SEES BOND AS KEY TO ONGOING GROWTH

Academic Work goes live with Bond Adapt in Sweden, bringing the total number of Academic Work employees using Bond Adapt up to 350, with further substantial growth expected in the next three years.

Academic Work, a temping agency specialising in Young Professionals in the Nordics, has successfully gone live with specialist portfolio of recruitment software applications, Bond Adapt, in Sweden – the third of Academic Work’s countries of activity to have deployed Bond Adapt since 2009 – and will be relying on Bond Adapt in two further territories, Norway and Denmark, before the end of 2012. Indeed, Academic Work is projecting an overall increase in growth of users of over 200% over the coming three years.

Academic Work helps companies reach university students and young professionals for short time assignments, as well as full time employment. Established in Sweden in 1998, the company now boasts an impressive €120 million annual turnover, places over 16,000 candidates per year and is predicting doubling in turnover and headcount over the next two years with the addition of new geographical locations.

As Academic Work continued to add new territories to its network over the last two years, each had initially set up its own processes and IT infrastructure, with little or no overall integration with the other geographies. With further expansion set for 2012, Academic Work decided now was the time to deploy a centralised recruitment system that could be rolled out readily internationally, operate multi-lingually and function from a single database so as to allow improved reporting, increased sharing of information and overall faster working practices.

Impressed by Bond’s experience in providing for large, multi-national corporates, such as Hays and Manpower, its financial stability and its software’s flexibility and scalability, the latest version of Bond Adapt was selected after a thorough review of the market.

Daniel Wrangsjö, Project Manager, Academic Work, comments, “Rapid expansion, especially when international, often brings with it a certain level of fragmentation. We were keen to prevent this occurring by bringing in a system that was first of all flexible enough to accommodate and streamline our own individual workflows, but also sufficiently robust to be used as a single system in all countries. Finally, it of course had to be sufficiently scalable to allow us to continue our growth without fear of outgrowing our systems.”

Wrangsjö concludes, “The deployment of Bond Adapt throughout our organisation will be instrumental in supporting our aggressive business expansion plans. Indeed, had we selected a recruitment system that did not offer such flexibility and scalability, I believe that we would struggle to continue our transition into a large, seamless, multi-national business. The centralised database that Bond Adapt provides us with is fantastic. Through the introduction of software, we are able to seamlessly draw on candidate records from our other countries of operation and use these for placements in other countries. We have high ambitions for the future and with such a strong infrastructure supporting us, we are able to realistically aim to grow the user count by 300% within the next three years.”