Recruitment group SThree, which owns many well-known
recruitment firms, has invested about 10% of the total project cost
of implementing a customer relationship management system in
enabling the proper engagement of its end-users.
Most of the end-users are salespeople paid partly by commission,
and SThree's information services director, David Timoney, said
engaging them in an IT project without compensating them for their
time would have been difficult.
"The business made a significant investment to ensure that we
had good access to people's time, and a number of people were taken
off their sales role and became full-time business analysts for a
couple of years," he said.
SThree has built a client- facing CRM system based on an Oracle
10g database and various elements of
Siebel Customer Relationship Management,
including Sales Base, Marketing Automation and Marketing Campaign
Analytics.
The aim was to improve management and circulation of recruitment
leads by formalising systems for sharing, Timoney said. For
example, the system would enable an consultant who specialises in
C++ jobs to pass on client leads to colleagues recruiting in other
technologies.
Although consultants were already rewarded by SThree for passing
on leads, this had been done on e-mail or using written messages.
With a system in place for managing leads, SThree said it could now
ensure they were followed up and analysed to better predict future
business opportunities.
"We wanted to give consultants a more holistic view," he said.
"We wanted effective leads management and Siebel does it out of the
box, is flexible and is in free form."
Although SThree was looking for an overall improvement in
business performance from its use of Siebel, Timoney said it would
particularly look for improvements in yield per CV sent or job
interview.
SThree has also developed a bespoke candidate relationship
management system in-house, also based on Oracle databases, using
an agile development process in collaboration with the business
users.
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