Record Quarter for StepStone Solutions with over 60 New Customers

Reaffirming its position as the largest and fastest growing provider of e-recruitment solutions in Europe, StepStone Solutions capped an eventful and successful year with over 60 new customers in its 4th quarter, across Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and UK.

StepStone i-GRasp now powers recruitment for over 150 customers in 11 languages across 30 countries. In one of the largest e-recruitment initiatives of 2005, Royal Mail, one of the UKís leading employers, has selected i-GRasp to meet its future staffing requirements. Also during the quarter, working with Capital Consulting, Bank of America has extended its use of the i-GRasp solution to cover all parts of its UK business, as well as adding all internal recruitment to the system. Other new customers in the quarter include Fiat in Italy which will roll-out i-GRasp across all its brands, Elan for temp and contractor management at Reuters, Hudson adopting the solution to support recruitment for Ericsson in UK, and EDF- GDF in France.

During Q4, StepStone delivered the first release of StepStone EasyCruit to widespread praise from its early customers. StepStone EasyCruit combines and enhances the features of StepStone OneStep and of EasyCruit HR to create a new market-leading e-recruitment solution. New customers for StepStoneís EasyCruit product line include Citibank in Belgium, Sony Ericsson in Sweden, Oticon in Denmark, Securitas Direct in Norway, Tecnimont in Italy, Enteo in Germany and SunGard for pan-European recruitment. In addition, Statoil, an established user of EasyCruit in Norway, has signed a further contract to roll out the solution to its retail organisations in Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Russia.

In Financial Services, StepStone is rapidly establishing itself as the de facto preferred e-recruitment supplier. During Q4 Citibank in Belgium, Handelsbanken in Sweden and the Nordics, HSH Nordbank in Germany and Runica in France joined existing clients, who include The Royal Bank of Scotland , HBOS, Abbey, Norwich Union, AXA, Cetelem, ECB (European Central Bank) and the FSA, in enjoying the benefits and results of working with StepStone Solutions.

In another successful quarter, StepStoneís Obvious Solutions has undertaken recruitment assignments across Europe as well as in USA and India for a number of blue-chip employers including Amazon, SAP, Irish Life & Permanent, SAIC, Microsoft, HBOS and BP.

Commenting on these results, Matthew Parker, Managing Director of StepStone Solutions said, ìOnce again we have delivered our most successful quarter to date. Over the last year, the market has developed rapidly with an increasing number of organisations investing in best practice recruitment solutions. Our unparalleled multi-country, multi-lingual delivery and support capability, combined with the proven results achieved by our customers, is making StepStone the natural choice for European recruiters.î