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Category: Vertical Advantage News

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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Anyone for drinks? How you could leverage current trends in the drinks industry to land your dream job.

The rise of the start-up is as prominent in the drinks industry as it is in other FMCG categories in the UK. Craft is nothing new, you have craft gin, craft beer and craft quinoa vodka, for goodness’ sake, and the category continues to ferment as new brands bubble into the market daily. It’s incredibly competitive but there’s some notable small batch gins really making noise in the industry, like Manchester Gin manchestergin.co.uk also up for a Great British Food Award for 2017

Together with the rise of craft is the tonic and soft drinks industry, with emerging brands like Fever Tree, Fentimans, and Franklin & Sons, now giving market leaders like Schweppes a run for their money. It’s also worth noting the emergence of the ‘low-cal’ category, which suit a more nutrition-conscious nation.

Staying with soft drinks for a moment, a few other categories have experienced growth and seen new contenders enter:

  • In spring water, Cano recently launched Canowater, a brand focused on sustainability and the environment, cannily (sorry couldn’t resist the pun) created aluminium cans of sparkling and still waters, where the packaging alone is enough to tempt you to make a purchase.
  • Tapped Trees is another brand busily making flavoured water cool again from the sap of the birch tree

Another thing I’d like to mention is the wide range of spin-off industries like subscription services. Whilst wine clubs have been around for aeons now, the subscription-based gifting services, whether drinks or cosmetics, or whatever it may be, are still really gaining momentum. One notable is Gin Craft Club with a staggering 20,000 members who receive a different gin every month/two months, along with a hamper-style box filled with related gin paraphernalia enabling you to create your perfect G&T in the comfort of your own home. There’s also a similar one called Caskers for Vodka lovers.

I think it’s a great time to be a consumer in the UK at the moment as the need for brands to keep their innovation pipeline relevant and fresh has never been more important. The result of this is a wider range of ingredients, new categories emerging, and innovative brands at our disposal, resulting in a range of highly creative products on our shelves like never before. However, life is not all about socialising and consuming, so here’s some critical success factors that I have put together about how to find work in the burgeoning drinks industry right now:

How can I get into the drinks industry?

Get yourself out there before you apply anywhere
More often than not you will learn your trade through the trade, so if you are applying for jobs with drinks companies, get out there and understand the brand perception. Identify if they are mass market or premium, who their competitors are, what the price-point is, what the promotions are, and if it tastes good. This first-hand research is especially important if you are making a switch from an entirely different industry.

Choose the business type carefully
If you are a sales professional looking for entry level positions, consider whether you want to work for an SME or if you want to join a larger business where you could get training development, and a better appreciation of other functions and resources like category management, shopper marketing, and consumer insights.


What traits do drinks companies look for?

Show you understand the business
The on-trade to off-trade transition will forever be an issue. If you are a NAE/NAM currently in the on-trade trying to make a switch, you will need to find comparisons with the Grocery/Retail channel. For example, building and negotiating Joint Business Plans (JBP’s, category management approaches, or where you have perhaps had crossover with colleagues in the off-trade in projects before.

Be a brand ambassador!
As we’ve seen with some of the recent trends, this is a really exciting, yet competitive time to be in drinks, so if you are considering a move to a Craft Gin, Beer or Tonic brand, bear in mind that there’s probably a high percentage of other people in the UK who also think it’s a cool job too. To get ahead, ensure that you are able to demonstrate your industry knowledge at interview, it sounds obvious, but think about what brands you like, and why, and make sure the company knows you have been into the trade and done your homework.

Be entrepreneurial
At the more experienced end of the market, let’s say you are thinking of making the switch to SME (another interesting blog covered by my colleague, Richard Bowen) you must be able to demonstrate real (and excuse the somewhat overused term) entrepreneurial spirit: how you’ve progressed, how you’ve worked cross-functionally, and where you’ve created/implemented processes from scratch.

Be prepared to work in your own spare-time
This is something probably more relevant in drinks than most other categories. You may be expected to go to festivals (what a drag!), attend events, collaborate with other brands in sponsorship agreements, deliver tasting sessions, and do pop-ups etc.

Ultimately working in the Drinks industry can involve lots of hard-work yet be extremely rewarding if you are passionate.

G&T anyone?

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Podcasts, Paul and Me – a reminder about the importance of listening.

Quite recently I have started listening to podcasts – I know, I’m pretty late to the game here (you can see the theme of late adopter shining through as my second blog is being written) but I’m not ashamed to say I am hooked… they had me at “Hello”. Podcasts have made the 30-minute Northern Line squeeze-fest a bit more pleasurable (though we were coming from a low base!) The Jerry Maguire link doesn’t end with the line above as the podcasts I have most enjoyed thus far are with great sportsmen and women who are both articulate and informative, intertwining amusing anecdotes about their life in sport and how this resonates with their new careers, often in business.

Amusing anecdotes about their life in sport and how this resonates with their new careers, often in business.

This has struck a chord with me as they combine my love of sport and business – something I know is not uncommon. At present I have listened to about 20 of these from Brian O’Driscoll to Peter Beardsley but the one that I have really identified with most was an interview with Paul McGinley (The Irishman Abroad podcast), European captain of the 2014 Ryder Cup winning team. McGinley was a good pro who had to work hard at his game and has some great stories of how he became a professional golfer arising from a Gaelic Football injury. However, there were three fundamental areas he touched upon with great eloquence that I have taken from his career to date:


1. Seeking Advice
Surround yourself with mentors and always look for opportunities to learn more from others. McGinley’s great success in winning the Ryder Cup as captain was meticulously planned but he attributes a great degree of his success to those he has had around him. I have always found in my recruitment career, I have performed best when having somebody to learn from, bounce ideas off and give me perspective… Tell me I’m being an idiot, pat me on the back when it’s going well and so on – all these things really help. There are so many owner managers in recruitment but from what I can see, most forge ahead alone without help from the outside, which, I believe, is an error.Â


2. Careers Trees
McGinley gives a great analogy on careers and likens them to climbing a tree in that you start at the bottom, think you know the way to the top but stepping onto a particular branch can take you in a completely different direction. Often you need to go back to the bottom of the tree and find another way… Very few people climb the (career) tree in a straight line and for me, it really hit home. The point here is to keep learning, every wrong step or broken branch is a learning curve and going back to the start is never easy but once you come out the other end and have taken something from it, then the journey hasn’t been wasted. This makes far more sense to me than the out-dated career ‘ladder’ which assumes people will go straight up – nowadays, people gain experience by working in different areas / markets, by making mistakes and through building experience.


3. Planning in detail
There were some great references in this podcast around the planning for the Ryder Cup a long time in advance of the actual event. And as the it got closer, some of those plans were chrystalised and some were discarded, with McGinley going into huge amounts of detail with some of the smallest factors effecting the teams overall performance. When this strategy was applied as whole, there is no doubt this level of planning gave his team the edge when it came to the big occasion . My belief is that we (I absolutely include myself!) – the owner managers of SME recruitment companies – are very short term in our planning. We often have long term goals and ideals but the pathway to these goals is driven by gut instinct, current market conditions or being in the right place at the right time… we have all had the opportunity at one point or another to diversify into a new market (‘the next big thing’) or hire a superstar that can take you there – often we take that chance but rarely does it end up being a success.

Was I aware of these points before? Yes.

Is there anything new and ground breaking in the points I have made? No.

However, hearing those points applied in a different setting by somebody I admire through the medium of sport, was incredibly powerful and enjoyable at the same time.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has had a similar experience with podcasts and would have any recommendations for me to listen to – my email is david@vertical-advantage.com.

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Is a recruitment business more like a noodle bar than you think?

I’ll come clean. As an economics graduate working in recruitment, I really don’t spend much time mining the ‘intellectual resources’ gathered during my degree. But a great article by Mark Ritson in Marketing Week a few months back got me thinking about elasticity of demand and supply in recruitment.

According to Ritson, a noodle bar in Singapore received a Michelin star and hit a massive boom in demand – way beyond what it could supply. This gave it an unusual opportunity: to increase prices without affecting sales volume.

Did the owner do it?

No.

According to Ritson, he is ‘hopeless at pricing’.

See, inelasticity – where price increase does not lead to a significant drop in demand – is a dream situation for most businesses, and one that may sometimes never happen.

If you’ve earned it, use it!


Inelasticity and recruitment
So consider this: in recruitment, inelasticity is a reflection of client loyalty and agency quality.

The conditions for kindling inelastic demand, mean agencies need to adhere to a meaningful value proposition.

Pricing is too often used as a negotiating tool, but it’s a mistake to define the ‘value’ of your proposition in purely monetary terms.

You owe it to your brand – the promise you make to your customers and clients – to keep the price representative of the high value they get from the product.

So the question to consider, particularly in recruitment, is:

How far does your brand let you increase profitability without damaging customer and client trust?


Stretching your elasticity
There are many factors that affect your ability to be inelastic, however these are the key ones.

Supply of candidates

Good quality, reliable candidates, relatively scarce in a particular specialism make for a more inelastic situation. Their negotiated salaries and recruitment costs can be increased without damaging demand.

Quality of service

Make it easy for clients to get great candidates, and you’ll achieve overwhelmingly positive client experiences. Client loyalty is a strong sign of service inelasticity; you can set your own prices without damaging demand.

Brand representation

Where the client brand is not properly understood, the right hire can be hard to find. The better the understanding of that brand, the less likely high prices will affect demand. In addition, all the effort you put into marketing your great recruiter brand must be reflected the price you charge.


What can we learn from this?
Rapid competition at a micro level, and uncertain political events at the macro, mean in 2017, recruitment is going to hit that price-value conversation with employers more often.

The problem is, negotiation to a lower rate really leaves three choices for recruitment agencies:

  1. Suck it up and carry on.
  2. Walk away and risk future work with that client.
  3. Adjust your service proposition to match the fee you are being asked to charge. For example, let your clients know that they will be serviced by the more junior members of staff. Just like in a hair salon!

None of these options will be good for your brand you have spent so much time and money building. If you’re a specialist, providing candidates others can’t, offering a level of service unmatched by rivals, a pricing proposition that undermines this will damage your credibility and your inelasticity.

Walking away from business never sits well, but your company’s values can sometimes be more important than potential business. As a recruitment agency, we’re not afraid to walk away from clients and PSLs when the terms don’t reflect the value we bring to a company’s hiring solutions.

What are your thoughts on pricing in recruitment?

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