The recruitment industry is a perfect fit for the benefits that cloud computing offers to both users and business owners.

Historically (and still the case) the recruitment sector is highly fragmented. Before the worldwide recession hit in 2008, there were approximately 15,000 recruitment companies out there operating in the UK alone. The next two years saw this drop back by as much as 25% but the last year or so has seen the number swell again. It’s a profession populated with start-ups. Sales-driven consultants with strong client relationships are tempted to strike out on their own and the few barriers to entry encourage this. Anecdotally, something like 95% of these companies have fewer than five employees.

As a sum result, these companies are small and highly agile. In addition, success in recruitment means the likelihood of working outside of the traditional 9-to-5 working day – candidates themselves may be working and so after-work hours may be required to facilitate discussions.

As a profession with a strong sales culture, recruiters may need to be fleet of foot or certainly mobile, and increasingly, remote working is being adopted to further impact fixed overhead. Perhaps paramount of all, the data that everyone has access to with needs to be as current as possible.

Recruitment businesses ideally need recruitment systems that are easy to set up with low upfront cash requirements, perhaps with the added benefit of incurring operational expense rather than capital cost and the tax efficiencies that go along with that. They need data that is available to all and updated for all, accessible 24/7 and from wherever in the country (or world) they happen to be.

And that is a perfect summary of the key benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS), or Cloud Computing as it is more currently labelled.