Computer Futures (hereafter CF) is a brand that belongs to the SThree Group. SThree is an international recruitment specialist that was founded in 1986, in London. The group presently owns eight different recruitment brands, including CF. Each brand specializes in different industries and SThree operates globally in 15 countries: UK & Ireland, Continental Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the Middle East with 41 offices. SThree works with approximately 7,500 clients and has around 2850 employees around the globe (SthreeReport, 2015). While SThree manages multi-brand strategy that builds expertise, the organization maintains its focus on niche sectors that allows them to provide quality service. The organization is constantly growing, adding each year around three new offices globally. Their focus used to be exclusively on the ICT sector; however they currently derive around 59% of their gross profit from Accountancy & Finance, Banking, Engineering, Energy, and Life Sciences (SthreeReport, 2015).
The majority of the organization’s business comes from providing skilled contractors to organizations who need niche skills for temporary assignments. The services cover different areas, from filling roles to providing payroll services and ensuring full regulatory compliance for all parties. CF specialties are; IT recruitment, Software tester jobs, IT Jobs, IT contract roles, IT permanent roles, Analyst jobs, .NET jobs, PHP jobs, C# jobs, SAP jobs, Microsoft SQL, Java jobs, Oracle jobs, Web Development jobs, IT manager, Head of IT jobs (Computer-Futures, 2016). CF has two divisions: Contract and Permanent. The contract division focuses on hiring candidates that work temporarily, their placement lasts between one and 12 months. The permanent division focuses on long-term jobs where the candidate and the client are looking for collaboration; these are generally 1+ year. CF’s market had changed enormously in 2015; the IT recruitment market changed from a client-driven market to a candidate-driven market. This means that the balance of power has changed; good candidates are more scarce and demand more from their employers (ter Haar, 2016).
The current system requires a lot of manual labor from CF employees because the system finds candidates solely based on their location and keywords mentioned in their CV’s. Therefore, it is possible that when a recruiter search for a developer in Rotterdam, the Salesforce candidate system returns a candidate that used to be developer 12 years ago. This makes the search of fitting candidate tedious, inaccurate and unreliable. A similar situation occurs in the Salesforce client database, when recruiters search for a company that need a specific project completed, the system might not have an updated list of companies’ current vacatures. Thus recruiters are searching for weeks until they finally finds a company and are missing companies that were not on the list. This is inefficient, expensive and time-consuming for CF.
Since August 2016, CF has a new department called the Outsourcing Team (hereafter OT) that focuses on the outsourcing of IT professionals. IT outsourcing concerns the outsourcing of all or parts of the IT functions to an external party (ter Haar, 2016). CF provides professionals in this field to clients. Firstly, CF will hire a number of IT candidates and will need to attract enough top talent with specific IT skills that are able to undertake IT related work such as programming to other companies.
In order to avoid having candidates “sitting on the bench” without a project, we propose the use of a platform that will match CF’ IT candidates with CF clients. This will enable on one hand, companies to look for the right candidate with the relevant skills for the job and on the other hand, candidates to choose the project that is better suited for them. The main purpose of the platform would be to match candidates of the OT with available project of companies, this way candidates will be able to indicate whether or not they are willing to take the job and clients’ project would be visible out in the open for the OT candidates’ pool.
Sources:
- Computer-Futures. (2016). computer futures linkedin page . Opgehaald van: https://www.linkedin.com/company/computer-futures
- Computer Futures. (2016). www.computerfutures.com. Opgehaald van About us: http://www.computerfutures.com/en/about-us/diversity
- ter Haar, A (2016, October). Computer Futures thesis supervisor and HR Manager. (A. Barry, Interviewer)
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