International recruitment company Solutions Driven has signed up to HR software solution Cezanne HR as part of a wider drive to improve the efficiency and consistency of its HR processes.
The business employs 38 staff and provides recruitment services to companies in sectors ranging from manufacturing & technology, energy & power, oil & gas, medical & automotive and health & social care. It is leading-edge in its use of technology to support the recruitment process and has ambitious plans to grow the business to in excess of 50 staff by the end of 2014.
Until recently, Solutions Driven had no dedicated HR person on board and was managing its people processes across a series of spreadsheets and with a very basic absence management solution. Shelley McGuckin has recently been brought in as HR Business Partner with a brief to drive the people agenda and streamline HR management. One of her first tasks was to look for an HR software solution that would help the company house all its key data and manage core HR processes in one central place.
“The business had reached a size where it simply wasn’t feasible to manage all these processes manually,” she explained. “We needed an HR system that would allow us to house everything on one central platform and that would grow alongside us.”
Cezanne HR appealed because it provided the ‘one stop shop’ Shelley was looking for. “The product stood out for me because it was simple to set up but sophisticated in terms of what it can do,” she said. “The recruitment industry is very fast-moving and target-based, so we needed something easy to use that would allow managers to access records, log information and get an overview of what was happening in their team. A lot of the systems we looked at were just too complicated to use and wouldn’t have gone down well in a fast-paced recruitment environment.”
Cezanne HR provided an initial online training session, supported by a series of how-to-guides and Shelley is now in the process of inputting the data needed to get the system up and running. She plans to organise a training session to familiarise business managers and department heads with how everything works – after which they will cascade the training to their teams. The plan is for the basic system to go live at the beginning of November, with the performance management element coming on stream by the end of the year.
“Performance management has been very ad hoc up to now. Reviews and one-to-ones were taking place but the information wasn’t always being properly documented,” said Shelley. “Cezanne HR will enable us to take a much more consistent approach and will also encourage managers to take responsibility for managing people processes within their own unit. It will give them ownership – which is important because I want them to see it as ‘their’ system rather than something that belongs to me. It will certainly make my job a lot easier – as the sole HR person in the business I simply couldn’t manage all these processes myself.”
Shelley has also been pleased with the support she has had from the team at Cezanne HR. “I think it’s a fantastic system and I’m certainly impressed with the service I have had from the company,” she said. “The support team have been really helpful with getting us set up and I’m looking forward to getting up and running with it now.”