Neveling Reply

I am Head of Technology at Elliott Browne as well as The Big Four. At Elliott Browne, we help our clients recruit in IT and software development. Our division The Big Four, on the other hand, focuses on candidates in finance. These include auditors and tax consultants, among others. We now have a candidate pool that includes over 400k pre-qualified candidates.

The successful placement of candidates willing to change to suitable and searching employers requires a great deal of manual outbound effort. Even though we have been operating very successfully for many years, we have identified great potential for optimization in terms of efficiency in this process as well as the corresponding customer experience. We want our customers to have direct access to candidates who are ready to switch, whenever they want, as easily as possible. In addition, we also wanted to generate significantly more inbound sales in order to better meet the enormous demand of our customers. A win-win-win situation that is second to none!

We had little experience to date in terms of selecting the right service partner for the development of web platforms. We found the market research somewhat difficult, which is why our management finally decided on Neveling Reply through personal contacts and goal-oriented discussions.

We roughly defined our requirements and communicated them to the agency for the purpose of planning and bid preparation. Based on this, they analyzed our requirements, supplemented or adapted them as needed, and presented us with a cost estimate for implementation as well as a rough roadmap. Since our scope was extensive and our deadline was ambitious, we mutually agreed on a very agile approach. Every two weeks, our features were analyzed, prioritized, broken down into development tasks, and scheduled for the next sprint. Regular feedback loops as well as review dates finally ensured more transparency in the project.

This was a cross-functional team, in which Neveling Reply provided us with the appropriate expert for the various requirements in the project. The following roles were filled in the collaboration: Technical Solution Architect, Azure Cloud Architect, Frontend Developer, Vue.js & .NET Core Developer, QA and, of course, a Product Owner who acted as the main point of contact for our project team. During the course of the project, other experts were brought in as needed, for example to set up tracking tools according to our specifications.

We received many candidate inquiries via the platform just 2 hours after the GoLive. This is a very outstanding result that has more than confirmed our vision and our path in the right direction. Our customers were thrilled with the platform and the positive customer feedbacks have reached us daily since the launch.

At the beginning of the project, there were some teething problems in terms of efficiency in collaboration. However, we were also very agile and often had to optimize our requirements. But after the stumbling initial phase, the collaboration became better and better and more efficient. The workflows became clearer and clearer. They quickly adapted to our agility and together we were able to find a good balance between agile implementation and stability of the solution.

Their commitment and interaction with our project team was impressive. In my opinion, the chemistry between the project teams must be right in order to achieve outstanding results. We were on a personal wavelength right from the start. Apart from that, you have very talented project team members who actively supported us with their technical expertise. They adapted to our pace as quickly as possible and were able to convince us with good results. Due to the good results so far, we are happy to continue our cooperation with Neveling Reply.

Communication could be optimized. For some project tasks, the current status was not known or transparent to us. When we had queries, we sometimes had to wait longer for feedback. The stability of the implemented features could also be increased by an adequate QA process. In the last weeks before go-live, we often found gross bugs in the presented features, which led to the postponement of our deadline. However, issues were identified, addressed and fixed over time. We continue to be very pleased.