StepStone Partner Programme drives Total Talent Excellence

StepStone today unveiled a partner network, which brings together a unique community of consultants, technology providers and other expert organisations. The partner network's sole purpose is the development of truly agile, strategic e-recruitment and talent management capabilities, which enhance customers' employer brands. The programme boasts acknowledged HR leaders as well as best-of-breed specialists, including Capita, Adecco, BackgroundChecking, an Experian company, and Guardian News and Media, and offers customers a broad spectrum of capabilities from candidate attraction, vetting and psychometric testing, to technology integrations and HR outsourcing.

The programme is divided into four core areas; Embedded Service partners (ESP), Channel Sales, ProServ (professional services) and Value Added Services (VAS). This multidisciplinary approach enables StepStone to easily support a wide variety of customer needs, minimising the need for time-consuming customisations or extensions to its solution set.

One of the key Value-Added Service partnerships that StepStone has developed is with Experian. This collaboration has yielded Europe's first integrated talent management and background checking solution, enabling HR professionals to verify candidate information, employment records and criminal data at the click of a mouse. This enhanced functionality automates manual checking procedures, reducing the likelihood of human error, fraudulent applications and unsatisfactory hires.

Tony Pickering, managing director of BackgroundChecking, commented, Effective candidate vetting is not just a fact of life in highly sensitive environments, such as airports or schools - it's entering the mainstream. The CIPD has found that a quarter of UK employers had to withdraw job offers after finding candidates misrepresented themselves in their applications. Thoroughly vetting candidates to mitigate these risks, however, is not only time consuming and expensive, it can also undermine candidates' trust in the employer brand. Our partnership with StepStone provides companies with a rapid, secure means to vet candidates effectively and efficiently whilst significantly reducing the risk of recruiting unsuitable employees.

StepStone's Channel Sales Partners bring extensive expertise in specific vertical or regional markets, to ensure StepStone's solutions match customers' requirements closely. One of the longest-standing Channel Sales Partners, Guardian News and Media, has completed ten major implementations in the UK public sector in the past year alone.

Commenting on the relationship with StepStone, Josh Smith, national online manager at The Guardian, added, Our partnership with StepStone has enabled us to complement our extensive experience in recruitment within the public sector with the best e-recruitment solution available. As a result, we have worked together to help many organisations to transform their approach to recruitment - cutting back on unnecessary costs so they can spend their money on key front-line services to the public.

Nick Holmes, Head of Partner Management at StepStone, concluded: Delivering the best results and most innovative services to customers anywhere in the world demands that we have a network of partners who share our values and our commitment to high standards. Our programme provides clients with compelling end-to-end solutions that increase the efficiency of the HR function, enhance the candidate experience and build employer brands. Over the course of 2008 we will be actively developing further partnerships that will enable us to take Total Talent Management to the next level.