It’s not likely to surprise you that as Development Manager here at Voyager Software I’m yet to meet a Recruiter that’s shown any real interest in the lines of code our Developers drool over, nor have I had many deep conversations with any Agency MDs on subjects such as ‘Big Data’ or ‘Microsoft Azure’.
I can also live with the fact that few Recruiters look more than a few months ahead when it comes to Recruitment Software, we have flexible contracts, but it does surprise me at the seeming lack of interest to check the quality of the build, ahead of the price. Recruiters should explore the quality of the product, build and supplier in much greater detail than they do typically. This webinar may help if you’re thinking about it.
“Recruiters are increasingly asking about our Agile methodology and how that differentiates us ahead of the competition.”
I’m pleased to say that the market is notably more interested in the quality of what we’re producing now than they once were, something that’s going to reap rewards for our users in the future.
Whilst Recruiters will put a decent amount of time into sourcing their first solution, their focus rightly moves on as the business takes its first steps. Recruiters know they need to keep their finger on the pulse of what is hot and what is not, but it’s an ongoing requirement that changes fast – they just can’t keep it up.
If you’ve chosen Voyager you will be rewarded with a solid, feature rich CRM platform today and well into the future, but let me explain why. I celebrated a not insignificant anniversary with Voyager in this June and it gave me cause, with a certain amount of pride it has to be said, to look back at how far the R&D team has come in this time, particularly in the adoption of a true Agile development process.
“Agile allows us to deliver new software features every two weeks, or faster”
Internally we carry out all of the usual Agile practices, we live by the Agile manifesto, such as doing daily scrums, sprint reviews and retrospectives and continuous improvement. We also encourage strong team interaction, have the walls covered in whiteboards for peer design reviews and brain-dumps, and use best of breed technologies such as Visual Studio Team Services and Ranorex to support the application lifecycle, check it out, its really cutting edge stuff. The chances are your software supplier is doing none of these things.
Each and every build of our codebase results in a fully installable and potentially releasable build which is automatically deployed to our SaaS development environment for everyone in the business to review.
But perhaps the biggest impact of our Agile process, both internally and externally, is the frequency of product releases.
“We aim to release a fully tested version of Infinity every two weeks and, with just a couple of exceptions, we have done this successfully for the last two years.”
This means that the development team and the wider Voyager business can more rapidly adapt our solutions to satisfy the ever changing markets that our customers operate in and, whilst it may take many sprints to build a major piece of new development such as the new Temps functionality, our agile processes mean that minor enhancements, updates for defects and bespoke requests can be released every two weeks and customers no longer need to wait for quarterly releases!
When coupled with our flexible, scalable SaaS platform, the Voyager R&D team is well placed to meet the demands put on it by our external and internal customers.
Voyager Infinity and Voyager Mid-Office are software solutions that make Recruiters’ lives easier. Voyager Infinity is a CRM used by thousands of recruiters globally to source, nurture and maintain the relationships with their clients and candidates, and Mid-Office manages the entire Pay and Bill process (IR35 ready).
