CVWarehouse supports Agidens with international recruitment
For Agidens, a growing international engineering and automation company, the search for engineers never stops. With a presence in six countries and an enormous stream of projects, recruitment is happening at a relentless pace. To meet the constant demand for new employees, Agidens is looking both in Belgium and abroad. In this context, how does the business maintain a global overview and at the same time have a pool of candidates? This is where CVWarehouse comes in.
HR Manager Kathleen Dupont explains: “Last year we hired around a hundred new employees, and we continue to grow. Around 95% of our new colleagues are engineers or technical employees, ranging from designers to engineers that manage projects during the implementation of specific works. These profiles are difficult to find in Western Europe, where there is a real war on talent. We try to attract them with interesting projects, but we also look further afield.
Engineers can be found outside Western Europe, so we are searching there via recruitment companies, LinkedIn and international job fairs.”
HR Officer Michael Van ‘t Veer knows exactly where the challenge lies: “Engineers are aware that they are in high demand, so it is a real challenge to attract them. Agidens is a great employer, and tries to profile itself to candidates this way. The financial package that we can offer – we have already been working with a cafeteria plan for three years, which allows employees to adjust their salary package themselves – is one thing, but nowadays growth opportunities are more important. There are many development opportunities within our business, and depending on the required competences and personal ambition, employees can take different training sessions and courses.” In this way, the company is contributing to personal growth. “I estimate that every Agidens employee does two weeks of training per year,” adds Kathleen.
Recruitment in own hands
The recruitment process at Agidens has greatly evolved. “In the past, we mainly relied on recruitment agents,” explains Kathleen. “But two years ago we hired Michael so we could fully manage the recruitment ourselves. That gave us the room to be more international and creative to overcome the shortage of engineers in Western Europe. Today, we not only hire people from the other side of the world, but also have them working there. After all, what is the difference between working from home somewhere in Belgium, or working in an office in Krakow?”
Over the years, both the recruiting method and the follow up of job applications have changed. “Before we started working with CVWarehouse, our recruitment policy was limited. We needed an internationally scalable tool, and CVWarehouse was the ideal solution. Now we can set up a database for every country, with an umbrella layer for Michael, who has overall responsibility. Through this, all data is collected centrally, but each office has its own database.”
Now the new European privacy law is being introduced, it is very important for us that candidates can manage their own profile. This means we do not have to continually ask them if we can keep their CV on file for future vacancies, etc. Candidates can change or delete their own profiles whenever they want, which saves us a great deal of work.
— Kathleen Dupont, HR Manager
Efficiency first
“Now the new European privacy law is being introduced, it is very important for us that candidates can manage their own profile. This means we do not have to continually ask them if we can keep their CV on file for future vacancies, etc.
Candidates can change or delete their own profiles whenever they want, which saves us a great deal of work,” explains Kathleen.
“Another advantage of CVWarehouse is that the tool offers a good overview for our hiring managers. At any one time, we have between fifty and one hundred vacancies online. If Michael had to contact each of the managers separately to update them, it would eat up half of his time. Now the managers follow the progress themselves via CVWarehouse.”
Michael adds: “CVWarehouse makes it possible to place our vacancies on various job sites as well as on our own website. One of the latest ongoing projects with CVWarehouse is adjusting the layout of the jobs page on our own website. We are creating a clear page with a fresh style, which is really important for the visibility of our vacancies.”
The collaboration for this project is going smoothly. “The service from CVWarehouse is outstanding. We have fixed contact people, and if we contact them, they respond straight away, and try to help us as quickly and precisely as possible. I believe that this is real added value,” states Michael.
Positive view of the future
In any case, Agidens’ plans are clear: keep growing. “We want to hire around a hundred people each year. Our reputation is good, and we are inundated with new projects. So we need to keep recruiting,” states Kathleen. Michael is also ambitious. “Our team has currently 550 people. In 2020 we want to have between 650 and 700 employees. That seems realistic to me.”
Agidens will certainly continue to use CVWarehouse in the future. “Of course, the output that you get from the system depends on your input. We are very busy expanding our database, and this is now gradually beginning to take shape. Until two years ago Agidens was an engineering company with a limited applicant history and only a small pool of candidates on file. In this regard, the input from CVWarehouse was the turning point,” according to Kathleen. “Definitely in the long term, such a database is really useful. Last year we drew on the pool of candidates that we had built up in the system, and we will undoubtedly do this more often in the future, meaning that vacancies will be easier to fill.”
