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Randstad, founded in 1960 in the Netherlands, is an international recruitment company with more than 4,000 branches in 39 countries around the world.

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Professional services

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Applied solutions

Google Workspace: Mail & Agenda

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Google Workspace

Randstad: “Google to the max”

Multinational recruitment company Randstad leverages Google Workspace tools worldwide to create game-changing efficiencies in everything from onboarding staff to producing annual assessments.

What functionalities?

Randstad uses a large amount of functionalities from Google Workspace such as: Calendar, Cloud Search, Currents, Drive and Docs, Gmail, Chat, Meet, Vault, Contacts. Groups and Keep.

Google Cloud Results

Streamlines annual reviews to save 900 work hours per year
Structures teams with Google Keep for intuitive workflows in a flexible environment
Shares Google Workspace tips with more than 35,000 employees worldwide with Google Currents

For more than five decades, Randstad has been matching companies around the world with millions of temporary and permanent employees, creating long-term, successful working relationships. Today, the company has an extensive multinational recruitment network, with 35,000 employees applying HR expertise in markets from Norway to Malaysia and more than 37 countries in between. To offer employees a more mobile, low-maintenance alternative to their previous communications solution, Randstad offered Google Workspace to its employees in 2012, allowing them to switch. All Randstad employees made that choice, assisted by a Randstad "Transformation Kit" with everything a team needs for a successful migration. Now Randstad's global community of Google Workspace users has unleashed the full potential of the platform, going beyond Gmail and Calendar to make the entire organization more efficient.

"Technology gives us more time to be in touch with people. This allows us to give more attention to the people we outsource to, our colleagues and our clients. Our administrative capacity makes Randstad successful, and Google Workspace makes all our processes more efficient."

Senne Beckers, Senior Accounts Specialist

Sharing tips worldwide to get the most out of Google Workspace

Using Google Currents, Randstad workers share their ideas for applying Google Workspace to their work. “We share tips and tricks with each other from all over the world,” says Frank van der Bijl, Business Analyst IT at Randstad. “There’s always someone you can learn from or educate, and that’s an innovation in and of itself. In the past, when we wanted to share information like this, we would contact the internal communications team for them to put something on the company intranet. Now we go straight to Google Currents and post it directly.” Randstad calls this project “Google to the Max”, and the boost in collaboration and efficiency helps its staff around the globe be more productive.

Those tips range from saving time by using Calendar to book meeting rooms and check the availability of colleagues, to minimizing unnecessary travel by replacing meetings with Google Meet. As an HR company, Randstad processes, optimizes and edits thousands of resumes every day. By using Google Forms to collect data for resumes and Google Docs to edit them, Randstad teams streamline that core process. "Instead of sending resumes back and forth with corrections and suggestions, we all work on them together, directly in Docs," Frank says. "It's collaborative, like how we centralize information in Google Sheets to give everyone on a team one up-to-date view of clients and candidates, maximizing the chances of a successful match."

Many of the innovations tackle processes that used to create bottlenecks by requiring specialist knowledge.

“In Sheets, I can create a pivot table, then I can drop Sheets visualizations directly into Google Slides for presentations. In the past, we would need visual designers to do that, but now I can do it in a matter of minutes.”

Frank van der Bijl, Business Analyst IT

Streamlining annual assessments with Forms and Sheets

In addition to improving internal processes, the innovations directly benefit Randstad customers, Senne explains: "We have more than 1,000 people working for a global airline through Randstad, and because Google Workspace is so open, the airline, like other customers, uses Google tools to send us information, even though they work with a different communication platform. "

That flexibility allows Senne and her team to apply Google Workspace technology to problems outside of Randstad. "We used to have a very old-fashioned way of collecting annual reviews from each of the people we have at the airline," Senne says. "We would email a document to an airline shift manager, who would have to go to his or her computer to receive it, print it out, fill out the document, scan it, save it, and then email it back. At one point, the workload was so high that we had to stop receiving feedback altogether. "

To simplify the process, Senne implemented Forms, as a fast, mobile way for shift leaders to send their assessments. “With Forms, shift leaders can be inside a plane or out on the runway, and when they want to comment on an employee they can give us instant feedback that goes directly into our system,” explains Senne. Back at the Randstad office, HR then pulls all the data they need directly from Sheets, without having to reference the CRM, chase clients, or search emails.

It now takes five minutes to complete an annual review, instead of one hour. Because there are 1,000 employees, a task that takes 1,000 hours a year or 140 workdays can now be completed in two and a half weeks.

Senne Beckers, Senior Accounts Specialist

"Because Sheets translates information directly into graphs as soon as it comes in, we can track the situation at a glance," says Senne. "Streamlining the creation of annual assessments with Sheets not only makes the process more efficient, it also means we can spend more time properly discussing feedback with employees. That's good for them and good for airline management, which is now looking to roll out this approach to more business units."

Bringing teams together with Google Keep

As HR specialists, Randstad employees know that solving individual work problems is only part of the story. For teams to work effectively, solutions need to be brought together in one place, where they can feed off each other. To make that possible, Randstad employees use Google Keep to communicate.

"Keep really helps me structure workflows and share my ideas directly with my team," says Senne. "I have a lot of ideas all the time, and with Keep I can make them known to the people I work with at the same time I'm writing them down in a meeting. It brings Documents, Forms and Spreadsheets together in one place where we can intuitively organize and prioritize things. With our to-do lists visible on that central hub, we can all look at each other and track progress in a transparent way. "

For Senne, that functionality is a great fit with Google Cloud Search. "As a senior accounts specialist, it's my responsibility to know what's going on in our teams, and Google Cloud Search helps me keep all the information at my fingertips so I can share it. This is the home screen of my Chrome browser. "

Recognizing that this flexible, fast-paced way of working may not be familiar to new employees, Frank uses Google Keep to introduce people to the Google Workspace tools. "When people are new to a company, they are sometimes nervous about asking for advice, such as how to request a day off," Frank says. "To help them, I created a four-step checklist of 'Things to do when you join Randstad,' which directs them to the information they need to get on board. With Keep, I can see where they are in the process and can contact them if I think they might need help. "

Embracing the interconnected environment

In each of the 39 countries where Randstad operates, operations are moving at their own pace toward greater Google Workspace integration. And while they are all at different stages of the process, the direction of travel is clear.

"Across the company, Chromebooks will be the next step, so we fully embrace the interconnected app environment," Frank says. "Some countries have already fully transitioned to Chromebooks, and others are migrating all their data to the cloud. Everyone has their own approach, and we all share our experiences through Google Currents and helping colleagues. Every day we find a new feature that helps us be more efficient, and all we need to implement it is an Internet connection.

g-company’s contribution

Randstad pays a lot of attention to training and guidance. g-company, as a Google partner and specialized in implementation and support for Google products in business, has supplied its expertise for this process as well. They support Randstad in making the move to Google Workspace, both at the technical level and at the employee-level to help with the change process. In addition, the Google partner builds applications for Randstad on Google App Engine, to integrate existing systems, for instance.