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On the eighth floor of the Cornerstone Business Park located at Rotterdam The Hague Airport, you can find Chain Technical Professionals (Chain). Last year this technical service provider was urgently looking for a new ATS/recruitment platform that could link to their new, still to be developed, website. Through efficient and flexible teamwork between Carerix, Secure Design and Chain, it was possible to set up the website within four weeks, including a link with Carerix, the migration of all data, and introducing ‘the World of Chain’.
Extremely customer oriented
In order to find the right technical professionals, the former owner of Chain developed his own database. In order to safeguard the continuity of the database, current director/owner Andy Schoemaker made the decision to outsource this to a professional supplier of recruitment software five years ago. “After five years we came to the conclusion that Chain was developing faster than this party could handle, which meant that we had to look for a new partner. In that regard, Carerix deserves a lot of praise. I had my back against the wall after cancelling with our previous suppliers, and Carerix managed to help us both quickly and professionally. I think that is a true testament to how customer oriented they are.”
Stick to what you know best
Andy continues: “Another reason that we decided to work with Carerix was because of their partner ecosystem. I was very impressed by that. Instead of trying to do everything yourself, Carerix uses the motto: ‘stick to what you know best’. Carerix focuses on system innovation and integrating the best HR Tech Tooling from specialized partners. This is extremely important for Chain to ensure that we keep up with the extreme developments in the field of online recruitment.” Those development are happening at a rapid rate, confirms Sven Versluijs of Secure Design. “As an organisation, you have to go along with automation, and that certainly applies to your website. Consider your findability, how people browse your website, how do you address your target audience?”
The ‘rush’ factor is an important driver
Carerix nominated several partners for the link with the website. “Totally different partners, but the rush factor was an important driver for Chain,” according to Andy. “Secure Design responded to this factor by acting quickly”. Sven Versluijs: “We’ve dealt with extremely tight deadlines before. We sat down with Chain to see how we can use the website to position Chain on the market in an innovative way. Their focus is on a niche target audience, one that is actively being sought after in a massive way. So why should these candidates opt for Chain? The basis of the new website is ‘The World of Chain,’ and behind it various components of pictures and stories of employees and partners. We want to generate the type of enthusiasm that makes someone think, I want to work there too”.
Making sure the customer is moving forward
The cooperation between the partners is going very well. Sven: “The idea is to pull together and ensure that the customer is moving forward as quickly as possible. That is the partner mentality that Carerix wants to exude. We would rather work together than force people out of the market entirely.” In addition to smooth collaboration and communication, Andy is also very proud of the fact that the youngest employees within Chain were responsible for the smooth migration and organisation of the database. “In other words: the crucial heart of our organisation”, according to Andy. “this includes thousands of professionals, companies and projects in addition to all the personal and financial data that goes with that. In short, a database with an enormous amount of data.”
Smooth migration
Rob Ooms, a working student at the TU Delft and Susan van der Plas, company office employee at Chain, were jointly responsible for the successful migration, design and linking of website. Andy: “I’ve been involved in a number of migrations, but I’ve never seen such a fast migration, including building a new website, and all realised by young professionals. The latter is perhaps our smartest move! The new generation is uninhibited and looks at the world differently. They also have the least experience with the old system and the old work processes. “The migration process did indeed move very smoothly and quickly”, Rob agrees. “I managed to make all the data from the old system readable and convert all the Excel files. Because Carerix was flexible in making an exception for us in relates to their traditional working method for data migration, we were able to continue the process and could meet the tight deadline.”
The correct technical design
Despite the short four-week timeframe, Chain seized the moment to remap all their business processes. “There was a lot of consulting within our team, thinking about how we want to set up certain things within our system,” says Susan. “This was a fun challenge to truly achieve something together. Which automation triggers are needed the moment someone reacts to a vacancy? An email needs to be sent out, but what should the content of that email be. If you move onto the next step, it means documents have to be activated. I also want to give compliments to Alwin Baaij, who clearly monitored the division of the different tasks between Rob and myself from Carerix . Rob was responsible for the data migration and I was responsible for the technical design. It was important that we didn’t interfere with one another too much, because ultimately that doesn’t work.
Building towards the end goal
The new Chain website offers much more opportunities to approach the market than the previous, static site, did. The site now has a section with vacancies. If someone applies on the website, the information is received by Carerix. “And with what we have now, we are just in our infancy,” says Sven, “because within Carerix there are many possibilities. Something else Chain wanted was to have control over everything that happens on the website; including maintenance, updating articles, and publishing vacancies. They can also add components themselves, components such as a campaign or an action. This makes Chain extremely flexible in responding to the market instantly. If you build a website, it is important to put down the foundation first. We more than succeeded in that, which means that it is now time to add new components to expand ‘The World of Chain’. There are many more steps that we can come up with. We are building towards the end goal in small increments.
Carerix: the flexible cloud-based software for CRM, recruitment and secondment
Every day thousands of professional employment agencies and talent management departments rely on our online solutions for their secondment and recruitment processes. Carerix offers a modern cloud-based platform to support the entire candidate brokerage process. Our smart applications allow us to provide better insights into talent profiles. Better insights for recruiters, intermediaries, and staffing professionals ensure that they can find the best candidates!
About Chain
Chain Technical Professionals was established in 1991 and supplies professionals for the technical market. This includes the design, construction and maintenance of technical installations in complex environments, such as offshore platforms, bridges, tunnels and locks or petrochemical/pharmaceutical plants. Chain primarily focuses on those candidates whom are highly educated who are responsible for thinking through complex problems and monitoring projects. The office in Rotterdam home is home to around 10 employees, but on site, depending on the size of the projects, Chain employs between 50 and 100 professionals. Clients include companies such as Shell, BP, Siemens, Heijmans and BAM.