Streamlined HR processes at Howest

University of applied Sciences, Howest, has 8000 students following one of the 24 Bachelor programs at their campuses in Ostend, Bruges or Kortrijk. Can you imagine the number of teachers and guest lecturers that walk these campuses? The amount of applications, interviews, and administrative work this would require? You would think that the practical organization of the personnel generates mountains of data.

Well, we couldn’t imagine it either. Thanks to our automation solution, the Howest HR department can register and handle their complete staffing procedures in just a matter of clicks.

Frederik D’hulster, Director of Education and Internationalization, HOWEST

“Our people are our biggest resource. We must be able to continuously guide and monitor our staff. That’s why HOWEST required an Office 365 and cloud solution 2 years ago. As early adopters, we contacted Arcade to help the IT department take a jump start in our staffing project.

Thanks to the smart automation of Arcade, our HR department can now register and handle personnel files in a matter of seconds.”

Focus on added value tasks

CHALLENGE 1

Personnel and HR administration involves a lot of paperwork and maintaining meticulous candidate files. HOWEST required an online database to speed up the productivity of this process. The solution had to ease the administrative burden for employees to focus on tasks with more added value, such as evaluating for cultural fit, effective onboarding, or employee personal guidance.

SOLUTION 1

First of all, automated staffing takes a process that was once highly individualized, time-intensive, and difficult, to a process that uses Microsoft technology to quickly and effectively follow up on applicants. To increase productivity this all happens via one digital online form. The relevant documents are generated automatically so that within a few clicks HR can immediately create an online file per person. How easy is that?

Transparant and traceable information

CHALLENGE 2

Staffing is HOWESTs core business. All information has to be available, transparent and traceable, for an organization with 80% of its resources dedicated to staffing. Any authorized employee needs to be able to monitor and access the tool from when the flow starts with external/ internal job publications, followed by selection phases, to finishing off with an onboarding procedure. The HR department desires to efficiently communicate and ensure all HOWEST staff is on the same page (without the endless back and forth e-mails).

SOLUTION 2

Office 365 provides a consolidated platform through which HR teams can communicate. Not only does this improve the internal organization of HOWEST but with the integrated option to share calendars, they can easily schedule appointments without having to continuously consult with each other. Moreover, our solution adds transparency and traceability to the staffing process. HOWEST can monitor which staff is involved in which phase of the selection procedure and involve the right employees when needed.

Centralized information

CHALLENGE 3

There are compliance criteria that companies have to meet when it comes to processing documentation during staffing procedures. For this reason, HOWEST needed a cloud-based tool that could centralize all information and allows for the secure processing of large amounts of data.

SOLUTION 3

As a completely integrated solution, Office 365 also works for documents, spreadsheets, and other Microsoft files. HR can share resumes and job specifications easily while adding notes where needed. With the built-in security and continuous compliance of Office 365, HOWEST can monitor where their data is and who has access to it at all times.

Let’s grow a plan(t)