Chasing the Dream
From fresh graduates and a server under a desk to South Africa’s most widely used recruitment software
This week’s blog shares the story behind Placement Partner.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years, you’ll know that Placement Partner is the most widely used recruitment software in this country – or ATS, RMS or recruitment CRM; call it what you will.
Highlights include getting schooled at the university of business, chancing upon a product in a receptive market with sweet timing, scrambling to grow in tune with demand, and still looking for that elusive four-hour work week.
The four-hour dream
Once upon a time, there were some fresh graduates trying to make a living in any way that didn’t involve answering to a boss. The thinking was that working for ourselves would involve a lot less work, random days off, and the freedom to do whatever excited us during the actual working part.
We had a suitable inspirational book: Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, detailing how it would all be done.
Needless to say, while chasing the dream, we ended up working 24/7/365.
As any business owner knows, there is a buzz in your brain that never really goes away. It just becomes less audible – or more – depending on your stress levels. Maybe you simply get used to it.
The university of business
Placement Partner started life as CV Warehouse, which was just one of many, many projects. There was a time when ‘no’ was not in our vocabulary. Whether it was a new machine that needed a control system or software for managing stock, our answer was always, ‘Yes, we can’ – followed by furious scrabbling to gain the requisite knowledge to back up our claim.
School fees were paid in the hardest currency: time. Sometimes, they were paid in cash too.
Once, we thought we had struck gold. Our newest clients – the sole importers of an extremely in-demand line of IT equipment (think of a fruit) – drove around the posh part of town in Ferraris, and they really liked the software we delivered. The only thing about doing business with them that sucked was that they never paid our invoices. Not one cent. Ever. We’re still waiting. What a lesson.
Still, the thought of giving up was nauseating, so we persisted with all manner of diverse projects for diverse clients, getting schooled until one day a perfect storm of good fortune happened to us.
The perfect storm
- A simple recruitment database system we had developed was liked by not just one client, but every other client we showed it to.
- It turned out there were quite a few of these companies helping others to recruit staff. Strange, that.
- The internet arrived like wildfire.
- Our software service could be delivered via the internet to recruitment companies all over the country.
Realising we were onto a good thing, we decided that our main word, ‘yes’, would henceforth be replaced by ‘no’. We would focus all our efforts, laser-like, on this one product.
Yes, we had a product. And she was called Placement Partner.
Growing pains
There followed a period of frantic growth and all the problems that came with it. There were a few times when the background buzz of business felt more like a helicopter hovering inside our heads.
Instead of keeping two or three clients happy at a time, we now had dozens to keep happy simultaneously. They wouldn’t necessarily tell us if they were unhappy; they would simply sign off. One thing that understandably made clients extremely disgruntled was when their system was offline. Considering our server was literally a PC under a desk in the office, the risk and stress were ever-present.
Every step up in infrastructure and staffing felt like a massive investment. The whole business had a fleeting quality to it, as if it could go up in smoke at any moment if we didn’t do the right thing at the right time.
We needed proper server infrastructure. We needed support staff who could stay calm under pressure while getting their ears burned off as we fixed problems or added features clients demanded. We needed former recruitment consultants to train clients on the myriad features of the ever-growing system. We needed developers to add new features and maintain existing ones. And we needed people to administer the processes and glue the team together.
More than twenty years later
We thought that perhaps, in a few months or years, it would all stabilise and we’d be able to kick back and relax.
More than twenty years later, we can say that – despite the best infrastructure money can buy, a team that only time can cultivate, the best available technology, and amazing longstanding clients, each with an incredible story of building their own standout businesses – kicking back and relaxing still hasn’t happened.
But we’ve had one hell of a ride so far. We’ve come to know the industry inside out, lived through many up-and-down cycles, technological revolutions, industry upsets, and political and global upheavals. We’ve made many mistakes and had plenty of luck too.
Focusing on one thing in one market for so long also allowed us to become really good at that one thing and to know our market intimately. These days, there’s a little less scrambling around and a lot more forward thinking – which means less stress and much more fun.
Best of all, we’ve made many, many friends over the years. We look forward to making many more!
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