One of the country’s first employment websites, CV-Library (CVL) is an award-winning job board that helps companies of all sizes and industries to hire faster, for less.
They offer a wealth of recruitment products, including a database of 17 million CVs and a range of job posting options allowing employers and agencies to find permanent, graduate, contract, and freelance candidates through their site.
CVL’s board has a strong desire to push job boards and online recruitment forward. To accomplish this, they have identified a roadmap for new capabilities that they wish to offer to candidates, recruiters, and employers.
Support CV-Library to change ways of working, improve their approach to technology selection and perform technical due diligence ahead of a strategic acquisition.
They are looking for:
CV Library acquired Brilliant Jobs and have a clear plan to integrate the Brilliant Jobs functionality into their CV Library and Resume Library offerings.
The leadership team now follow a clear process for selecting the right technology to underpin their business vision.
A new CTO has been selected and is soon to start with a clear handover to expedite onboarding.
Kerv Consult’s work with CV-Library:
and supporting criteria for future use
of several key team members
for new ways or working
CV Library can offer new features to its customers, enhancing their already market leading offerings.
Key technology decisions are now made using the new approach with clear justifications and strong business cases.
The Added Value (delivered above scope)
Their achievements include:
The company was founded in 2000 by Lee Biggins and Brian Wakem and within 10 years was one of the Top 10 UK websites.
Since then, Lee has steered the company to develop a range of targeted job sites and has expanded into the US with Resume-Library.
CV-Library (CVL) is also a company headquartered locally to Kerv Consult. Given this, Kerv Consult was invited by CVL’s Chief Executive Officer, Lee Biggins, to support them with IT leadership consultancy as they assessed and ultimately acquired another company.
CVL also asked us to deliver a consultancy style engagement focussed on the following:
We mobilised quickly and integrated well with the CVL management team, though specifically with Lee Biggins (CEO), Matthew Moore (MD) and Nolan Vernon (Operations Director).
We deployed Graeme Buntin as our lead consultant for this engagement and Dan Wright, Kerv Consult’s owner, also worked closely with the team to ensure we hit the ground running.
Whilst the original discussion was around a consultative approach, it became clear that the CVL team and culture is very delivery focussed and the organisational culture is geared towards ‘getting things done’.
This matches closely with the Kerv Consult culture and so we switched from simply making recommendations to acting as part of the team to help drive the outcomes of those recommendations. This shift in focus allowed the combined team to focus on the most critical activities at any given point and led to trust being developed quite quickly between the two organisations.
We originally started by meeting with the stakeholders across CVL and came to understand both some of the capabilities and some challenges across the organisation.
We quickly learned that CVL has some incredibly talented people and some strong leaders. However, given how feature reach their platform is, they also have very complex technology which underpins the business.
This meant that the success of the projects which we were assessing would be dependent upon a key enabler, a new approach to integration of new technologies and features into the core solution. The CVL leadership team quickly embraced this observation and have focussed on the integration approach to make future delivery simpler.
We also quickly outlined a new Technology Vendor Process for the business. We then collaborated with CVL to develop this into a repeatable technology selection process, supported by a play book, templates and guidance. The process we delivered was fully tailorable to the complexity of the requirement but included approaches for: Requirement gathering, Business sponsorship, Solution identification, Vendor selection, Business Case and RFI/RFP engagement with suppliers.
The key elements of technology process were also able to be applied to the two key projects that we looked at;
Automated Marketing Services project was early in its lifecycle and so the team identified a business sponsor and worked through requirements, solution option, vendor down select and a business case. This approach took several weeks but allowed the CVL leadership team to consider the through life value and cost of each of the proposed options and so informed the right decision for the company.
The Brilliant Jobs activity was already in flight when we mobilised to join the CVL team. The wider commercial discussions around the potential acquisition had been ongoing, but we were able to support a technical due diligence to ensure that the solution offered by Brilliant Jobs did contain the features on the CVL roadmap. Additionally, this work quickly evolved into integration planning to allow the Brilliant Jobs solution to be implemented into the CVL platform.
We also delivered the recommendations report that was originally requested, and positively, as per CVL culture, the team had already been actioning the recommendations as part of continuous improvement as the ink as drying on the document.
Given that we quickly built trust and were able to act as one team, we could provide support above the core scope in other areas such as:
Recruitment of other IT leaders and team members into CVL. We supported interviews acting as one of the CVL team and in collaboration we were able to find great candidates to fill roles as Enterprise Architect, Head of Data, and a permanent Chief Technology Officer amongst others.
We were able to provide recommendations around the team structure which informed the organisational planning for the IT roles in the company.
We delivered a technical due diligence approach which covered over 200 assessment criteria to determine how mature some software or a platform / solution is. This helps to determine the level of risk around adopting it and is vital given the need for all aspects of the CVL platform to work in unison to provide great service to candidates, employers, and recruiters.
We mobilised an architecture mapping across the organisation which was later driven forward by the EA who was hired.
We brought in Kerv Consult initially to help us tackle a finite array of challenges, and that has quicklyexpanded across several other focal points within primarily our technology and product areas of the Business, as we realised and experienced their value as a trusted partner.
What I have enjoyed and appreciated most during our journey so far with Kerv Consult, is besides their obvious and impressive repertoire of knowledge, expertise, and experience (all of which we have drawn upon) it’s actually their authentic, grounded, and agile approach no matter the challenge, ambiguity or complexity of the scenario in play, and this is what sets them apart, proving invaluable in helping us to navigate and progress often tough conversations into actions and decisions.” – Nolan Vernon, Operations Director
The key outcome that CVL achieved was that they decided and then went on to acquire Brilliant Jobs. This was the largest acquisition that CVL had ever undertaken and was strategically important for the company.
The CVL leadership team were focused and hugely competent so did a great job with the commercial element of the acquisition, but it was great to know that the decision was underpinned by the technical due diligence and input that we were able to provide.
We have now planned the integration and technical elements of the post-acquisition project and continue to work with the CVL development teams to deliver against this.
CVL is also now in a strong position when assessing new software, services, and technology to be used by the business. CVL built their entire platform themselves and have strong track record when building services and capabilities. However, given the focus on building capability internally, the team had less experience with the ‘buy’ aspects of the ‘make vs buy’ selection so wanted to standardise on a best practice approach. The work that we did allows the leadership team to be confident that a robust process has been followed when procuring new services and technology.
This engagement was highly successful for both CVL and Kerv Consult. In fact, we were commissioned to provide a second stage of activity beyond the conclusion of our initial engagement.
I initially trialled Kerv Consult for a small digital engagement given they were a local consultancy that could address a specific challenge that we had at the time. We have since grown to trust the team and have agreed several further engagements, continuing to collaborate with them up to today. They have been willing to work and flex with our business and they do truly behave as an extension of our team. Kerv Consult has helped us in key areas, including our recent Brilliant Jobs acquisition and I would happily recommend them.
Our mission is ‘to become the trusted partner for our customers’ and this is something that we feel that we have made great steps towards accomplishing this with CVL.
We quickly built trust in both directions, and we have very much enjoyed working with such a passionate team.
It is nice to work with a local company which has grown into such a market leader and get to work with such a strong team. I am delighted that we have been able to add value to CV Library and I also enjoy that we at Kerv Consult have been able to learn a lot from the team at CVL during our time working together.
We have been able to offer CVL flexibility, with us tailoring the amount of consultancy offered to the requirements at each stage as well as quickly focus onto new requests outside of core scope where it adds value for CVL.
Likewise, CVL have been accommodating with our team delivering this as a remote engagement and have always worked to keep us informed as to any changes in their requirements as we have worked together.
Ultimately both organisations have been working towards one common goal which has contributed to the success. We continue to support CV Library with IT Leadership consultancy and likely will until their new CTO is fully onboarded, however we are proud of the part that we played in their successful acquisition of Brilliant Jobs.
To see how we can help your Transformation, or to learn how you can benefit from our approach to ensure your projects are successful get in touch!
In a continued effort to ensure we offer our customers the very best in knowledge and skills, Kerv has acquired Worth Digital.
