SaaS - a Life on Mars experience or a 21st Century Bureau based e-recruitment solution?

I had a ‘Life on Mars’ experience the other week, except I think I woke up in 1981 but my name wasn’t Sam Tyler. I had just been reading a report from Gartner about Software as a Service (SaaS) and thinking – hey, this is what our iCams e-recruitment service is – other analysts appeared to be asking if SaaS was the 21st century Bureau solution, when I started to read one of my early work diaries..

In 1981 I was a Graduate Trainee and the HR system was run on a mainframe Bureau system, hosted in NL, dialled up on a daily basis. It cost £75,000 per year, expensive for a 750 employee company.
The Bureau was replaced with the first UK personnel packaged applications, installed on an IBM 4341 mainframe and implemented by yours truly. As security of data was paramount it was with amazement that the management agreed to spend £10,000 on a line printer for installation in the HR department office – this was twice my annual salary! Today, this is equivalent to paying £30,000+ for an office Laser printer!

And so, over the next two decades or so, an array of technological solutions have been offered up as the ‘mantra’ for the best HR solution…mainframes were replaced by PC’s – soon Networked, the advent of relational database systems spawned the rise of departmental Unix systems, then ‘client server’ – everything went GUI (Graphical User Interfaces). Then the move towards ‘self service’, workflow engines’ – suddenly business process re-engineering became the vogue until a steady growth of usage this thing called “the Internet”! Overnight all systems suddenly became ‘web enabled’ – Thin Client (the size zero label of software!) And then the growth of hosted services, or Application Service providers (ASP) and now the SaaS debate! However, before looking deeper at the SaaS model, let’s first look at e-recruitment.

e-recruitment

At Hireserve we have been helping companies for some 9 years to utilise web technology to help acquire staff efficiently and cost effectively. We originated out of a project with Oracle Corporation in the mid 90’s that resulted in a saving of £1m in agency fees in the first 12 months of operation.

e-recruitment is viable today because if you analyse the profile of people you actually want to hire it’s highly likely some 95%+ will be accessing the internet daily (in the UK it’s 30million)

In principle it’s simple;

• leverage your own web presence - your online Brand
• Drive all your candidates from all sources to find your own corporate website and your own job vacancies easily.
• Make it very simple for them to register interest in joining you or apply for a specific vacancy.
  
• Say ‘Thank you’ i.e. ensure you communicate appropriately with all candidates.
• Remove the paperwork form the process and enable easy screening and communication with everyone involved in the process
• Make it easy to build a qualified “talent pool” – so you can start to fish in your own pool first.
• Remove all unnecessary use of 3rd party agencies – 100% is unlikely especially for the very scarce skills!

Typical impact will be the lowering your overall recruitment costs by some 20%+, lowering of administration paperwork by 50% r more and the faster hiring of better quality staff.

e-recruitment in the Financial services sector

Today, one of our Clients, Asirt, specialises in the financial services sector and helps companies acquire staff more cost-effectively than through the use of traditional agencies – companies such as Legal & General Investments, Rhyme Systems and Threadneedle Investments.

“Acquiring your staff through the use of traditional agencies is a very expensive option“ said Gerald Hough (MD Asirt). “We also find in the sector a growing awareness that agency costs are too high and there is a workable alternative that is effective at attracting good quality people. It’s not just about speed of execution, which is important, but also about creating an awareness of quality branded direct to market recruitment. This is the exciting, modern way to recruit and use of the iCams software from Hireserve provides us with a cutting edge solution.

However, success is not all about the technology – the clicks! At Asirt we utilise the iCams ‘clicks’ with our own ‘bricks’ i.e. real expertise in building media campaigns to generate a high volume of quality candidates & channel them direct to our clients branded websites. We back this up with an application process that ensures candidates have a positive experience and they do not feel like they are being processed. Each candidate might be a future client so a constructive experience is critical to client brand protection.

An example is our graduate recruitment programme with Threadneedle Investments. A focussed media campaign directing graduates to an online application form (in their own time) resulted in a campaign that was so successful its created an unforeseen problem – too many high quality candidates to select from!. The iCams software provides an interactive link with the client so we can tell candidates exactly where they stand, in a timely fashion.

It came as a bit of a shock when my previous supplier decided to stop investing in the software – this was critical to our business. So we spent many months researching and assessing all the big providers. However, we came across a small niche player, Hireserve.

I needed an offering which I could rely on 100% and I wanted a complete software service solution as I didn’t want to invest in IT infrastructure myself.

So today, I am able to look my client in the eye and say with considerable confidence that I use a very good software package supported by top class people who really care about client service and are prepared to invest a good proportion of their gross in keeping the product in peak condition. Without this confidence I would be very reluctant to offer a service to these significant FS organisations AND in selecting them I researched the market quite intensively and thought them to be the best option for me. After a year or so I haven't changed this view” said Gerald.

The SaaS Model – impact & benefits

Gartner defined SaaS as where the Application is;

1. Owned, delivered, and managed remotely by one or more providers
2. Based on single set of common code and data definitions which are consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers at any time.
3. Licensed on pay-per-use or subscription basis.

In addition to all the above iCams is 100% web architected and we operate where service to our clients is paramount - it’s inevitable when 80%+ of your income is dependant upon continuation of service to clients.

Gaining real benefit from using iCams is pretty straight forward. The main impact of the SaaS model is affordability e.g. our smallest client employs just 70 people.

Some of the real benefit of our SaaS deployment:

‘Just in time’ functional delivery to meet our clients’ needs is enabled by embedding our clients’ actual requirements within our latest version of product, updated quarterly. Our approach is simple; we tell the client how we can meet its requirements; what it will cost (effort to build typically max few days effort). We then build this in a manner so it can be easily supported & deployed to other clients if required. The client approves what’s been built and delivered. That’s it. This means we engineer our offering to meet actual clients’ needs and our development activity is geared around actual clients’ own project implementation timescales.

Speed & Cost of delivery. We are able to generate a Client’s baseline environment within 2 minutes. One of our fastest deployments was with Grant Thornton in Eire, 2 working days. Typically it takes about 6 to 12 weeks to fully implement and SaaS enables an option for remote consultancy on an hourly basis, so no big budgets are required.

The £30,000 printer question. Security of personal data today is probably of higher concern than it was in 1981. Then it was the new experience of paper to electronic records – today its legislative compliance and corporate risk.

Operating in a secure but shared environment is at the heart of the SaaS model. We take security of our clients’ data seriously and have regular 3rd party OWASP (The Open Web Application Security Project) assessment of our service. All our services use SSL encryption.

No Long term commitment. We do not expect our clients to commit to long term contracts, typically 12months but some are less. It’s the client’s data, so the client can have it whenever it wants it. Whilst we believe in making it easy for our clients to move to another supplier, it’s something we have little experience about actually doing!

Life on Mars? – May be - but not as we knew it!

In my 25 years experience of HR systems I have drawn a simple conclusion – complexity of the solutions i.e. cost and complexity in deployment, appears more closely correlated to the complexity of the authoring company itself than anything else. So whilst I think it’s a bit of an academic argument if SaaS is the 21st Century Bureau solution, it goes deeper; I feel its all about the underlying philosophy of the software developer, which in turn has moulded the actual application architecture.

About Hireserve

Hireserve is a provider of web-based recruitment management solutions for HR and recruiting professionals. iCamsOndemand® is a state-of-the-art Hiring Management Solution that creates a one-stop recruiting resource to streamline internal recruiting operations, saving corporations time and money through integration, automation and collaboration. Clients include Oracle, ITV, and CERN. Learn more about how iCams Ondemand will help your organisation by visiting: http://www.hireserve.com.