Bond Talent's new Habitat

20-January-2010

The Challenge

Habitat has been at the cutting edge of furniture design since the early 1960s, headed by a certain young designer by the name of Terence Conran. From its beginnings, the Habitat name trumpeted its products as being contemporary and functional. Until recently, however, the same couldn’t be said of its recruitment processes. “Up until a year ago applications were still being looked at manually as we had no e-recruitment tools,” previous head of HR UK, Sean Thomas, told Recruiter.

“Recruitment was split 50:50 between agencies and direct resourcing methods,” Thomas continued. “However, we didn’t have an electronic database of candidates we could search through. Because of that we had to manually sift through prospective applications, or rely on agencies to fill our vacancies.”

The company needed a more precise system and so the challenge was to find an e-recruitment tool that could deliver cost-savings through electronic efficiencies.
The HR team looked at around four or five different e-recruitment systems before choosing recruitment software provider Bond International Software’s Bond Talent solution.

“Habitat was confident in the fact that Bond was a strong and stable business, with more than 500 employees, and also that the Bond Talent system’s functionality was easy to pick up and extremely user-friendly, as no one at Habitat had used e-recruitment before,” explained Bond’s sales manager Phil Jones.

“Habitat had no idea even how long it took from putting a vacancy up to time-of-hire.”

The Solution

Working in a true partnership with Habitat, Bond’s implementation team had to first identify Habitat’s recruitment workflow. Jones told Recruiter “The implementation team undertook a gap analysis to identify any disparities in the standard Bond Talent system in relation to what Habitat actually needed. The major benefits Habitat was looking for were measurable metrics, giving them a suite of reports regarding time-to-hire or applicant tracking time.”

Jones went on to explain:

“We’re flexible to adapt to the needs of the client. We’re able to modify Bond Talent. We don’t ask companies to change their recruitment processes to fit in with our system.”

Working in partnership is key to ensuring companies have a system that works for them and is fully understood by the teams which use it.

Bond corporate account manager Dan Woodsford is now the lynchpin between the companies. “The software is adaptable and standard elements of the system can be updated,” he told Recruiter. “In the past few weeks, there has been a further review of the system and Habitat’s working practices around the software. For example, we’re working with Habitat to streamline the application process to make it easier for applicants to continue the process.”

It was through using Bond Talent’s metrics that Habitat’s HR team were alerted to the fact that there were too many actions in the application process, which was putting off possible good candidates. “In partnership with Bond, Habitat is constantly tweaking the system and adjusting various elements to make it better. We’realways looking at the stats to fine-tune the process,” he said.

So will Habitat’s recruitment operation in future be more in line with its furniture - contemporary and functional? Habitat certainly thinks so. “We are intending tohalve our recruitment costs following the use of Bond’s technology, and have reduced our reliance on external agencies,” according to Thomas. During this initial phase, the system is used by only the HR team. However, the long-term strategy is to roll out the system to the retail stores nationwide.

Would you like to be involved in The Challenge? Contact Vanessa Townsend at vanessa.townsend@centaur.co.ukPhil Jones, Bond International Software
lessons learned