OME Stuff, Market, New Business

Tried to come up with a snappier blog heading....failed

had a few undeserved days off last week but it has given me the opportunity to reflect on the market and its possible ramifications over rest of 2008 (that's long term enough for me). Our new business pipeline is probably the healthiest it has ever been - with wins and projects from significant UK businesses such as www.addleshawgoddard.com and www.fitnessfirst.co.uk - which i think shows that any downturn is absolutely definitely going to drive recruiters online at an accelerated rate (hardly award winning analysis i know). The biggest driver for new business enquiries has come from our launch of www.ome-search.co.uk - probably as the launch has made us give this product more focus internally and created more of a buzz externally.
So the OME investment will continue, the most recent example being that we have spent some cash converting our office from the look of a rather spacious but grim prison cell to something that is actually a vaguely pleasant environment to work in. I would like to point out that i have been excluded from any decisions on colours/styles or wall decoration which is a very sensible decision indeed.

So is there any form of recruitment downturn occurring?

its the word that dare not speak its name but lets not be shy of at least looking at it. I am going to talk about our narrow world - so no mention of credit crunch or macro economic factors that the media are bombarding us with at present.

My answer is a qualified Yes and No - and please remember this is based on an incredibly short period of time

• Q1 2008 was OME's most successful quarter in business by a long way- so thats rather good isnt it
• None of our clients have stopped recruiting - announced a recruitment freeze etc
• Our most recent launch (OME Search) is getting huge client interest

However

• Feb and March were not quite as active as January
• The extra campaigns from our clients are not as prevalent. So all our contract work is occurring but additional spend is absent
• The job boards seem to have been hurting in March and deadline deals were dramatically attractive to get something/anything signed off
• Our new business is not signing off as quickly as i would like (statement of obvious) - in my paranoid mind - is this a sign of caution/an unwillingness to commit
• the phones don't appear to be ringing as much

Am i worried? not particularly - its end of financial year - we are still growing and as we all know - even a mild downturn will make clients look really carefully at their costs/cost per hire and that is fabulous news for online in general and OnlineMediaExperts in particular.

So in a way - a potential scare like this could be the best thing to happen to us!

Industry Expert Comments in People Management

and there is also a bit from me

http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/computersaysmaybe.htm?name=_guide&type=section