Talking to a customer earlier this week, they were telling me how one of their consultants had recently posted a vacancy up to the job boards for a position that would usually attract 30-40 applicants, only to come in on after the weekend to find just under 700 (yup that's two zeros) waiting there for her!
That shows just how much this has changed from a candidate driven market to one (in some sectors at least) where vacancies are gold and just managing the candidate applications are the challenge...
Of course one of the unique benefits of evolve is the candidate CV pool technology and the fact that you don't have to create a candidate record in order to process the CV (you simply just drop it onto the index folder and whether its a DOC, PDF, RTF, TXT or HTML file its almost instantly converted and indexed onto the database for all your recruiter to access).. Now that I think about it, I should really do a piece on that…
But back to the theme though… talking about this big upswing in candidate numbers brought up another subject; the client asked me about our system and whether we were going to be able to cope with an ongoing 40% increase in volume.. for them in particular, we currently index around 400,000 CVs (we have around 10 million CVs in total across all of our clients).. and they were predicting that by the year end, this could be as high as 750K… did we have the storage and search capacity for this they wondered…?
The answer of course was yes… when we originally planned evolve back in 2000, the architecture was designed to allow both scale-out and scale-up, so whether just that client, or ever client increased in the number of candidates, we’ll be able to search them just as efficiently.. Today we have over 70 quad-core blade’s running the evolve platform in one huge cluster…..we could easily scale up to 150, 200 or 500 if that was what was required… that's the great thing about multitenant systems!!
A great system architecture is only half the story though... we spent over £250,000 last year upgrading our storage system to include a new enterprise-class NetApp SAN (16TB of super-high-availability, hi-performance fibrechannel disk arrays).. so as far as space (and disk IO performance) goes, that’s a check too :-)
The thing is though that we are able to spend that money because we are lucky to be established and stable enough to have that sort of cash to hand and serious enough about SaaS delivery to know that you need to invest at this sort of level in order to guarantee your (read..your customer’s) future growth and stability..
In these more challenging times though, there are lots of providers who haven’t made those sorts of decisions.. having put things off, or ‘fudging’ a technology solution to try to get by (you can buy a few TB of storage for a few £10s of thousands if all you need is the space.. don’t expect it to be reliable, secure, fast or scalable though!)….we know this is going on because we keep winning new clients from them who are fed up with performance, reliability or scalability problems they experience..
In particular I guess, you gotta ask yourself how some of the entry-level guys who offer ‘free’ systems users are really able to deliver it…given that to do the job properly means that those users have a real-world cost to support (even just in infrastructure) that is not measured in pennies or cents of you do it properly…
....the answer is of course that they don’t… rather they get by using low-end kit (servers no better than you could have running in the corner of your office), renting equipment and space from low cost hosting companies (whereas we are an ISP in our own right and don’t rely on any 1 single provider for any aspect of our network or datacenters) and cramming as many customers onto each single server (no bespoke computing clusters here) as they can before renting another…
So I guess that really what I’m saying is that like so many things in life, you get what you pay for.. you just need to make sure that when the times get tough as they are now, the provider you use has a plan and the resources to support the changing needs and growth of your business, backed with the investment to make it happen…. after all, the stuff behind the scenes you probably never get to see in practice.. it’s easy for them to cut costs on their delivery platform for a short term gain, that you won’t get to know about until its too late!