Then and now

So, as we sat yesterday eagerly looking forward to posting reams and reams of information about what's happening within the group and our industries on our brand new blog, we almost stumbled into a mental, momentary pause. It seems we have a lot to say but have hit writers block on just where to begin. Anyway, on a date, a palindrome no less (11.11.11) we got thinking about things that go backwards and things that go forwards. Unlike todays date, technology and its impact on the world of recruitment has just gone further and further forward and as it stands, shows no sign of halting or looking back. So it seems rather apt that we start our opening blog by going back to where it all began, to where we tentatively entered the digital age and take a little look at where we are now and look at how far we've come. One thing we do well as a company is retain the very best experienced recruiters; no one knows the business the same as time-served "been-in-the-industry-longer-than-you've-been-eating-solids" Recruitment Consultants. Many of our Managers were here when [REC] was a button you pressed on your VHS recorder, not the governing body for our industry as we know it today. Many of our Consultants newer to the industry are awestruck by how we once managed. We often take for granted how difficult it was to establish ourselves as a major national recruitment group with such (comparatively) basic technology. Back when we first launched duttoninternational.com in the late 1990's, suggesting that you were about to "tweet" or "multi job-board post" your latest vacancy would have perhaps resulted in you being sectioned but in the present day our vacancies are reacted to in a split second with the help of the latest technology. The time was once when, in order to fill a booking from a Client we had to wait until potential candidates were at home to contact them as the advent of mobile phones was not yet upon us. Our branches used to be full of rows of filing cabinets filled with the paper CV's of our thousands of contract personnel and advertising a job sometimes meant writing out a card to put on the board in the job centre.

A perfect barometer of progress has always been our website. In the 1990's we were one of the first recruiters on the "World Wide Web" and our offices were provided with an address each for receiving "Electronic Mail". Our website played music as you clicked through basic pages and a tiny animated globe followed your mouse around the screen. In 2001 we even began to use the website to advertise our vacancies. Today our website is updated hourly instead of monthly and one of the mainstays of our site is the advertising of vacancies, one of the early initiatives which was trialled and became popular.