On the last day of September our recruitment CRM provider terminated our agreement with immediate effect. No wind-down period, no export window, just a closed door. Our candidate records, our open positions, our jobs board and every link we had published to it went dark on the same afternoon.
If you had asked us a month earlier what our single greatest operational dependency was, we would have named that system. We had integrated our procurement automation with it, our partner submissions flowed through it, and the careers links in every advert pointed at it. Losing it should have stopped the business for weeks.
What we did instead
We had two advantages. The first was that we are a company that builds. The second was that we had, over the previous year, documented our own processes so thoroughly that we knew exactly what a replacement had to do. So we built one.
- Within two days we had a working system of record for candidates, companies, positions and applications, built to the shape our own processes already expected.
- Within a week the public jobs board was live again at axiomdata.com.au/careers, on our own domain this time, with every open role and a no-account application form.
- By day twelve every process that had depended on the old vendor was running again on our own system, end to end.
What we learned, again
Own your system of record. A vendor can be a fine way to start, but if your business cannot function without them, you have handed them a veto over your existence. We will not do that again.
Own your process, not just your data. The reason we could replace the CRM quickly is that the way we work was ours, written down and understood, rather than something the vendor's product defined for us. The CRM was just storage. When the process is yours, the storage is swappable.
Small teams that build are fast. There was no procurement, no vendor evaluation, no change board. There was a problem on Tuesday and a working system on Thursday. That speed is the whole argument for practitioner-led firms, and we have never had a better demonstration of it.
Also this week: our policies, in public
Separately, we have published our full set of workplace policies, from our code of conduct and conflict-of-interest register to our work health and safety system and pay practices, at axiomdata.com.au/employee-resources. We wrote them because a client asked, and we published them because we think a labour-hire firm that places people inside government should be willing to show, in public, how it treats them. Read them, and tell us if we have missed something.