Rayner Personnel

GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

Rayner Personnel have grown from strength to strength since they were established by MD Joshua Rayner in 2013. Now with 6 offices throughout London and the South of England, Rayner Personnel is the market leader for the property sector, serving many of the industry’s leading brands Nationwide.

It was a journey that started like a lot of successful recruiters with Joshua working within the industry he now services. Josh tells Steve Smith of Voyager Software more about his and Rayner Personnel’s’ journey.

CAN YOU TELL US HOW RAYNER PERSONNEL WAS BORN?

Working in an estate agency gave me valuable insight into the day-to-day workings of a branch and I soon recognised the need for a different type of recruitment, which focused on long term goals rather than quick fixes.

I carried out a lot of research and identified several key missing services and specific client needs which led me to establish Rayner Personnel. I wanted the business to help revolutionise and professionalise the industry and to truly focus on people rather than jobs.

Since starting in Recruitment, we’ve placed over 3,000 property professionals from Juniors/Graduates to CEOs, and I’m proud of how the company has built a reputation as one of the leading players in property recruitment for higher grade employees.

TELL US MORE ABOUT HOW YOU WORK WITH YOUR CLIENTS?

We help companies attract talent at all levels from school leavers to experienced hires and board members. We offer both contingency recruitment and executive search services including full consultancy, market mapping, retention strategies, succession planning and salary benchmarking.

We have a dedicated board with over 300 years combined property expertise, so we’re uniquely positioned to help develop and deliver a people strategy that make our clients the employers of choice within the property space.

Besides the technology that’s now available, recruitment in our opinion hasn’t evolved over the last decade and sending a good old CV by email is still the way we seem to justify our fees.

SO HOW HAS TECHNOLOGY FACILITATED YOUR GROWTH?

I want Rayner Personnel to be DIFFERENT, so in January 2017 I decided to take the plunge on a 3-year project to become the most recognized recruiter of choice. The first step was to upgrade our antiquated CRM system ahead of the GDPR regulations, ensuring we were compliant and our data was stored securely in the cloud. We also needed a system that would assist our growth strategy and provide the tools we need to stay ahead of our competition.

After considering all the main players in recruitment software, Voyager was the company of choice. The consultancy, knowledge, implementation and the system itself – Voyager Infinity was head and shoulders above the competition.

The level of support and advice yourself and Sharon Lane provided from onboarding, to the new projects we’re looking at now, has been second to none. Also, the training that Mike Jones delivered on Infinity and specifically GDPR was first class. It’s helped cement the success of our partnership with you, something we are looking forward to building upon further.

Having a software partner who is ‘on your side’ and able to adapt to change is vital. We chose Voyager because you didn’t put us in a straitjacket, Voyager Infinity was adapted for our specific needs and we can tweak it wherever we see fit.

HOW SPECIFICALLY HAS INFINITY HELPED YOU WITH YOUR 3-YEAR PLAN?

Infinity helped bring our technology into the 21st Century by giving us a platform to consolidate our data, systems and processes. The GDPR tools and training has also been very effective in a very short space of time.

HOW ARE YOU FINDING THE FREE GDPR TOOLS WITHIN INFINITY?

The GDPR workflow within Infinity has made our lives so much easier, the straight forward ‘shield icons’ and consent request process has made what could have been a very time consuming and costly transition, pain free, and allowed the team to remain focused on what they do best.

BESIDES VOYAGER INFINITY, WHAT OTHER TECHNOLOGY HAVE YOU IMPLEMENTED?

After we had Voyager in place the next step was for me to add the ‘Fairy Dust’.

I subsequently invested in a process platform we call R360. This allows us to come away from contingency recruitment (only as good as your last deal) and provide key clients with a retained solution. This not only assists our cashflow but also allows us to spend time with our clients to give them a ‘Rolls Royce’ service and ultimately these three USP’s:

• Reduction of management downtime

• Increased new employee retention

• Reduction of overall cost to hire

The candidates also benefit from R360 by giving them:

• More visibility and involvement in the screening process

• Confidence that the vacancy is genuine

• Increased support at the interview stage 

All this aides us to become a recruitment ‘Partner’ and an extension of our clients brand, rather than a third-party recruiter tarred with the same brush of ‘making one call and charging a huge recruitment fee’.

We are now, with the assistance of Voyager, looking to introduce video automation to give the candidate and client a 21st century experience. Think Uber!

We want to alert our clients when the candidate is on their way for an interview. We want to give both our candidate and clients interview tips and advice. We also want our candidates and clients to ‘rate’ their experience, providing them more control of the process.

SO, YOU’VE GOT YOUR TECHNOLOGY SORTED, WHAT’S NEXT IN THE PIPELINE?

We are currently touring the country with The Guild of Property Professionals visiting some 900 estate agency owners across the whole of the UK. The aim is to become the recruitment partner of choice with our extensive experience and use of technology.

We’ve also decided to roll out Rayner Financial as stage one of our growth strategy. This will be followed by Rec2-Rec and then Construction. We decided to run with Finance initially as there was lots of cross over with our current property business and we’re confident that with the support of our business partners we can replicate the success we’ve achieved thus far.