From Bond, Welfare-to-work, to Daxtra – A brief history of Toby

Steve: You’ve just joined Daxtra – tell me your background.

Toby: I have. I’ve worked with the industry for a very long time, starting with Bond International Software in ’96 inside their technical team to support their rapidly growing client base at the time.

Later in their account management function, again, a more technical role – helping recruitment business owners realize more from technology which in the late 90s was a very fast moving subject with significant problems to solve for those businesses as they grew.

I left to work as a recruiter for a while – and then found myself back at Bond as part of their commercial team, building enterprise class solutions from a concept perspective through to delivery.

I’ve worked with many of the world’s largest recruiting agencies. I’ve sold directly to Randstad and Adecco, successfully helped them implement global systems and also inside the Welfare-to-work market – helping long-term unemployed back to work, which was a really interesting project.

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Steve: Tell me more about that.

Toby: A government program – taking a feed from Jobcentreplus for people who have been on benefits for a long period of time. Think of a recruitment platform that understands what the key challenges for finding work for them are and then putting an education program in place prior to the recruitment process to help them along. It could identify simple things – for example, if you haven’t been in work for a very long time, or you’re simply not physically fit enough to do a job.

We’re not talking Exec Search top positions here, but genuinely getting normal people back to work. In my view, the program came under quite a lot of criticism from the press. We all like to throw stones at the government.

Personally, I felt it was a successful program on the basis the government only paid out to the agencies on successful long-term employment. Agencies had to make successful placements before they actually got paid for doing the work.

It was a good distraction from general recruitment. I have worked within Exec Search, Contingent as well as temporary and fast moving shift-based recruitment. Again, it was just something different and really exciting.

Toby Conibear is Chief Commercial Officer at DaXtra Technologies (@Daxtra)