Industry :

HR services

Location :

Australia

About Randstad

Randstad is the world’s largest HR services and recruitment provider with over 60 years of experience in the industry. It has a strong presence within 39 countries and represents over 90 percent of the global HR services market. Randstad Australia employs around 1000 corporate employees within its company and also handles a casual workforce numbering over 14,000 people. As Brooke O’Keefe, HR Manager-Randstad Australia, describes, “We source a huge range of workers with diverse backgrounds and skill sets."

The HR department within Randstad follows the same business philosophy that the larger organization does: empowering people to reach their true potential. To facilitate this, Randstad Australia’s HR team implemented Freshservice as the central HR service desk.

 

Growing need for a systematic ticketing process

Before Freshservice, the HR department used shared inboxes to respond to queries and carry out daily operations. But as the volume of tickets began to increase, this system proved inadequate. “The viability of managing queries through a shared inbox was starting to become untenable,” recalls Brooke. “We wanted to improve efficiencies within our team and get a deeper insight into the type of work that they were doing.” This became especially critical when the company started working remotely after the country went into lockdown. Since team leads and managers weren’t actively involved in day-to-day operations, they did not have visibility into the ticketing trends and the broad pattern of queries the HR department was receiving. This prompted Brooke and her team to consider implementing an internal service desk. 

Randstad was no stranger to Freshservice. In fact, several teams from IT to the Legal department were already using Freshservice. As there was already IT buy-in for the solution, this made it easy to implement the same for the HR department as well. What sealed the deal, however, was the customer support Freshworks offered. “A different supplier that we were in conversation with wouldn’t even schedule a time with us to have a meeting. It was such a juxtaposition when we met Freshservice,” says Brooke.
 

“I’ve been a real advocate for Freshservice within the organization, and that has purely come down to the customer service. Nothing was ever a problem for the team. They were always willing to try and create a solution. They made the effort to understand what our challenges were and worked really closely with our IT team.”

Brooke O’Keefe

HR Manager

Randstad Australia

Automating HR workflows for higher efficiency

Once Freshservice was officially implemented, the team was ready to start using it with minimal training. “When our team was first introduced to the tool, they knew it would be an absolute game-changer for us. The solution itself is fairly self-explanatory,” says Brooke. “We had a brief demo and the Freshservice team shared some resources, but beyond that, there was no real training we required to begin using it.”

One of the biggest uses that the HR team hopes to get out of Freshservice is the ability to automate workflows. Broadly, there are three HR workflows in use:

  • New starter workflow
  • Employment change workflow
  • Employee cessation workflow

These workflows had to be manually performed, and given the volume of employees the team works with this was proving to be unscalable. In the last 12 months alone, Randstad Australia has made around 300 hires and has had a staff turnover of around 350. The number of employment changes internally would be about 4 times that figure. Additionally, the HR team manages immigration queries. With Freshservice, Brooke and her team are looking to automate these repetitive processes and reduce the number of actual tickets HR employees have to attend to.
 

Integrating existing solutions with Freshservice

Freshservice and Randstad’s internal HR and IT teams have worked closely to ensure the solution was tailor-made for the department’s needs. Speaking about this engagement Brooke says, “We didn’t just want to put our existing processes into Freshservice, we were really interested in seeing how they could be improved. We shared all of our workflow documents with the Freshservice team and asked them to advise us on how we could make them more efficient.” Through this process, Randstad was able to identify redundancies and bottlenecks in their existing processes and adopt a much leaner approach using Freshservice.

Additionally, Freshservice’s open APIs and customizability gave Randstad the flexibility to integrate existing tools with the solution. For instance, Randstad uses a bot to draft employment contracts. Essentially, a manager, instead of filling out a form, has a conversation with the bot about the new hire. The bot then uses this information to generate a contract within just a few minutes. The team was able to easily integrate the bot with Freshservice, eliminating the need to find an alternate solution.

 

Kickstarting a COVID-19 taskforce

Like most companies around the globe, Randstad Australia was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown restrictions. Given the vast geographical spread of its workers, however, Randstad was in an especially unique position. As the lockdown went into full effect, the company was suddenly inundated with new queries, such as those related to immigration, remote work guidelines, COVID-19 restrictions and vaccination requirements. To prevent those queries coming to various managers by email, Randstad built a dedicated COVID Help portal using Freshservice. A special COVID taskforce was created to handle the queries coming through the portal. “We had to issue a huge number of permits to workers in different states and were constantly fielding questions from employees and workers. Freshservice helped us stay on top of this and enabled us to have consistency in how we were responding to these queries,” says Brooke. 

 

Looking ahead

The HR department’s rapid growth over the last year is expected to continue well into the future. Brooke is confident that Freshservice will be a vital asset to successfully scaling up. Next in the department’s plans is to develop a self-service HR model to empower managers. “Managers are dependent on us for most information, whether it's accessing the org chart or the salary trends within their teams,” says Brooke. By making that information available to managers through a self-service portal on Freshservice, the team believes that managers will be in a better position to lead their teams successfully. 
 

“When we embarked on this project, we asked ourselves how we would create the best experience for managers, remove roadblocks in their work and make life easier for them. We believe we have achieved this goal with Freshservice.”

Brooke O’Keefe

HR Manager

Randstad Australia