Staffing & Recruitment Community Event

The market for secondment, temporary employment and staffing & recruiting is characterized by great challenges and, at the same time, plenty of opportunities. What are the recent trends and developments? How do you ensure that you are ready for the future and make the right choices for your agency, and what role does technology play?

Around those themes, Salesforce and Byner brought customers and associates together for a yearly meeting to inspire and connect with each other and to build lasting relationships.

Theme of the event was growing and accelerating with the Talent 360. We discussed the power of the Salesforce platform for the Staffing & Recruitment industry. Then we dove into three statements around developments in the market. Finally, our clients YER, vind! and Working Talent shared their stories on their digital transformation, the approach, the results and tips for colleagues. Read a short report of the sessions here.

Salesforce and the Talent 360

Everyone knows examples of the surprising customer experience offered by companies such as KLM, Rituals and Omoda. The foundation for this is Salesforce technology, on which Byner is built.

Sales, Service, Marketing, E-commerce, everything comes together on one unified platform. As a result, every employee has a complete, 360° view of all customer and prospect data in real time.

From there, you can manage and enhance existing and potential customer relationships. And give them a unique, personalized, cross-channel experience at every stage of the journey and provide a service that exceeds their expectations. By email, mobile, social media or in face-to-face interactions.

What would happen if you translated that customer experience to the candidate experience? According to Nina Gmachl-Eshuis, Area Vice President of Salesforce, that’s when really great things happen. In her presentation she shows how, as an agency with a powerful digital landscape, you can create an infinity funnel in which prospect, customer, candidate, employee and ambassador are in constant motion. After all, today’s candidate can be tomorrow’s supplier and the client the day after tomorrow, and vice versa.

This allows you to optimally serve, surprise and engage them at every stage of the journey, even if they change roles and/or develop different needs.

Trends and developments in the market

Marc Nijhuis, Chairman of the Bovib (Trade Association for Intermediaries and Brokers) and CFO of Circle8 discusses his vision of the market based on 3 propositions with Joram Timmerman, Co-founder of Byner.

#1 Scarcity leads to more flex

Marc Nijhuis observes that in times of a talent shortage, employers and clients are switching faster and more often to flex. At the same time, more and more employees are venturing into self-employment, giving agencies a large group of competitors. Temporary staffing and secondment agencies that stand out in this market see talent as an asset to their business. They focus on being good employers, on binding and retaining their own employees and workers.

#2 Laws and regulations are counterproductive

The new laws and regulations have a big impact on the flex industry. The certification requirement has the necessary impact on agencies and creates a barrier for new market entrants. The expectation is that many smaller staffing agencies will disappear and move towards secondment.

Marc Nijhuis predicts a flight to all kinds of flex. He advocates a level playing field for all workers with the same regulations and privileges. This will create a market with greater individual freedom for all workers with a free choice in contract form and/or self-employment.

#3 No ‘touch’ without ‘tech’ 

Technology plays a crucial role in the maturing of the employment services industry. In 2018, Marc Nijhuis formulated a strategy with the former De Staffing Group, now Circle8, with new ambitions around automation and digitalization. The starting point was to put freelancers and suppliers at the center and offer them an ultimate experience in every touchpoint of their journey with Circle8.

Keywords here are personal attention, processes in order and doing “everything for a smile.” This transition from administration to service led to a completely new end-to-end digital environment, with Byner on Salesforce serving as the foundation of all core processes.

Tips for peers:

• Formulate a vision and roadmap for digitalization
• Build personal relationships with customers and talent
• Be inspired by cases within, as well as outside the industry

Working Talent: integrated processes from lead to cash

Working Talent develops traineeships for young talents and helps experienced professionals give a new boost to their careers. With their growth as an organization, the need for more efficiency, insight, scalability and future-proofing increased. The departments were not optimally collaborating, knowledge was not secured, there were no audit trails and there was a lot of double administration. Besides, the process from writing the hours to sending out the invoice took too much time.

The digital transformation from Working Talent to Byner on Salesforce covers the entire end-to-end process from lead to invoice. Everything starts from and is collected in one digital environment; The Hub.

In their case study, Recruitment Manager Onno Slinger and Project Manager Marlies Wardenier give an insight into the new digital environment on Byner. They show how simple and clear everything works now that the entire process has been streamlined and comes together in one Hub; Sales CRM, Recruitment ATS, order process and contract management, time registration and declaration, invoicing, supplemented with document generation and e-signing.

Pleasant Collaboration 

Working Talent looks back on a smoothly running implementation process where the cooperation with Byner proved to be very pleasant and constructive. And that’s not all; the fundamentals are in place and offer many opportunities for further steps.

Result

• all users in one digital Hub with one truth
• 5 x faster time-to-invoice process
• central assurance of all information and therefore audit-proof
• data-driven dashboards and reports

YER: growing and accelerating with a new approach and new technology

YER has been a leading labor market platform for higher educated people and total solutions partner from student to executive management for 35 years. The organization has grown about 20 to 30 percent annually in recent years and this growth is expected to continue non-stop. And that, of course, has to be well managed. Because YER wants to connect talent, experts and organizations and set ambitions in motion.

Jan-Willem Prins, Director of Operations at YER, makes the comparison with success in Formula 1. If man and machine optimally work together, groundbreaking successes are within reach.  To realize this, a digital transformation was initiated with Byner to streamline the process from lead to placement. With the goal of:

• more placements
• higher customer satisfaction
• greater productivity
• data driven decision making

Niels Valks from Crossing Circles is supervising the implementation project with Byner for YER on a turnkey basis, as temporary reinforcement of supplier and client. At the start, he encountered an outdated and underutilized system. Adoption was low, a lot of work was done outside the system, data quality was poor, and users said it was chaotic, labor-intensive and not user-friendly.

Guidelines in Byner’s transition: less is more, less administration and more automation, tight workflows, structured candidate registration, standard resume generation, fast and quality matching and good LinkedIn integration.

He continues the Formula 1 metaphor and illustrates the importance of the team around the driver as a key contributor to success.

Tips for peers

• Work with a partner with knowledge and experience in the industry
• Begin with the end in mind
• Focus on adoption before, during and after going live
• Commit to data quality from the beginning, because that determines the migration conditions and enrichments and the access to talent, business insights and strategy for further automation

vind! A data driven fundament for insights, grip and high quality matching

vind! is a Flemish player that annually makes more than 1,300 matches in ICT, technology, engineering and office. Professionals are employed directly by the client or work for a client on a temporary basis for the first six months before becoming a permanent employee. Quality is key at vind! But that is easier said than done, explains Steve Goethals, product owner at vind!

Meanwhile, there were quite a few challenges due to the high quality requirements, such as less smooth cooperation due to a decentralized organization, time-consuming onboarding, lagging knowledge transfer and assurance. Furthermore, there was a great need to deploy modern recruitment marketing techniques. vind! tried all kinds of initiatives with different systems in various areas. However, this led to a fragmented IT landscape with more obstacles and little additional revenue.  And with that came the conclusion that something bigger, more fundamental was needed.

Experienced partner

For the selection of and transition to a new system, vind! attracted Engation as an experienced partner. Thijs Burgerhout explains, “We went back to the drawing board. With the experiences of clients and candidates as our starting point, we designed and streamlined all processes with a fresh perspective. So that we can offer a high standard of quality and users can work practically, easily and effectively.

It was clear that we needed a flexible platform with which we could easily and quickly adjust processes to our liking and add new functionalities in an integrated way. Moreover, we were looking for a partner who was willing to shape the product with us. And from there we ended up with Byner.”

IT-landscape

For vind! Byner forms the central platform for sales, recruitment, talent management and engagement. In doing so, it is deeply integrated with technology for data enrichment, innovative recruitment marketing and advanced search & matching.

Integrated process control with an innovative data platform

A complete picture of all information surrounding client and professional. That is what is crucial in making the perfect match. But vind! wanted more. Not only insight into the history and current state of affairs, but also a view of the future and a piece of business planning.

So on Growpath, integrated with the Byner/Salesforce platform, they started building an innovative data model that covers the entire process; from Sales, Recruitment, Marketing to payroll and billing. Thijs Burgerhout explains, “This will give us informed insights into questions such as: which channels and campaigns work best, what are the individual margins, where are the opportunities, what are the growth sectors, which vacancies deliver the most results, and what makes the individual teams so successful?”

Playbook for rapid onboarding and greater enjoyment of the system

Designing and setting up processes is one thing, actually using them properly is quite another. But vind! has found a solution to this problem: a digital Playbook. This already consists of over 300 short videos with ready-to-use explanations and instructions on all the steps in the process.

Steve Goethals explains, “We made these videos right from the start, so that new users are quickly on their way and experienced users have a clear reference.”

Because everyone can get started right away and can understand how and why steps are taken and what it delivers, adoption was very high from the start. Result: more job satisfaction, fast onboarding, high productivity and everyone works to the same standard.

Recruitment marketing

The Jobrock recruitment marketing toolkit in Byner puts users in control. They can now easily create their own landing pages, launch campaigns and publish and post jobs on external sites and social media. But that’s not all. vind! makes extensive use of handy automations integrated with WhatsApp, e-mailing, text messaging, videos and an appointment scheduler.

This works comfortably and effectively: time-consuming and frustrating cold calling has given way to targeted, quality contacts. Candidates schedule their own appointments in the recruiter’s calendar. And perhaps more importantly: vind! now has a huge recruitment advantage thanks to the increased speed and relevance of the offer.

Result

• Strongly increased influx of quality candidates
• Candidate satisfaction increased to 8.8 on average
• Better and deeper picture of candidate needs and ambitions
• Onboarding significantly accelerated and improved
• Better forecasting and integrated management information through the new data platform

Tips for peers

• Before a digital transformation, first sketch the ideal process situation
• Invest in a playbook for adoption and ease of use. This will pay off handsomely
• Work data-driven and choose your platform smartly
• Organize your further development and optimization

Feel the vibe

Missed the event? Watch this recap video and get an impression of the ambiance. And .. be sure you’ll join next time.