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Month: May 2017

A new website for Vertical Advantage

Drum roll please!

With a bright and shiny refresh of our brand identity, Vertical Advantage is pleased to reveal our new website with all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a professional recruitment agency with your future in mind.

Since our launch in 2012, Vertical Advantage has always been sure of its identity. We recruit permanent, contract, and interim professionals in key vertical markets such as food and drink, consumer products, retail, marketing and media agencies, and many more besides.

You can guess where our name Vertical Advantage originated!

But four years on, in these fast-changing times, we became acutely aware our current digital presence was not quite where we needed it to be.

We embarked on a marketing journey to understand what we wanted to say and how we wanted to be perceived by the market. We also looked at some data (Google Analytics) to understand how our existing users interacted with our site.

The new website is a result of all of this work and so much more, and we are delighted with its results. We were able to address a few key issues, and introduce some great new features that we are sure our customers and employees will love!

Smarter Job Search
The job search on our previous site was a little bit clunky. Our revised job search enables candidates to search by salary or day rate first, and then offers a streamlined version that lets users be really specific about what they want to see. We also built in a keyword search from the home page, which replicates the ‘Google’ experience that we know many of our users trust.


Modern look and feel
The style of the website is, of course, crucial to that great ‘first impression’. Aligning Vertical Advantage more closely to the forward-thinking FMCG and consumer brands we do business with, made a lot of sense. We wanted to modernise Vertical Advantage without losing our original vision for the brand that made us unique. To get there, our team worked collectively with our agency partners to decide on a final identity that suited who we are now. We wanted the logo to be modern, future-proof, social-media friendly, and to build affinity with our target markets.


Mobile optimised
We realised many of our users (job seekers and clients) increasingly access our website on their mobile and tablet devices. Not only that, all the data out there tells us to think ‘mobile first’. Our previous site was not mobile optimised, so users found it harder to access the information they wanted from us.

So yes! Our new site is now fully mobile optimised, and in addition, it can now accept mobile applications for job roles. Just attach your CV from your device, Dropbox or Google Drive storage. You can apply for your perfect role on your commute or even in the middle of lunch!

Go on, take a little look on your mobile device if you haven’t already!

 

Our Engage Page
Because we understand the power of online marketing, the VA team now produces more social media and blog content than ever before. This helps us demonstrate our market expertise, as well as our personal passions in the world of food and drink. Our old website just didn’t do this justice, so now we’re so happy that our new website has a clever ‘social wall’ feature. We’ve called it our ‘Engage Page’, because it pulls in our latest original content, including our LinkedIn and Instagram feed.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page to be the first to hear of our latest blogs, insights and news!


Showing off the Vertical Advantage Culture
Vertical Advantage is a great place to work (ask any of our team)!

In 2016 we did a huge piece of work to define our culture and articulate what makes us unique. We distilled this into 3 key values:

  • We’re straight-talking and down to earth
  • We work hard, but we also work smart
  • We’re innovative, agile and open

​Our ‘Join us‘ area on our website really brings our values to life, in a simple yet dynamic way that reflects our culture properly. Our team are very social and we love to explore the best places in London, so keep an eye on our live Instagram feed, where you can find all our latest team outings, gossip, and of course visits to London’s best eateries! We hope we can use this to attract more great talent to our business.

As with any digital project we know the hard work is not over yet and we will continue to monitor and evolve our presence to reflect our customers’ needs.

So, please check out our new website and let us know what you think.

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Interim Career Planning – Fail to prepare, prepare to fail!!

Navigating your roadmap to a successful interim career
As the Interim and Contracts manager at Vertical Advantage, one of the things I always get asked is ‘how do you manage an interim career to gain as much career satisfaction or advancement as a permanent career?’

Most people would assume that as an interim you pick up new jobs as they come in so your career history will look haphazard with no direction. With a little planning and foresight, however, it is possible to chart a defined path through your interim career, which will allow you to achieve all your goals you set out from the start.

If you know what you want your interim journey to look like then you should take these important points into account:


What do you want to achieve working as an interim?
This is probably the most important thing to think about. Are you working as an interim for the money, for the challenge, or to allow you to experience several different sectors or disciplines?

Once you identify why you became an interim in the first place, you can decide which opportunities will suit you best. Sometimes it may be a combination of goals, but you may want to change your goals after a couple of assignments. There are no hard-and-fast rules on why you became an interim in the first place, but the most important thing is to know what that reason is and keep it foremost in your mind.


Accepting the first role offered?
The eternal dilemma for an interim is whether to ‘twist or stick’. Do you accept the first role offered, or do you wait a little longer to see if a role better suited to your goals will turn up? This depends on a couple of things: the current state of the job market (whether it is busy or quiet), and how far away from your goal is the job? When the job market is quiet it maybe pertinent to accept the first thing going, but then sometimes the role may be too junior, too far away from your ideal role, or a huge commute. You may have to turn down an offer rather than walking away mid-way through the assignment as that may tarnish you with a bad reputation.


How will the role develop?
The other thing to take into consideration is whether or not your interim role will evolve whilst you are in assignment. Maybe the role is not quite right when you are offered it, but most interim roles evolve over the length of the assignment, and it may add a skillset that your CV otherwise lacked.


Always keep moving forward
Interim careers are sometimes seen as stunted compared to permanent careers, because you may not go in a straight line as you would in a permanent role. It’s fine to move roles when they are not the most logical, but one of the key things is to try and always move forward with each interim role. Have a look at the role and decide whether it is adding to your initial goals. Is it more money? Am I picking up new skills? Am I learning about a new industry? These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself whilst pondering on whether to accept.


Will you go back into the permanent market in the future?
Sometimes an interim career is only a short-term lifestyle change, and you may want to ultimately go back to a permanent role. Picking the right interim role is paramount if that is your aim. The wrong interim roles, whether something too junior, short-term, or an industry change, may jeopardise your future earning potential. On the other hand, picking up the right interim roles may also enhance your career prospects, so you do need to think long term even when accepting something that may be short term!


One step back, two steps forward
Occasionally it might be worth taking a slight step backwards. Maybe you could take on a slightly junior role, or step away from management responsibilities to allow you to take a much bigger leap forward in the future. You may lack big brand or particular industry experience, and so if you take that junior role at a blue chip, it could allow you to rapidly move forward, opening up more avenues for you to explore in the future.


Cutting your losses
You start a new interim role and it isn’t quite what it is cracked up to be; it may have been mis-sold; the role may have changed, or a line manager leaves. When do you cut your losses and leave the role early? I would advise you to do so as soon as it is starts to become detrimental to you / your CV. Ultimately, the longer you stay, the more likely it will affect your future career. In the interim market, your reputation is very important, so being transparent is a key trait to a healthy interim career.

Whether you are looking at interim as a career change or you are a long-time contractor, a plan is key. Sometimes we are so engaged with the day to day job we forget to look at our long term goals. Let me know what you think! Did you have a plan of what you wanted to achieve when you became an interim or do you think having a plan may limit your options?

If you don’t yet have a plan and would like to discuss it please get in contact.

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Careers in supply chain continue to evolve!

Lately, I’ve written about how sexy supply chain careers (and people!) can be; how the empowerment afforded by agility, better forecasting, and improved control has led to the evolution of the standard supply chain career, but now I want to talk more specifically about the evolution of its people.

Hiring in FMCG has come a long way from relying only on supply chain professionals with relevant experience in a specific industry. Now talent can cross over from food to non-food, and from small to large business and back again. We can really drill down into this fluidity by examining the current career paths:

At entry level, the supply chain career options are more diverse than ever!

Quite often a supply chain professional – graduate or not will ‘fall’ into a role and will work their way up the corporate ladder.

However there is a trend where more and more graduates are choosing one of two ways to specifically to kick start their supply chain career:

  1. Pick a graduate scheme in an established company like Unilever or Kraft, or
  2. Join a start up, maybe something in craft beers, startup businesses with rapid growth or similar businesses to Innocent drinks.

It’s no longer just the established go-to organisations providing valuable opportunities for supply chain professionals. Smaller companies can now give graduates much wider exposure to the whole supply chain. End-to-end experience shapes their learning, and enables better development of their problem-solving skill sets.

On the other hand, blue chip structures make it easier to learn the specific functions of the business. Smaller businesses may not have the benefits packages and structure of a corporate but they often have a more informal culture, with perks that can make the work place more fun. This can be a very strong pull to attract tomorrow’s talent.

Supply chain is becoming more influential and commercial

In my last post I wrote about how over the last few years, supply chain teams have had more direct contact with customers. A relatively new function known as the ‘customer supply chain’ has evolved over the last 6-8 years in larger companies. It’s attracting a whole new breed of supply chain professionals that can be both commercial, technical, and makes for some great career progression for individuals on this path (such as going on into sales or marketing roles and vice versa). This gives them more fluidity and a holistic view of the organisation.

Usually problems with the supply chain means bad news for business, so the need for skilled and accurate forecasting of supply has become seriously commercial, and customer demand planning is one of the roles that has come out of that. Those forecasters have to do better than the Met Office! So the skill sets that come from more technical roles can really come out to play for this type of role.

Professionals who have, up to now, travelled a more technical route, such as IT, analytics or consultancy, can be seen moving into these roles.

Organisations value supply chain professionals more

Supply chain professionals are no longer left in the shadow of the warehouse or factory; they’re being asked to apply their skills and knowledge in other areas instead.

Secondments in departments like marketing or finance provide professionals with a valuable holistic view of the business, making work more interesting for them, and they can really benefit organisations too.

For example, one of our candidates in supply chain went to work in the accounts/finance department on a secondment. While there, she identified an inefficient process already met by a report from the operations department. Would she have known about that report if she hadn’t worked in operations? Probably not!
Thanks to this type of success, some of our clients maximise on the opportunity to encourage secondments from within when members of the workforce move into internal projects or go onto maternity leave. This is a great way for all professionals to get new exposure and skills within a business.

Putting this into perspective

Clients often tell us they want to hire the Supply Chain Director of tomorrow, but that person will have to have exposure to all areas and not just be a specialist in one. Rounded experience by the time they get to a senior level is crucial to success for the appointment, the candidate, and ultimately the business. If you’re aiming to be a Supply Chain Director one day, make sure you’re on the right path and give me a call to talk about your options.

Thanks for reading. This post was originally published by Jayna on LinkedIn.

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