Recruiting Success

One of Scandinavia’s most successful recruitment businesses is using PAR’s data quality tools. We find out why it’s helping them increase business and ‘work smarter’.

StepStone’s business is about matching potential job candidates with employers’ vacancies. But unlike a traditional recruitment agency, the company sells online job listings to companies. Its offering is market visibility and it currently attracts more than a million online user sessions each week and also holds a million searchable CVs.

Because visibility is the aim, much of StepStone’s marketing spend goes on targeting candidates. Without visitors, the service would become unattractive to companies.

Recruiting in a recession

So how does StepStone find its business customers and in such an economic downturn, are they recruiting at all?

“How companies have been affected by the economic crisis differs from industry to industry,” says Casper Hviid, Business Intelligence Manager Nordics at StepStone. “Even though we have seen negative growth, many companies still have a recruitment need because of their staff turnover.

“The key is to work smarter, targeting the most likely companies. In this market, our resources are not sufficient to work badly because we have a limited number of sales people. We need to maximise the resources that we have,” he says.

Working smarter

For StepStone, a big part of working smarter is to get its data in order. The company had already started the process in Denmark and when Casper Hviid took over responsibility for Swedish and Norwegian data, he brought in PAR.

The initial cleanse in August 2008, in which PAR matched its EuroContactPool master database against StepStone’s data, threw up some uncomfortable results. The match hit rate was below the average.

Casper Hviid says the result did not surprise him: “I knew the poor quality of a lot of the company records in there – maybe half a name, a third of a telephone number and no address”.

StepStone took the decision to devote time and resources to go through the mis-matches manually. It was a major task but paid dividends by significantly improving the match hit rate.

This has helped them target businesses that are in more recession-proof sectors because PARs tools enable selection within industries and StepStone is clear on which industries have growth potential.

Maintaining quality

A database is a living entity and unless quality procedures are maintained, it will soon go out of date again. StepStone has used the PAR One-by-One plug-in to SuperOffice CRM to maintain the quality levels it has reached.

“Before the plug-in, creating a new company in the CRM was a long process,” says Casper Hviid. “Our salespeople had to find a job listing on the Internet, find a company name, maybe a contact, and call them. If they couldn’t get a response then it was left half-finished. Now, with One-by-One they can add in all the details in seconds.”

So important is ongoing data quality to StepStone that they have forbidden the manual creation of new companies on the database.

One of the major reasons for choosing PAR as a supplier was the option to have automatic, monthly updates. Every month, StepStone gets an update on the companies in its database and this is integrated into the CRM. (no manual procedures involved)

Increasing sales

StepStone has recently purchased another 9,000 company records from PAR, which are companies that match its target criteria but were not in the database, as part of a project to build its Swedish operation.

As the economic environment improves, StepStone is enjoying increased business as a result of having better data and is seeing an immediate result from its Swedish data project. “We now have a solid platform to build on. We have always used targeted campaigns and the quality of our data makes it so much easier to do that,” says Casper Hviid.

 

Would you like to find out more?

Contact PAR today on +46 (0)8-775 36 00 or send an e-mail.