We reached out to Watu (a tech company that specialises in temporary worker solutions) to help us engage with freelancers quicker than the current limited methods. Through our new web based app we aim to drive engagement between freelancers and us. We know that key to finding a freelance role is the speed of which you are made aware of a role and the relevance to your job search criteria. By building your profile on our freelancer app you can select the areas of marketing you wish to be updated with for freelance positions and receive alerts when positions are live.

We’re committed to providing a reaction to the old freelance recruitment model of ‘them and us’, the agency calling an otherwise unengaged database of faceless individuals to fulfil a short term contract. We’re aiming to drive more interaction between our freelance talent and increase the speed of new roles being released to the interested temporary worker.

With any new initiative our success (or failure!) hinges on your feedback. We’d like to invite all of our freelance talent to subscribe to our app and help us help you!

After a thorough and uncompromising grilling by the HR Director, jaded by hyperbole and unfulfilled promises, we were told in no uncertain terms that she only gave agencies one chance.

So, with brief in hand, we retired to London Bridge and got on with the brief. Five months, five briefs & five placed candidates later, we have maintained a 100% placement record and are delighted to be fulfilling our promise. We’re grinning like cheshire cats!

This month marks the 5th year that Dylan opened its doors to the marketing world. In March 2007, myself, Julian Johnson and Philip Edleston decided to set up an marketing recruitment agency that did things a bit differently and a bit better. We have seen an incredible journey and had many highs along the way, with a lot of hard work and dedication to our original ethos;  we even celebrated the end of the 5th year picking up multiple awards in the MARA and NORA awards. It’s great to be part of such a brilliant and talented team working with excellent candidates and clients and I look forward to the next 5 years unfolding.

So, the other day, I was browsing the inter-web, trying to find some ideas for our office revamp. And, luckily enough, one of my digital idols just so happens to have made a video on how to enure you have the most coolest and creative office in the world. If you’ve not heard of Alex Bragg, allow me to introduce you: Mr Bragg is the creator of BajillionHits.Biz, a widely celebrated multi-platform social media lifestyle experience. Or, to put it simply, he’s the Dalai Lama of the social media space. Naturally, he’s close personal friends with The Zuck (or Mark Zuckerberg to those who aren’t in his inner-circle) and Big Cash (Pete Cashmore) and has won 2 Webbys, so you know he’s legit. Alex is a curator, a strategizer, a blogger, a paradigm-shifter, an innovator, a community-builder and a bespeckled dream-boat. Now we can add creative raw workspace loft visionist to the list. Boom.

If you’re thinking of updating your workspace into the trans-media creative live-work-play biosphere of your dreams, these are things you definitely need to invest in:

- Vintage Video Games
- Chillpods
- Buddhist crap
- Loads of booze
- A yoga dungeon
- Bon Iver musak
- Exposed brickwork
- Fußball/Pool/Table-tennis table
- Bean-bags
- Remote-control toys

Any other suggestions should be sent to interiorconceptulization@strategy.com

Have a look here: Chillspacing: How to Have the Coolest and Most Creative Office In the World

I think that’s long enough of a blackout for SOPA to take notice….welcome back to the
Dylan blog! Happy New Year guys, hope you had a good one? Last year was a big big
year for Dylan, we were recognised by MARA’s & NORA’s for our work in the last 12
months, which was a huge honour. If that wasn’t pleasing enough we were awarded Best
Recruitment Blog of the year by Jobsite. Thanks! They have great taste in them Jobsite
offices (Max Beesley aside).

Anyway rather than talk about how great we are (let’s face it, we are great) we want
to say a massive well done to Creature for winning business from Adidas to help launch
new trainers in the Adidas Orginals range. This is an awesome win which includes TV,
print, digital and out of home. Great work guys.

I love LinkedIn, not in the love I will have for my first child, but close to it. LinkedIn has revolutionised the recruitment industry. It plays on a very simple emotion, vanity. You may disagree with the vanity suggestion, but if you are on LinkedIn, then you are comfortable with promoting yourself to the world, which is being vain.

Your profile is effectively your CV, it’s a highlight reel of your corporate life, an opportunity for everyone to see what you do and how good you may be.  For companies this is an interesting problem because you know you star performers are constantly visible for all to see and for all to contact.

Recruiters obviously use LinkedIn as a first port of call to head hunt candidates. It allows upfront honesty and assuming that the recruiter is ethical in their approach and respects the persons contact settings (ie, the “open to career opportunities” is highlighted in their contact settings) it is an unobtrusive manner to get in touch. So knowing this is the case, why do companies like their employees being on LinkedIn?

The reason is that it offers a readymade eco-system to help understand what your talent is doing and where. Many companies are buying staffing enterprise solutions, such as Watu, www.watuhq.com, a subscription based staffing ecosystem that manages recruitment. Watu also schedules, deploys and runs payroll for staff. It’s a fantastic product that is revolutionising the field staffing sector. But if you don’t need the extras then LinkedIn is ready made. Coca-cola famously used it to track down talent in their organisation. They required a specialist skill-set and via LinkedIn found out someone in their organisation had it, saving thousands of pounds in recruitment fees.

I believe LinkedIn to be a friend. It creates transparency in the work place, allows for business to flow and a freedom to develop that we didn’t have 10 years ago. LinkedIn is here to stay, so I say embrace it!

I have been here since March 3rd 2007 when Dylan first opended its doors as Mash Recruit. We opened them as a new and fairly green agency, we made some good headway through determination and a genuine ambition to create a unique recruitment consultancy. It was untimley that the recession took hold soon after but we were tenacious, dug deep and kept our heads above water, still trying to continue to stick to our ethos of trying to be a bit different but a lot better than the norm.

On Wednesday night last week, donned in a tuxedo with the team, I felt very proud to see us pick up two awards at the MARAs (best recruitment website and highly commended in the medium recruiter category) as well as picking up best small recruitment agency in the NORA awards recently too. It was a sign of how far we have come, it was a just a shame yours truly who was shortlisted for the best recrutiment awards wasn’t victorious, we must have missed the application deadline!

These awards are testament to the sheer hard work of the whole team and wonderful to see it acknowledged. Dylan is a wonderful place to work; there is a great culture, a fantastic team and a genuine pride of who we all work for and the brand that has been created. Next year I hope to go one better and scoop best medium agency of the year… see you on the podium.

 Having recently won awards at both the NORA and MARA Awards, we’re delighted to announce that Dylan has been chosen to join the distinguished recruitment PSL of Proximity London, officially the ‘world’s most creatively-awarded direct and digital agency network’.

This is a great win for us as a business and, having also recently been retained across the board on the BD Network PSL, it helps in our drive to work with the very best creative agencies in the world, providing career opportunity to our brilliantly talented and super ambitious candidate network.

If you’re looking to work for the very best and want your interests represented by consultants as passionate about recruitment as you are about your discipline get in touch with us.

11.11.11 was always going to blow the tweetosphere into oblivion, but Miguel Rios has captured the magical moment (or should I say moments) in a geographic spin of the volume of tweets moving across the globe like a pulse, first at 11:11am local time and again at 11:11pm. The size of the 1 represents the volume of tweets from that location at that time. I think this is a fascinating example of the prevalence of social media across the globe and the increasingly important role it plays in communication.

Twitter said of the phenomenon, “Whether you were inclined to crack a joke about this rare binary occurrence, wax poetic about its meaning, or join in a global game to share photos at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m., numerology dominated the conversation,” this trend did not go unnoticed, even by myself who is far less then an expert in tweet!

The significance of 11.11.11 is it being the last binary date of the 21st century, and thus important if you believe in the power of numbers. Dubbed the ‘Nerds New Year’ it is believed to be the perfect opportunity to turn over a new leaf and make those all-important life changing decisions, something I seem to do every Monday morning! A novel idea is the production of a film, 11/Eleven Project, designed to capture a snippet of thousands of individuals experiences during the big day to frame this historic date, these are to be made as digital submissions of any kind: blog, audio, tweet, video, and will be screened in September 2012. Being a digital enthusiast, I think this is a great method of collecting moments and really taps into the zeitgeist.

In the more bizarre trends across the globe, Las Vegas was kept busy with nearly 4,000 wedding applications to be held during the crowning moment, and South Korean midwives had a manic day with an influx of expectant mothers demanding c-sections to ensure infants bore the lucky birth date. Here in the UK I imagine gym memberships doubled and McDonalds profits halved over the 24 hours!

And if you missed out on the hype and the fuss of this day in history, you’ll have to wait 88 years until the next binary six-digit date will occur – on January 1, 2100, so you’d better consider the life preserving lifestyle changes if you plan to be around!

Whilst talking Twiiter, the record number of Tweets per second was unsurprisingly held in Japan with Tweeters wishing family and friends a Happy New year, or should I say “Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu,” on the tide of welcoming in 2011. A record of 6,939 tweets per second, almost twice the record previously set last summer when Japan beat Denmark in the World Cup.