Building our own solutions

I’ve never been a fan of simply shelling out funds to a third party provider to solve a problem for me with their off-the-shelf solution. I like to get to the heart of the problem and build my own solutions.

It’s something we’ve always done at Sterning and it’s meant the birth of some pretty damn cool applications. The first that comes to mind is Resumo. I created Resumo after noticing a number of flaws in the candidate representation process that could be tackled with a bit of tech.

A few months later we were in Beta. Resumo’s totally changed the way our recruiters are representing candidates. They’re able to work more in tune with their clients and save time – it’s a huge win for everyone.

From iOS apps to Chrome extensions and loads of other tools, we’ve built these to help us work smarter and many of them we’ve made available to others in the industry. One of our Chrome extensions has almost hit 2,000 weekly users, entirely organically.

To me this speaks volumes for the power of problem solving in business. Solve people’s problems well enough and your solution will market itself.

I don’t build these tools to make money, I build them first and foremost for those within Sterning. Sterning’s model was created from the ground up to be more cost effective than starting up your own. Knowing we’re winning on this front is great, but it’s not enough for me.

I don’t want Sterning to just be an end-to-end solution for recruiters, I want it to be an end-to-end solution for recruiters that is jam packed with so many unique tools, and so much additional value, it’s unrivalled. And that’s exactly why I’ll be pulling a number of our tools from distribution and making them only available to those within the group.

Not great news for the thousands of recruiters using our tech on a daily basis but then again, half of them probably don’t even know it’s ours.

Ever built any cool tech solutions? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.