Phil is the e-mail facility that was introduced on Version 8 of the software. This sees ITRIS integrate with Outlook. “This offers many useful, time saving features such as the multiple send facility. One of the neatest things about this feature is the ability to personalise e-mails via mail merge. Used properly, this can save a lot of time,” said Phil.

Migration from SQL
Commenting on the move to ITRIS, Phil said: “The migration from our bespoke SQL system to ITRIS was relatively painless. We had to migrate 40,000 contacts – both clients and candidates – from the old system to ITRIS.  The support offered by ITEC during this period was exceptional. They worked long and hard on our behalf during the migration process to ensure all our deadlines were met. There was always someone available to answer our questions, even late into the evening!”

Because it is the consultants who use the system every day, it is important that they are happy with it. This has not proved to be a problem for Spinnaker. Consultant, Natalie Armstrong said: “Speed and ease of candidate processing is the best feature of ITRIS for me. Accuracy of searching for keywords using the Alias feature is a big improvement over our previous system.”

Another Spinnaker consultant, Caroline Horsley, has to undertake a lot of search work using the system. She is a big fan of the new ITRIS Web search facility, which allows users to search the database and LinkedIn at the same time. She also makes good use of the shortcut capabilities, which allow her to navigate immediately to her own application list.

“ITRIS has certainly lived up to all of our expectations – the next step for us is to start looking at best-practice to ensure that we get the most out of the system. Some of our consultants are using more features of ITRIS than others.  Moving forward, we want to ensure that the team uses more of the many useful features of the system that are available to us!” concludes Phil.

Spinnaker Global Shipping Recruitment