Society ditches printed paperwork in favour of low-cost tablet devices

Anyone who has ever used an executive search firm will know that our industry has a habit of drowning its clients in paperwork. At both the longlisting and the shortlisting stage, most headhunters will produce neatly-bound hard-copy packs of CVs, covering letters, and commentaries. With a full application often running to about six pages, and an average assignment having around 20 longlisted candidates, these packs of paperwork can be comfortably over 100 pages long. Very often, several packs are produced at each stage, so that every senior stakeholder can be given a copy.

In short, our industry wastes a lot of paper.

This simple fact has bothered Society for years. We took early action on it by adopting double-sided printing, and using only 100% recycled paper. That didn’t do much to soothe our collective conscience though, and we have been on the lookout for a more sustainable alternative for some time.

In November 2013, Society began a pilot programme with selected clients, in which we provided them with their paperwork preloaded onto cheap tablet devices. Our choice of technology was the £119 Tesco Hudl, which has a 7” screen and runs the Android operating system. Instead of printing the paperwork, we saved it onto the Hudls as a PDF file complete with bookmarks for each candidate, so that it would be easy to browse.

The feedback from our pilot was exceptionally positive, so we have now rolled this approach out across the firm, and completely abandoned the production of hard-copy paperwork.

Simon Lucas, Society’s Managing Director,commented:

“As the technology became affordable, we knew that this was something we wanted to try. Electronic paperwork obviously reduces our overall consumption of paper and ink dramatically, and therefore lessens the company’s environmental impact. Providing documentation in this way also saves us time and money, since we no longer have to collate, bind and transport big, bulky physical packs. Our clients seem to find the tablets user-friendly, and also enjoy the slight novelty value of the experience. And since tablet devices can be password protected in a way that physical paperwork can’t, they have the added bonus of allowing us to implement an extra level of data security protection.”