By Amy @BubbleJobs
Choosing a digital recruitment agency to partner with is never an easy process, with lots of agencies to choose from and endless factors to consider before you select an agency that’s right for your business.
Earlier this month, I had a chat with Deepak Saluja, Director of Success Digital – Recruitment Specialist – about what makes Success Digital stand out from the crowd in the ultra-competitive digital recruitment industry. (You can find a handful of Success Digital’s jobs on Bubble Jobs here).
Q: Tell us about how Success Digital started…
DS: Success Digital started about three and a half to four years ago and it was all on the back of evolving our business model as a retail recruiter into the eCommerce space. We realised that the recession changed a lot in terms of our clients within the retail sector – so we knew that we needed to find a niche within the market where they needed an agency and we could supply talent for them to resource directly. We looked into what would be the next big thing for our retail clients and it was going to be online shopping so we then decided to set up Success Digital to cater for that market.
Success Digital is actually a brand within Success Appointments – and we felt like we needed to create a new brand because we didn’t want to limit our growth to just retail. Digital is cross-sector and we felt that if we positioned ourselves as Success Digital it would give us the ammunition to move into different sectors; be it travel and hospitality, agency-side or the technology side.
What makes Success Digital different?
DS: We’ve worked with a lot of retail clients previously, be it buying and merchandising, technical, design or retail operations – so we know the DNA and the culture fit of our clients. As a result; it’s been easier to place the right digital professionals within these organisations because we already know the culture fit.
Also, each consultant within Success Digital has their own specialism – and they are experts within their own verticals. This means each consultant is best-in-class in each vertical which means that they have their own network – so when we’re given a search assignment for a role, we don’t really need to advertise too much or use LinkedIn because we can just approach our network immediately and see if we can source candidates that way.
We also invest a lot of resources into positioning ourselves as leading digital recruiters. In the past we’ve sponsored awards, like the eTail awards, and networking events and we take time out to attend forums to keep at the forefront of what’s going on in digital.
We don’t want to stand on the sidelines of digital. We try to position ourselves in an effective way in the right places – and we also have round the table discussions with key individuals within high profile eCommerce businesses like Amazon and eBay.
This means we can explain to our clients and to our candidates what’s happening within the digital space – and it means that we have expert knowledge to consult on behalf of our clients and guide them through the talent process.
The other USPs come back down to the fact that we’re not after the short-term buck – we’re after long-term relationships. As far as Success Appointments is concerned, we’ve got relationships with some high profile brands which go back 25 years which shows our retention rates are high.
What kind of clients do you recruit for?
DS: 80% of our clients sit within the retail space, with brands ranging from pure-play businesses such as boohoo.com, missguided.com, and Prettylittlething.com to eBay and Amazon. We also deal with multi-channel businesses such as Marks & Spencer, Burberry, Debenhams, Ted Baker and the Arcadia group.
The other 20% of our clients is made up of a combination of agencies and direct clients. On the agency-side we deal with brands like Steak, Enterprise and 4Ps – and then on the client-side, we deal with a lot of media and publishing houses. And we’ve also dipped our toes in the telecoms industry, with clients such as HTC.
This year, we’re seeing a big growth in mobile and we’ve actually just taken on the leading mobile agency SoMo Global. We’re one of three agencies who provide recruitment services to them.
Do you only recruit for clients in London?
DS: There’s no doubt that London is very much the showcase of digital talent for UK and Europe – it’s very much the melting pot. But what we’ve found is that the North is becoming the digital hub too – and in that we’re fortunate in that we’ve got a number of offices – one in Holborn in London which is well positioned for Shoreditch – the home of a lot of creative agencies – and we’ve also got an office in Central Manchester which is well positioned for our major brand clients such as boohoo.com, missguided.com and Shop Direct Group.
80% of our recruitment still sits with London and the South East, with 20% in the North – mainly Manchester and Liverpool.
What kind of roles do you recruit for?
DS: We cover everything from creative and technical to analytics and trading to marketing and PR – and work from the top down. We recruit for director-level roles and we do a few executive searches at that level – but most of our recruitment is between middle to senior management level. This is our core market and equates to about 70% of the roles we recruit for, with salaries tending to range between £30,000 and £60,000.
In terms of niches, digital marketing is massive for us and we’ve seen a big growth in this sector – and the specialist functions within that – Email, eCRM, SEO, Paid Search, Affiliates, Display and Social. We’re now seeing that our clients want candidates who are specialists within these areas.
I think in the next 12 months we’ll see a growth in recruitment in more technical areas of digital.
What would you say the most challenging roles that you’re recruiting for at the moment?
DS: Mobile is definitely one of the most challenging but exciting areas to recruit for right now. In addition, over the last 6-12 months, two other key areas within digital have been extremely challenging but exciting – and one of those is Analytics. The days are gone where clients will simply take on staff to fulfil their requirements to grow online – now data is behind every decision. I think previously our clients would be relying on digital agencies that would bring that expertise and share that data with them – but now they’ve realised that that data is here to stay and it’s important to get it right which is why they’re now bringing analytics in-house and adding that to their headcount.
The challenges that come with that are that the candidates that come from agencies have been paid very well and they’re used to dealing with a portfolio of clients – so for them to come in-house and take a slightly different view and perhaps not get as competitive pay as they might get with an agency has been the challenge – but you can overcome that by positioning the role as a career move and highlighting that they get to deal with the end-to-end lifecycle of a project and can potentially build a team around them.
The other one is actually User Experience. The biggest areas of creative recruitment for us have been UX designers, architects and managers – and that’s all about candidates who have the skills to put wireframes together and can create a seamless user journey across multiple touch points. User Experience has definitely been a massive growth function – and again, it has similar challenges to analytics in terms of persuading candidates to leave agencies to move in-house.
As we mentioned at the start of this blog, there are lots of factors to consider when it comes to choosing the right digital recruitment agency for you – and one of the most important priorities has to be finding an agency that’s highly knowledgeable about the industry you operate in. In this case, when it comes to retail, eCommerce and digital, it looks like Success Digital definitely fits the bill.
Visit Success Digital’s website or call them on 020 7759 7337 to find out how they could help you with your digital recruitment.
The post Digital Recruiter Spotlight: Success Digital appeared first on Bubble Jobs Blog | Bubble Jobs.