Driver Require has been a trusted driver job agency for more than 20 years, specialising in temporary HGV, LGV, Class 1, logistics, truck, and lorry driver staff. With a growth rate of 30% per annum since 2009, the firm operates from 6 branches and completed 62,500 shifts for its clients last year.
Having worked a long time ago with Voyager’s development team to implement temporary recruitment functionality in Infinity’s predecessor, Account Manager Ian Datlen shares his views on now working with Voyager Infinity to manage day-to-day business activities.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background as a recruiter?
Ian Datlen: I’ve been a recruiter for 18 years now. Prior to that, I did all sorts of sales and publicity jobs in all sorts of industries. Whilst I was a recruitment consultant, I also got my LGV license, so I was already driving for customers. It made it an easy thing to drive for a while, and now my job is made up of a little bit of driving and then project work internally, so that might involve induction training for the other consultants as they come on board.
I was involved in the original installation of Voyager software, pre-Infinity. I was actually involved with the team that developed it, because we were quite early in there to bring it along to what we would like out of it. It then obviously transferred into Voyager Infinity – I was involved in its implementation as well, and then I’ve been doing projects on Infinity ever since. Whenever it needs to be adjusted or trained, or bits added on, etc, then I come back into the office for a couple of weeks, concentrate on that, do all the coding, that original sort of setup, and turning on the buttons they’re allowed to use and turning off the ones they’re not. So, it’s the writing of templates, and even such exciting projects as GDPR I wrote last year.
What made you choose Voyager Infinity over other software providers?
Ian Datlen: It’s interesting, because the system we were using before was paper. The shift planner, as you see it now in Infinity, would be an A4 piece of paper with people’s names written on it, or printed out from Excel, and then we’d use a pencil (not a pen, because these things change all the time) and then we would then do the billing from that very important piece of paper. If you lost it, we were absolutely stuffed that week because in general there wasn’t a copy! So you had a special folder which you carried around on call, which you weren’t allowed to lose.
We did about 300 shifts a week and we did all right but it was different, it was not as efficient as using software obviously.
What do you like about Voyager Infinity?
Ian Datlen: For me, this is fairly clear cut: what we’ve got in Voyager Infinity is something that does nearly everything that we wanted to do. We use it for temp recruitment, and it does 99% of what we need in an effective way, in a fairly intuitive way. Not all software is as easy to use.
The temp planner is where all the action happens and where the bookings and the shifts go, and that makes us work more efficiently. I mean, we’re doing somewhere in the region of 700 shifts a week now through Voyager Infinity. And that’s a big payroll. There are very few companies with a payroll that size out there in the world; I mean, they exist, but it’s not common – and Infinity is very capably coping with that.
We have 8-9 consultants concurrently using the system at any one time. As with an awful lot of employees, they just want to get on and do their job. The sign of a good system is that they don’t notice it. I do a tour every so often around the offices to remind them that other functionality exists that they may want to use it.
How does Voyager Infinity support your day-to-day business?
Ian Datlen: As I mentioned, the temp planner is there for availability. It’s a good diary and record of whether you’ve spoken to one of your temps before. It allows us to lay out maybe the next two or three weeks of whether they’re available or not available, and it prompts us to communicate with them.
Then you’ve got all the background stuff – there’s a lot of automation you can use in terms of reminding us to do employment checks. License checks for us is an important one; we need to check the license every three months and Infinity will remind us and show us when to do that.
You can set those reminders up for anything to do with what’s important in your business, so certification, CRB checks… A lot of that automation helps the team not miss something, basically. You can set up business rules within the system, so that your temps can only actually be booked to a shift when certain things are fulfilled such as their EAA rights and that sort of thing. It can be automatically ticked.
Also, the system stops them booking them out without that information. They get keen, they want to get the drivers out on the road, but actually it’s not happening until the checks are done. So it creates a physical barrier for that, which is also good.
You’ve got complete records of candidates, everything’s on there and all the documentation is easily accessible. You can send it out. You can not send it out. You can keep it for your own records. You’ve also got checks when you come to booking – automatic checks you can implement to stop you booking people to the wrong customers.
You’ve got customer reviews. You can block candidates from certain customers. All those things which you thought you wanted are sitting in the background and they’re there for you to use.
We’ve not come across anything glaring for the last eight months that we need that isn’t there.
It’s generally a case of reminding yourself what the system is capable of doing, finding how it works and then put it into place.
How would you rate our support service?
Ian Datlen: The support team is very good and we don’t often need it now. Normally, you get a resolution within the day, you’ll certainly get a response within the hour. They’re knowledgeable, they know what they’re doing. A lot of our contact with support is just education rather than problems – users hopefully phoning up and saying, well, how do I do that?
It’s one of those things you get used to with Infinity that you start taking for granted, and that’s a great service.
Would you recommend Voyager Infinity to other temp recruiters?
Ian Datlen: I absolutely would, yes – and I’d be more than happy to talk to them individually about that as well and see make sure it fits with what they do. We were quite lucky as it’s been moulded around a fast-moving temporary agency!
