Economic adversity can bring out the best in a company, with its leadership team rising to the challenge
This certainly appears true of national recruitment group Pin Point, which has its UK head office located in Gateshead. During the last six months the company has relocated its HQ, appointed a new MD, restructured its sales team, taken the full impact of Covid-19 on the chin and accelerated its investment in digitising many of its processes and systems.
“During times of crisis companies bend or reshape and diversify. In the last financial recession, we set up a healthcare division which has become a major driver in the growth of the business,” said Stephen Hall, who recently returned to Pin Point as MD after leaving several years ago.
“We are weathering the current storm well. Like all business we have taken some financial strain through lockdown as our recruitment clients made changes to working practices and numbers. Like most UK businesses we utilised the furlough scheme for a small number of staff, and made redundancies in certain areas, mainly in back office functions.
“The cuts have been made in areas which will not affect our front-line service or customer experience. We have definitely weathered the eye of the storm and are driving through this crisis by winning new business and growing existing relationships, ensuring we come back stronger and more effective” he said.
Pin Point offers a range of recruitment services to a broad spread of industry sectors from industrial and commercial to technical and healthcare. The company provides a national service from six regional operations including offices in Birmingham, Bristol, Middlesbrough Stoke and Aberdeen. A key part of the drive to return the business back to growth and help deliver a new strategic vision is a digital transformation programme. In the last 12 months, the company realised it needed to make better use of technology to provide added value to clients while better supporting an expanding business network.
Pin Point’s director of IT Terry Carney originally thought an off-the-shelf software solution for several processes that included HR, wages and client engagement would be ideal. He was unable to find anything suitable and took on the challenge of leading the development of their own solution.
Newcastle-based digital products studio NE6 was appointed months before the coronavirus outbreak to create a bespoke solution and one that could scale and develop with Pin Point.
Steven Gibbons, director at NE6, said: “We got to work and after a few months developed Pin Point’s own pay slip portal, built in React JS. The client quickly saw some immediate business benefits, including time and money savings. A typical data input process that originally took around 8 minutes can now be done within a minute.”
NE6 started the process of automating the onboarding of candidates for employment. Registration forms – some of which could be 40 pages long – were moved online and streamlined. MD Stephen Hall explained: “We were already impressed by NE6 and their investment in the task. When the coronavirus outbreak hit, we needed to accelerate things. The relationship between Pin Point and NE6 really took off. They were both responsive and proactive. They rose to a challenge and took time and trouble to understand our needs in a difficult period. They have been outstanding, and we look forward to developing our plans with them.
“The new levels of automation have made the process of remote working more effective and streamlined our processes for the future.”
Steven Gibbons, of NE6, added: “Ultimately, we’re providing Pin Point with a highly bespoke digital solution that wraps around the needs of the business. We’re releasing time for consultants to develop more time for customer relationships and business development while making it easier for candidates to engage and onboard with Pin Point.” In the coming year Pin Point aims to develop and expand the number of consultants in its national offices, expanding its offer into new sectors such as IT and tech while establishing a national business development team, to further develop national accounts.
Digital transformation – designed and driven by NE6 – is behind the strategic vision for growth for Pin Point.
For more details about digital transformation, visit www.ne6.studio