Morgan McKinley: Creating value through digital platforms
As part of our 10 opinions for 2021 campaign we interviewed Cathal McCarthy, now Global Marketing Director at Morgan McKinley. As a global professional services recruitment consultancy, Morgan McKinley connects specialist talent with leading employers across multiple industries and disciplines. Their team of consultants either have an educational background in their discipline or industry experience.
Talking about digital, what was your biggest challenge in 2020? If there were no challenges, what were your biggest learnings?
Our biggest challenge in 2020 was to stay on course with our digital transformation goals despite the recruitment market changing so suddenly. There is a well known mantra, written on the wall of our office: ‘If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan but never the goal’. With this in mind, we transformed our 2020 plans to the global pandemic by launching an ‘Adapt Your Business’ digital content hub to help our clients adjust to working remotely with their teams. However, we also maintained and accelerated our original goal for 2020 which was to complete our largest digital project to date: to consolidate seven of our localised country websites around the world into one global morganmckinley.com website. Our global team collaborated closely to achieve this goal in August 2020, while all working remotely, and we now look forward to launching new initiatives for our clients, candidates and contractors on this global website in 2021.
Where you are now, what do you think 2021 holds for you? In other words, what will your focus for 2021 be in terms of digital.
Our focus for 2021 is centered around the evolving needs of our customers. From a digital perspective, this means delivering as much value as possible through our digital platforms. Our ‘2021 Salary Guide’ for example, will be completely different to years past. For 2021, we are launching an interactive, online salary guide calculator for the first time ever to our markets in Europe, APAC and North America. The reason that we are changing the format is because we recognise the needs of our clients, candidates and contractors to have easier access to this important information and in a more interactive way than a static document. Transparency is also a priority us, so in August 2020 we launched an opt-in cookie management tool on morganmckinley.com in line with GDPR, and we plan to launch other projects in preparation for a more ‘cookie-less’ future in 2021.
What company/companies inspire you in terms of their digital achievements? Why do you find it inspiring, and what initiatives do they do?
I love InVision, the digital product design platform. It helps to bring our team’s digital concepts into reality by helping everyone internally visualise what our end goal is at the very early stages of a project. This helps us to collaborate across multiple functions, optimising the online experience before development ever begins, saving us time. More importantly it makes the end-product highly tailored to our customers requirements. Invision also produce inspiring documentary content that I would highly recommend for Digital Marketers use to gain internal buy-in on user-centric projects.
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