Colt Technology Services has saved £300,000 on recruitment costs alone this year by replacing a hotchpotch of recruitment systems with a single Software-as-a-Service-based offering.
Telecoms and IT services specialist Colt operates in 13 countries and is expanding rapidly. Because it is currently hiring about 600 new staff a year, the company was keen to apply a more streamlined approach to recruitment to help drive growth still further.
The firm believed that consolidating 15 disparate systems down into a single, unified one was crucial in order to streamline its business processes and help it identify better quality prospects while also keeping a lid on costs.
Paul Musson, executive vice president for human resources at Colt, says: “We had lots of inconsistencies across the geography: inconsistencies of employment brand, inconsistencies in literature and advertisements, inconsistencies in agents and fees for executive search and inconsistencies in the way we did internal recruitment.”
The company’s siloed approach to recruitment meant that employees in Italy, for example, could only see opportunities in their own country but not elsewhere in Europe or India.
After the HR team implemented SuccessFactors’ Recruiting Management system, however, it found it was better able to analyse the skills sets of existing staff, identify potential candidates for promotion and find external candidates for vacant positions. The system also played a key role in helping to reduce agency fees by £300,000 this year.
Colt was already familiar with SaaS-based HR systems as it had implemented the same vendor’s performance and talent management suite about 18 months ago. The firm decided to go down the cloud route after discovering that it would take considerable time and money to upgrade its existing on premise Oracle 11i HR management system to deal with its new requirements.
Specific requirements
Although it was not specifically looking for a SaaS-based offering, the appeal over an in-house deployed system centred on ease-of-implementation and lower upfront costs. SuccessFactors took only 10 weeks to take live compared with the 18 months Musson’s previous organisation spent on simply getting the data in place when undertaking a similar deployment.
While Colt made some changes to meet specific requirements, Musson warns against the dangers of over-customisation.
He says: “I’ve been in organisations where they do lots of customisation on their HR solution and you end up spending much more and end up doing processes the way you’ve always done them. The lesson I learned from that is that, when you do something in-house, you must not let your own internal processes blind you.”
But persuading people to move to the new system was easier with some functionality than others. For example, it was a straightforward proposition to encourage people to swap to the new performance management module because the previous system had been dreadful to use. Because compensation management had been done using spreadsheets, the benefits of the new system were obvious there too.
But it was a more difficult sell on the recruitment side. Some line managers felt that the offering just created more work for them because it meant that a lot of the recruitment process was dealt with by them rather than being handled centrally by HR.
Having a central skills database also provided the HR team with a clear overview of what was available on a corporate-wide basis, which enabled it to redeploy staff members onto different projects more effectively in order to save money. But such a scenario also forced managers to really think clearly about the personnel that they required.
Although adopting a cloud-based approach may not have been top of Colt’s agenda when it began its search, Musson is now a convert. “For me, the cloud is the way to go. It’s low cost, easy to manage, easy to keep up to date,” he concludes.
