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:

• Supported recruitment of several key individuals across the team (EA, Data and CTO roles)
• Developed proposals for new ways of working and new approaches to drive forward the CVL and RL solutions.
• Delivered a Technical Due Diligence process and supporting criteria which the team can use in future.

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.

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.

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.

“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

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.”

Lee Biggins, Founder and CEO of CV-Library and Resume-Library

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!

Rather than simply define and build the Service Requests on behalf of the IT team, the project team invested the time to train the IT team to allow them to build their own within the system. The full credit for proposing this approach goes to the BHT Team; it was their suggestion, Kerv Consult and Unifii agilely accommodated the approach. Put into practice; instead of 15 key requests that the project was scoped to deliver, there were 85 built, tested and released, including those from the BHT IT team. The approach had the added benefit of ensuring that future service request items could be added at speed without the need for a project to update the system as the knowledge had been successfully transferred into the Trust.

ServiceNow Director of Transformation, Graham Curran, said: “The project team’s focus on collaboration and communication with users really helped make this such a successful implementation and showed the power of strong business change disciplines” which was an excellent endorsement of the project and the team.

“A great example of team work and agile delivery, this was a fantastic achievement in support of the Trust’s COVID response and has made a big difference in our ability to manage urgent requests from our colleagues across the Trust.”

Phillip Neal, Chief Technology Officer, Bucks Healthcare NHS Trust

Building on the success of this project, BHT have requested that Kerv Consult and Unifii continue to support the Trust to improve their IT service by delivering against the transformation roadmap.

We have discussed a series of agile projects to implement further ITSM capabilities, wider business capabilities and ways of working as we continue to deliver against the longer-term transformation roadmap for the service.

BHT has clear plans to be the best IT team across the NHS and has already demonstrated significant progress towards that goal. Kerv Consult is genuinely excited to continue to be part of the team which will make that a reality.

Rather than simply define and build the Service Requests on behalf of the IT team, the project team invested the time to train the IT team to allow them to build their own within the system. The full credit for proposing this approach goes to the BHT Team; it was their suggestion, Kerv Consult and Unifii agilely accommodated the approach. Put into practice; instead of 15 key requests that the project was scoped to deliver, there were 85 built, tested and released, including those from the BHT IT team. The approach had the added benefit of ensuring that future service request items could be added at speed without the need for a project to update the system as the knowledge had been successfully transferred into the Trust.

ServiceNow Director of Transformation, Graham Curran, said: “The project team’s focus on collaboration and communication with users really helped make this such a successful implementation and showed the power of strong business change disciplines” which was an excellent endorsement of the project and the team.

“A great example of team work and agile delivery, this was a fantastic achievement in support of the Trust’s COVID response and has made a big difference in our ability to manage urgent requests from our colleagues across the Trust.”

Phillip Neal, Chief Technology Officer, Bucks Healthcare NHS Trust

We have been extremely fortunate to work with a team as strong and forward-thinking as Lightspeed, and we look forward to continuing our successful relationship into 2022 and beyond.

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!