in this episode of titans of ServiceNow we're going to interview Sarah weeks of momentum consulting her website will be in the description below and you're going to want to check it out remember the purpose of titans of ServiceNow is to eventually land an interview with the man himself mr. Fred ludie I can't do that without your help so if you enjoy the content please pass it through your network if you want to see what I'm up to these days I want to personally invite you to check out vivid charts and make your service now reporting vivid links in the description below hey everyone welcome back to the titans of service now series my name is Robert the Duke Frederick and as you know we're talking to all the movers and shakers in the ServiceNow ecosystem I couldn't do that without talking to the most influential and premier staffing persona in the space Miss Sarah weeks Sarah welcome to the show hello thank you for having me my pleasure as always so we always start at the start why don't you tell the audience how you came across this ServiceNow thing I actually fell into IT recruitment because I was doing automotive recruitment before I started to do service now because I already knew a lot about cars but I was a bit fed up with recruitment and some of the companies that I'd worked for and somebody contacted me to get a new recruitment role and they said you need to speak to this ite recruitment firm and you need to go and interview with them and I said I don't really want to work in IT recruitment because I think it's gonna be boring but I went and really liked the company and they offered me the job and said go and have a look at different IT and different technologies and go and find something that you're interested in and I came across service now and I found it really interesting and decided to specialize in that you say specialization and this is why I've got you on the show because I don't know of anybody else in the staffing space in the ServiceNow ecosystem that took that specialization to the level of you have like what recruiters does anybody else know that actually got the certifications you know that studies the material can talk intelligently about platform from a tech perspective you tell me but I haven't seen any so thank you for that it's really important to me I have the kind of attitude if you want to do something then you need to do it well and I didn't want to be one of those recruiters that picks up a few buzzwords off of a CV and tries to match people I really wanted to know that I was matching the right people to the right job genuinely so for me the only way to do that was to really study the technology in detail to make sure that I knew I was asking the right questions and getting the right people in front of the right people so how might people in the ecosystem know of you usually from LinkedIn I attend all the events are usually knowledge and now forum in London and when people look at me they usually look at my badge and say oh you're her from LinkedIn the one and only huh apparently so yes but that was also that was also your pitch to pitch so you can tell people how they might really know you so I recruiting in the ServiceNow space I have clients in the UK the US Canada France Switzerland Germany so I'm recruiting across a lot of different countries I'm all purely ServiceNow and how big is your team just me but yeah just me maybe one day I'll expand I just haven't found anybody who is willing to dedicate the time as much as I am so I just haven't expanded to haven't that hasn't been the right person I just wanted again underlying the legitimacy of your service because there's a couple times where you talk to to myself and some of my friends James and Tim about an app in your space right and I got to tell you folks the way she describes the app and how she would build it like I don't know why she's recruiting I don't know why you're you're recruiting and not actually doing services on service now I am building my app so it's going to be coming at some point I've just had a few personal things over the ratio which is delayed it but it will be coming at some point the app is going to be recruitment focused it really automates the entire recruitment process so it eliminates all of the need for admin within recruitment which is the thing that recruiters and or salespeople hate the most it makes the process easier for hiring managers because they're linking directly into an out-of-service now it standardizes feedback so that recruiters can actually pass the feedback on to candidates it enables every candidate to be answered because every candidate comes through the system and you reject or accept every single candidate that comes in so everybody gets a response I can't wait to see this fly I'm really excited about it I think sometimes you use some softwares and you know that the person who designed it didn't do the job that the room software is intended for and so there were always things that are missing or that it doesn't quite do but I really spend a lot of time thinking about me as a recruiter and what do I want to software to do and I made sure that it is absolutely everything that you could possibly need it to do and more which is really just the essence of what ServiceNow was put here to do right I mean we all know it started in ITSM but you know I just live for these kind of stories where it's somebody who's got serious workflow serious automation gaps and they don't have time to build an application from scratch but you give them a platform like ServiceNow and all of a sudden you know whole new possibilities are available to you yes and as soon as I saw ServiceNow even four years ago I looked at it and thought this is made for recruitment that's crazy that's crazy I just had so much potential for the automation side and I just the software's that I had used up to that point didn't really automate any part of the process so I just looked at it and I just knew that as the platform the potential for having something for recruitment on that would be huge so tons of optimism about the platform and and what you can do about it have you had any like dark moments in the ServiceNow space or things where it's like I'm not sure if I'm going to make it or like deep challenges I guess the challenge is always with the recruitment side the shortage of people in the space and how do we get more people into the space because I have had a client who does purely service now but has needed some other skillsets and I've managed to fill the roles within 24 hours to find a really experienced ServiceNow person can take two months sometimes depending on what the skill thing is so I guess that's the biggest challenge and the thing that makes you think sometimes is it right to just specialize in just this in my other podcast and some of the other videos I talked about skills that are good to have in the ServiceNow space I really like your opinion on that besides the hard ServiceNow skills what other skills would you wish that your candidates had I think especially in the UK in the way that the partner managers within ServiceNow are kind of encouraging where the new partners are starting up is having specialisms within ServiceNow so there are like CSM specialist partners and item specialist partners in the UK so really grabbing hold of something that you're passionate about within the platform and gaining skills and experience around that I think would stun someone a really good stud at the moment tilting the question in the opposite direction what would you wish that your customers or potential customers knew about the ServiceNow ecosystem you know before during their search for a resource I guess it's the same with this as with lots of different types of recruitment you're not necessarily going to find someone who takes all of the boxes all of the time what are the core requirements of what you need this person to do and what can you train them to do because a lot of the time there are some quite strict requirements which narrow the candidate pull down significantly whereas if we focused on maybe two or three things that this person absolutely has to be able to do from day one but maybe we can train them on a few of the other things then it opens up the candidate pool significantly and encourages more people into the space and enables to get more people into the space so is the second time you said more people into the space are you finding that even all this time has passed and the demand is still such that we need new entrants hugely the salaries in the UK have increased so much over the last four years purely because there are so few people with good skills and experience in the space what we need is more programs to get people trained into service now I provide graduates for free to all of my clients for that reason I want to try and help them to get more junior people so that they can train them the other issue is that people see the contracting rates and it's kind of the level of experience before people start contracting sometimes I don't think they quite add up so you'll have someone with one or two years experience you start contracting and some clients will take them on four five hundred pound a day but really they shouldn't be in a permanent role for at least another two or three years before they go into the contract in space yeah a little premature right yeah I tend to agree with you there I want somebody who's like seeing some scary stuff and you really don't get that you know unless you've had some time on the clock right yeah if you're employing a contractor and you're looking for someone at such a high day rate you need someone that can come in immediately hit the ground running this is tell people what they need to do on the project being more of an independent role and you're just not going to be able to do that with 18 months experience on the platform you need to have experienced multiple customers platforms how different people do it one of the biggest pluses and minuses of the ServiceNow platform is it's customizability the way that one customer chooses to implement ServiceNow will be completely different from another it takes you a long time to be able to learn the different nuances of the platform and the the different ways of implementing and the best ways of doing it being somebody who basically picked up ServiceNow from nothing not even an IT background do you have any special insights for people to get into this space and to learn the tool from scratch I would say to start with to look to YouTube there are loads and loads of amazing videos out there to introduce you to the platform you can download your own instance for free to help find your way around the platform immediately in terms of learning the coding skills I went on to something called code Academy and started to learn the basics of JavaScript so there's loads of free tools out there to help you to start learning the platform totally hear you on code Academy I didn't start with that but a few years into my service journey I did the code Academy JavaScript course to see what else and I felt like you know I took that code Academy JavaScript course and it was like oh that's exactly what I learned over the past you know however long I was doing it at the time I've been in it for a while okay I always tell people some of the most interesting ServiceNow resources out there are people that not only didn't come from a development background or but not even in ITSM background so is there anything about your previous experience maybe in the automotive recruiting or even before that that you feel has given you an advantage in the space and I think having lots of different experience generally gives you experience to do whatever you do going forward I took a long time to find where I wanted to be because I was convinced I wanted to be a lawyer and so I originally did a law degree and when I couldn't become a lawyer I didn't really know what else to do so I did lots of sales jobs which gained me the experience to become a recruiter and so yes definitely there are skills that you can gain from other areas the best skills that you can get in terms of being a consultant are the communication skills more over than the development skills so having jobs before IT where you doing lots of communicating and talking to people will give you those you know talking to the customer skills that you need on top of all of those development skills so we're creeping up on time I'll leave the last question a little bit open so if you could tell us maybe one part of the platform that you're just really excited about be it present day or in upcoming versions or if there's anything you change about the space what would it be so the thing I think is most important to service now is the HR module because if you think about a business HR is where the data touches first when you have an employee they need to be on boarded so all of their data is collected at that first point of entry at HR once a child have it that can then be passed on to all the other areas of service now that you're connected to whether it be IT or project management or the financial side of service now any other area that data that's collected can be passed on without any kind of duplication so to me HR is the key to making the platform truly enterprise wide and you think ServiceNow has got got a good shot in that market with all the other competitors in there like workday and yes I think that the customers that ServiceNow tend to target are the large enterprise customers who are committed to looking at using servers now enterprise wide the HR module of ServiceNow definitely has the potential and already has a lot of the functionality that the other competitors have but it also has the added bonus and benefit but it is connected and in the platform as well as all the other areas of the platform that they're using which is really what the point of ServiceNow was when it was first conceived that's an opinion I don't hear much before thank you for bringing that to us yes I mean the whole point of service now when it was very first designed was that his black plat build whatever you want on top of it but people it was - head of its time so the IITs our module was really only built to show the capability of the platform and not for it to be an IT SM tool it's now kind of 15 years later everyone starting to say oh it's an enterprise wise tool but actually it's only just becoming what it was first conceived to be when it was born yeah it's funny you know every every few years I I listen to the sales staff and it's usually the new sales staff and they're like oh you can you can build this on it that's amazing and we get all these social media posts about the flexibility of ServiceNow and I'm like oh they rediscovered themselves Inc and that's awesome ladies and gentlemen this has been Sara weeks a serious service now thought leader cleverly disguised as a staffing expert please check her out at momentum consulting the link is going to be down in the description check her out if you're a ServiceNow customer needing seriously vetted talent by someone who actually knows the platform and check her out if you're a seasoned ServiceNow resource looking to expand on the consulting market Sarah was so good having here thank you very much having me it's been really nice - okay