Home : Networking : News

Habitat saves thousands with e-recruitment

The furnishing retailer is looking to save £60,000 by signing up to web-based recruitment systems.

By Miya Knights, 19 Mar 2008 at 13:48

Habitat UK has signed a five-year e-recruitment contract to remove reliance on paper records, provide end-to-end visibility of its hiring processes, and save £60,000.

The High Street home furnishing retailer will use hosted online recruitment management software Bond Talent from provider Bond International Software to provide online web portal-based recruitment application and applicant tracking system functionality throughout its UK operations.

Habitat employs more than 900 people across 38 UK stores and will use the new system to manage all of its recruitment processes electronically and eliminate existing manual and email-based systems.

Sean Thomas, Habitat UK's head of human resources and development, said: "With all of our recruitment records on email and paper, we had no systematic way of calculating even how many candidates we had for each vacancy, let alone a way of centralising all the information."

The web-based system will give its recruitment teams full visibility of all candidates and facilitate secure access to its business partners and line managers, who need to manage more than 4,500 job applicants annually. The retailer creates about 35 vacancies every month.

Migration to the new system is expected to result in the annual cost savings from increased efficiency and speed of operation. "With Bond Talent, the time taken from posting a vacancy to filling it can be dramatically reduced. We will see a substantial reduction in administrative time spent and we expect to save thousands through productivity and time savings," Thomas said.

He added: "All of our line managers, regardless of department or location, can post vacancies through the portal, to which prospective candidates can submit their applications. These candidates can then be assessed and tracked all the way through the recruitment process."

"Moreover, our recruitment department has full visibility of each application and can create a 'talent pool' from which we can select appropriate candidates for future positions. We see this as a clear advantage for the business," he said.