We’ve applied what we’ve learnt from Service Oriented Architecture and created something which could be called ‘Service Oriented Recruitment’.
Most people in IT know about Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA. The beauty of SOA is that it breaks down the islands of business logic and data that are scattered across multiple, disparate applications. These silos may exist in on-premise or cloud-based software, SaaS applications, or personal devices. SOA enables interoperability across all silos through integration, making it easier and faster to automate business processes.
Before SOA, applications for related business processes contained duplicate functionalities, often with the same code existing in several internal programs. Code was poorly reused, leading to wasted effort and money spent during development. As infrastructures became more complex, it become increasingly difficult for developers to maintain and support these applications, and businesses quickly lost agility.
Reusable services and eliminating redundancies
With the advent of SOA, infrastructure architecture was designed around services rather than around entire applications. The emphasis came onto creating components called services, which are discrete units of software that provide a specific functionality and can be reused in every application. So in a SOA model, developers create new applications by orchestrating a collection of services instead of building out an entire software programme, eliminating code redundancies across multiple applications.
The benefits of SOA are plenty: By improving the agility of IT systems and businesses processes, enterprises can better respond to changes in the market and innovate new products to stay competitive. At the same time, they can reduce bloat and complexity inherent in legacy systems, increase developer productivity by making software design more intuitive, and lower IT costs associated with maintenance and upgrades.
So what does SOA have to do with recruitment?
In the same way as a software architect may look at legacy-based IT infrastructures and design better process, integration patterns and reusable services in a SOA project, at Integrella part of our Specialist Resource Provisioning service is to look at the way recruitment workflow and applicant tracking is set up to identify areas that need a “service-oriented” approach to better align with business and project objectives. We have found that expecting an enterprise-wide recruitment solution to be effective when complex development skill sets are needed is often unrealistic.
Our core business is software, and this is one of the most competitive areas of the recruitment / employment domain. We have found that cumbersome application processes, poor supplier communication and slipping timescales can massively affect the delivery of a project or system impacting on both time and cost.
Why does enterprise-wide recruitment fail in the domain of IT software?
Often an enterprise wide recruitment strategy doesn’t have the level of detail to be effective in the IT software domain. Weaknesses that should be highlighted before implementation are often overlooked in favour of a cost-based solution. Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a popular solution for large enterprises. Believing that a vendor-specific RPO solutions or internal HR-based team is a good solution for software often leads to problems later where cost and frustration can mount up. Supplementing your solution with recruitment agencies is an option, however lack of consistency in agency engagement and lack of technical knowledge can be frustrating and not relied upon.
In an ideal world, CTO’s and Development Managers want peace of mind and continuity, coupled with a supplier who has a good technical understanding of the resources required.
Why Service Oriented Recruitment Works
We take each individual software project and isolate it from the main recruitment process. We analyse the market for available resources in each phase, from design right through to long term support. If we know the calibre and availability of project resources early in the lifecycle we can prevent project creep due to lack of resources and in some cases may even influence vendor selection. We take over the analysis of the skills and person required for every project, and help companies to –
- Reduce time to hire
- Accurately forecast cost per hire
- Streamline the application process
- Analyse the risks
- Transfer knowledge
- Pool talents for future projects
Benefits of Service Oriented Recruitment
- Better resource control
- ‘Plug and play’ solution
- Scalable resources
- You don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time you’re looking for a new resource
- Pre-interview testing, screening and reference checking
- Short term swap-outs
- Dedicated resource management
- Long term resource planning support around permanent hires
Our approach dovetails seamlessly into a modern agile development environment.
A New Approach to Specialist Resourcing
Our Specialist Resource Provisioning (SRP) service utilises our internal recruitment processes to help you find the right integration and SOA resource quickly and on budget. As a trusted partner to key players in integration and API management, you can be sure that when we hire staff into our team we get things right – so now we’ve extended this to help companies which need specialist resource.
Customers have been so delighted with the value we have been able to add, that we decided to make this the cornerstone of our Specialist Resource Provisioning service. We now have a small team in place which look after all the recruitment and scheduling for our project teams.
Read more about our SRP service here and drop your details into the form to tell us about your technical resource requirements.
You might also like our blogpost 5 Areas of Specialist Resourcing You Can’t Afford To Get Wrong