For over 90 years, the innovative Belgian company Van Marcke has kept families comfortable with its sustainable heating and plumbing solutions. This family business has grown into an international, multidisciplinary group with branches in Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Malta, the United States and elsewhere. Every day, more than 1,600 employees work hard to create a more pleasant home environment for their customers. However, it is challenging to keep finding these motivated talents in an increasingly scarce labour market. So, it’s great to count on professional and motivated partners such as CVWarehouse.

Wanted: powerful platform and customer-centric team

Before CVWarehouse came into the picture, Van Marcke used a module in their payroll processing system for recruitment management. But this module was very slow and offered limited options, says Stien Decadt, Van Marcke’s recruitment manager: “All we could do was see the applicants and consult their CVs. There was no status management or reporting, and we couldn’t view a history either. We had to switch constantly between this module and our Excel files. Paper CVs were put into folders and scanned manually. It was all very primitive. To top it all off, it was quite a pricey solution. So we had plenty of reasons to look for other tools.”
In searching for a new recruitment platform, several criteria were at the top of Van Marcke’s recruitment team’s wish list. User-friendliness was undoubtedly among the essential requirements, as was the responsiveness of the supplier in the event of problems and an extensive reporting functionality. “On the other hand, we didn't want an overly large and cumbersome platform either because this often comes at the expense of flexibility, and you can end up paying for unnecessary features,” adds Stien. At the intersection between user-friendliness, flexibility and affordability, they found CVWarehouse: “The software turned out to be intuitive, and plenty of demos online explain how to use it. The company also proved extremely accessible and immediately provided a SPOC (single point of contact) for all our questions and requests. The pre-prepared reports and additional options for tailor-made reporting were top notch.” Since the price/quality ratio also met expectations, Van Marcke soon decided to go for it.

Added value in efficiency and communication

CVWarehouse has been proving its worth to Van Marcke as a recruitment platform for over five years. It is an essential tool for recruiting over a hundred employees annually and managing an average of fifty job vacancies at any time. It has also proved a precious weapon in the battle for increasingly scarce talent, notes Kimberly Coeck, a recruitment officer at Van Marcke: “Less and less technical-commercial talent is available these days, but this is our most sought-after profile. Although we can work around the shortage through internal training, for example, filling all the vacancies remains challenging. Fortunately, our good name and solid reputation help with the talents we seek. At the same time, we are delighted with the support of CVWarehouse, which makes the lives of our recruiters easier and enhances our positive image among the candidates.”

Kimberly explains that ease of use begins as soon as you start creating job offers. “We have three recruiters, each with their own set of job offers that they can create themselves with one click by posting on the desired job channels (such as our job site, LinkedIn, VDAB, Careerjet, etc.), and then follow up on them. However, we can also consult each other's job offers at any time if a question or update occurs during someone's absence. This is why CVWarehouse's status indicator is so important: we can see the progress of each job offer at a glance, even if we didn't create it ourselves. This allows us to combine efficiency with flexibility.”

Communication with candidates is also highly efficient on this platform. Kimberly continues: “To begin with, an automatic thank you email is sent each time we receive an application. Likewise, if we decide a candidate is unsuitable, we can send a standard email at the touch of a button. There are also lots of email templates that we can use to invite candidates for an interview and so on. We can effortlessly adapt these templates to suit our corporate identity and update them occasionally. After all, the Dutch language is also constantly changing,” she laughs.

The system's efficiency continues to prove itself even after recruitment. Kimberly notes: “For each job offer, you can indicate how many people you seek. If several people are sought for a particular project, and you designate one applicant as ‘recruited’ for this project, the counter will automatically go down by one unit. That’s very handy for project management and reporting.”