Case studies

Personal Group develop bespoke solution for Randstad, the largest recruitment company in the world, enabling them to connect and engage their entire workforce all in one place.

Randstad is the global leader in the HR industry, active in 38 markets. In 2018 alone, the recruiter helped more than 2.5 million candidates find a meaningful job - placing people firmly at the heart of the organisation. Globally, Randstad celebrates its 60th year in 2020 and the UK now hires 1,400 employees (working in over 70 locations throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). It’s a business renowned for combining the power of technology with the human touch - they call it Human Forward.

Migrating in-house

Back in 2017, Randstad was using a digital employee benefits company to offer discounts to employees, but the system proved to be complicated, clunky and rigid. Whilst the Randstad HR team was proud of the benefits it offered employees, they were not being utilised effectively because of poor online user experience. Randstad knew it had to improve both its technical offering and employee engagement in order to make a real difference. Having overhauled its existing benefits offering just 3 years ago, Carolyn Walker, HR operations director at Randstad UK, wanted to use this opportunity to introduce a new way of working. It needed to offer both a longer-term, sustainable solution coupled with harnessing strong employee engagement. With this criteria top of mind, the decision was made to migrate to a new inhouse platform.

We met with Randstad to discuss the barriers that were holding its current benefits offering back. Like Randstad, we were focused on matching the inhouse solution with the right employee benefits. Three key features were going to be critical to make the employee benefits solution a success.  Through a single log-in, simple user interface and the ability to house everything in one place, the new platform was perfectly designed to drive employee engagement.

“Our biggest focus to this day remains connecting and engaging with all our employees. We wanted our employee benefits programme to offer more than just discounts. However, communicating our employee benefits offering to thousands of employees was proving tricky; many of our employees didn’t even realise they had access to such a benefits platform. We needed to find a way to engage them with us, our brand and the vast benefits we offer to make work as meaningful and fulfilling as possible for our people. That was going to be the key to future proofing our employee benefits programme,” explained Carolyn Walker, HR operations director at Randstad UK.

Tailor made solution

With simplicity at the heart of the brief, our technical team worked closely with Randstad UK’s HR team. Within a matter of weeks, the team had tailored our Hapi platform to specifically address Randstad UK’s needs. To make the offering even more personalised for its employees, Hapi was rebranded to ‘Your Hub’.

Since the nationwide roll-out of Your Hub, we have continued working with Randstad UK to evolve its offering. Today, Your Hub is a single sign-in portal that can be used on a computer or a mobile phone. It provides over 1,500 active users with all the information they need to do their job and take advantage of a comprehensive employee benefits offering. All in one place.

Your Hub brings together a collection of benefits including health and wellbeing resources, discounted gym membership, retail and leisure employee discounts and rewards, employee health checks, financial wellness, HR employee communications and more.

Six months ago, Randstad UK also adopted an ‘awards and recognition’ capability onto ‘Your Hub’. Now employees can nominate one another and send each other e-cards to recognise work excellence and team contributions. This was a suggestion put forward by an employee and the adaptability of our offering meant we could easily add the feature. Our technical team is currently working to develop the ‘Your Ideas’ section on the Your Hub portal, where employees can put forward their ideas for improvement on any area of the business.

Carolyn Walker, HR operations director at Randstad UK said: “Since day one, Personal Group has been an extension of the Randstad team. Personal Group continue to be very responsive to our development requests, which enables us to continuously evolve our offering. The product development team has absorbed all the feedback the team has given them, they go above and beyond to give us a tailored platform that fits our needs. What we have achieved alongside Personal Group has been amazing, and the fact that it’s future proofed is even better.”

Randstad UK’s most recent employee survey results indicate the key features are now Your Hub’s accessibility and simple, streamlining of information.