Elan specialises and dominates the IT&T Recruitment market, operating in 16 countries from 55 offices. A GBP billion organisation, Elan provides IT professionals to over 10,000 companies across the globe, with thousands of staff currently on client premises. Elan has built a reputation for quality delivery of IT personnel in all technologies and disciplines, on a contract, permanent, managed service or outsourcing basis, and continue to attract the best partners in IT, such as BT, HP, and IBM.
Elanís UK operations currently have over 5000 contract staff in positions, and place over 2000 permanent IT specialists every year.
In 2000, Elan was acquired by Manpower, one of the largest employers in the world.
The Challenge
Continually working with the widest selection of skilled IT staff, and wanting to maintain the status as the leading specialist to attract the best candidates and grow the business, Elan wanted to ensure the screening and placement process was performing at an optimal level.
With the added objective of doubling the forecast from placing 2000 IT professionals in 2004 to 4000 in 2005, Elan needed a reliable and comprehensive means to ensure its candidates would continue to meet their high standards.
Contract Challenges
Critical to the candidate pre-screening and placement process is the need to ensure skill levels are not only of a high standard, but remain so under time critical circumstances. Elan also needed to provide an environment for their contract recruitment team to perform job specifications and pre-screening of candidates quickly and easily.
Permanent Challenges
Hiring just one new member of staff can take days away from focusing on core roles. A wrong placement can be costly, absorbing time and money. Elan wanted to ensure its permanent recruitment consultants could provide a seamless path to permanent placements, including pre-screening, knowledge assessments and inductions, as well as achieving a high degree of repeat business.
Maintaining PSL Agreements
As with many recruitment organisations, Elan has a number of Preferred Supplier List (PSL) agreements in place. Integral to these is the need to ensure that any potential candidatesí skills can be substantiated.
The Solution
Elan uses IKM as part of its commitment to meet its clientsí requirements to pre-screen job applicants as well as to identify and ascertain existing skills levels.
In todayís business environment, finding people with the right skills needed to deliver key business objectives is critical to our clientsí competitive capabilities, states Joanna Wood, Marketing Manager, Elan.
IKM offers a wide range of standard and customised assessment packages for professional, occupational and psychometric requirements. IKMís Professional range of assessments include a unique adaptive methodology to achieve the most cost efficient and effective way of measuring knowledge in the shortest possible time.
Adaptive assessments adjust the difficulty of questions based upon the answers to the previous questions. In this manner, no time is wasted giving beginners questions that are too difficult, or asking senior professionals questions that are too basic. Multiple correct answers also ensure that the fewest number of questions is required to produce the greatest level of knowledge detail.
Wood stated: Using IKM allows us to produce a detailed evaluation of knowledge levels in the shortest possible time. This means we can produce a shortlist of quality candidates to our clients quickly.î
Elan has access to over 750 assessments including IT, Sales, Project Management, Clerical, Call Center, MS Office and Computer Literacy. Predominantly using IKM TeckChekTM, Elan produces an objective and detailed proficiency profile of the candidate, including necessary knowledge, understanding, practical experience, work speed, and overall strengths and weaknesses. This level of detail is critical when placing permanent and contract professionals.
Wood stated: One of the most important services we can offer our clients is the ability to pre-screen potential job applicants prior to interview. Integral to this is IKM TeckChekTM, which substantiates candidates existing knowledge levels in relation to the permanent or contract job at hand.î
IKM assessments can be delivered online in a supervised environment administered by Elan, or available remotely as self-administered assessments.
The Results
Since using IKM for pre-screening and assessing candidates, Elan has a higher degree of confidence in providing a quality service for its clients.
Elan has reduced the incidents of clients wasting time on interviewing the wrong candidate or conducting in-depth technical evaluations. ìUsing IKM TeckChekTM we have virtually eliminated time wasted on unsuitable candidates and shortened the technical evaluation process, added Wood.
Pre-screening and knowledge measurement has also improved the candidate placement rates for Elan. ìThrough our free training offer and innovative search and selection methods that include IKMís solutions, we achieve greater levels of repeat business,î said Wood.
Elan is also utilising IKM to extend its value-add services by providing competency evaluations of existing workforce of key clients. IKM TeckChekTM enables us to substantiate the level of competency of IT professionals so we can clearly identify what training needs are required. Through conducting pre and post training assessments we can supply our customers with an accurate training return on investment (ROI) figure. IKM TeckChekTM not only enables us to assess quickly, it enables us to do it accurately, continued Wood.
Overall, IKM has improved the level of quality Elan offers its clients.
IKM TeckChek is an important value-add service that improves the quality of our overall offering to our clients,î concluded Wood.
Elan UK differentiates its service offering using IKM
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