The Practical Cloud: Colt

Colt has saved £300,000 on recruitment costs alone this year by replacing a hotchpotch of different recruitment processes with a single, Cloud solution from SuccessFactors. Telecoms and IT services specialist Colt operates in 13 countries and is expanding rapidly.

With roughly 600 new hires a year, the company was keen to apply a more streamlined approach to recruitment to help drive this growth. Replacing its 15 existing recruitment systems with one standard format was key to finding better quality recruits and 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 advertisments, inconsistencies in agents and fees for executive search and inconsistencies in the way we did internal recruitment. ”

This siloed approach meant that employees in Italy, for example, could only see opportunities in their own country rather than Colt’s other offices in Europe or in India. Using SuccessFactors Recruiting Management, Colt is better able to analyse the skills sets of its existing staff and identify internal talent ready for promotion, as well as find external candidates for vacant positions.

It also played a key role in cutting £300,000 this year from agency fees, though Musson stresses that the true value of the new system is far wider than anything you can put a a price tag on.

Colt was already familiar with cloud-based HR services, as it had implemented SuccessFactors’ performance and talent management suite about 18 months ago. It had previously attempted to use its existing Oracle11i HR management system to shoulder these additional HR requirements, but it had proved a tough ride.

Musson recalls:

“We did try and do talent identification and performance management, but it was far from state of the art and there was a huge amount of push back from line managers because it wasn’t intuitive to use.”

Sprucing up Oracle11i to meet its requirements was not an option, as it would involve considerable investment and require almost as much work as a whole new implementation. Instead, Colt began looking for solution that could work alongside and supplement its creaking Oracle11i system.

Although the fact SuccessFactors was a Cloud based was a factor in its decision, the company was not specifically looking for a service approach. But, soon into the RFP process, Colt realised that the benefits of ease of implementation and costs made a Cloud solution highly desirable compared to an in-house system. Musson expands:

“It means you’re not completely tied, and if you want to take a different solution it’s much easier because it’s not embedded in your own servers. You can add to it and take stuff away and because you’re charged per user or module, it’s so much easier.”

The beauty of Cloud services is that you can be up and running very quickly with little customisation - it took just 10 weeks to get SuccessFactors working, whereas it took 18 months in his previous organisation just to get the data in place.

But Colt has made some changes and works with SuccessFactors to tweak the system to meet specific requirements. Musson warns against the dangers of over-customisation, however. He says:

“I’ve been in organisations where they do lots of customisation of 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. Persuading people to move to SuccessFactors was easier for some modules. It was straightforward, for example, to get people to swap to the new performance management product, as the previous system had been so dreadful to use. Similarly, compensation management had all been done by spreadsheet, so the benefits of a new system were obvious. ”

It was a slightly harder sell on the recruitment side, however. Some managers saw this as creating more work for them, because now much of the recruitment process is managed at line manager level rather than handled centrally through HR. This means HR can redeploy people onto other projects and save money, while it forces managers to really think clearly about the people they want.

Although adopting a cloud-based approach was not top of the agenda when it began its search to improve its HR capabilities, Musson believes that it is definitely right up there as a key consideration now. Musson says:

“For me the Cloud is the way to go. It’s low cost, easy to manage, easy to keep up to date.”