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ProRail case study
(pdf)

_ProRail

ProRail enhances employer brand with
central recruitment solution

"PeopleXS gives control and direction to recruitment processes. And from 20 vacancies onwards, that starts to matter."

Godfried Koevoets, Interim recruitment manager

The company profile

Managing capacity, reliability and safety on the Dutch railway system is the core of ProRails activities. The railway giants’ working area covers more than 6,500 kilometres of railroad track which is maintained, renovated and expanded. Every day ProRail guides over 1 million passengers and 80,000 tons of freight into the right direction, which requires effective use of railways. In order to achieve this, the company divides their capacity based on transparent, objective standards, resulting in a clear and easy-to-use timetable for transporting operators. With this timetable, ProRail manages, guides and follows railway traffic day in and day out, dividing tracks and operating signals and switches. Working together with transport operators, ProRail repairs tracks and realises swift traffic recovery when problems occur. Transport companies and passengers are kept up-to-date continuously with clear travel information, not only in stations, but also on radio and teletext. From construction and maintenance to capacity management and traffic control: ProRail has a socially important task. A job that the company takes very seriously. ProRail strives to be the best railway manager in Europe in a few years time, and with more than 2,900 motivated professionals, they are well on their way.

The reasons

Godfried Koevoets MBA MSM, Interim Recruitment Manager at ProRail, explains that ProRails number of vacancies has increased strongly in the last year. “We can trace this back to three recent developments: first, the Dutch government, with whom we work closely together, has given us more tasks and responsibilities, which requires the employment of additional staff. Secondly, a reorganisation within the company resulted in a number of vacancies that needed to be filled. Lastly, outsourcing has traditionally been a part of ProRails recruitment strategy, but lately this has changed. ProRail now puts more emphasis on recruitment to find the people required for the job. These 3 developments, coupled with the facts that no recruitment solution was present in the company, and that we wanted to direct all recruitment activities within ProRail centrally drove us to look for a recruitment system”.

“We made a selection of 8 providers that could help us optimize our recruitment system, and defined several criteria that the solution had to meet in order to qualify. Our main requirements were that the solution would be web based, flexible, could integrate with our existing database and would be available within a short time. After we screened the providers on the basis of these criteria, 3 remained, and from that group we chose PeopleXS”.

The results

After using PeopleXS for 6 months, ProRail has seen very positive developments within their recruitment department. Godfried identifies 3 area’s in which change has occurred.

Control
“The big influx of vacancies and the absence of a recruitment solution resulted in a lack of control and direction over the whole recruitment process. The large amount of vacancies helped us realize that we were not well prepared for the future. With PeopleXS we now have better control of this influx and can respond to our candidates within an acceptable time span. We can now recruit centrally from our headquarters without having to worry about the number of candidates that apply at our company”.

Time
“PeopleXS has helped us to reduce our administration in the recruitment department by 50 to 75%. We used to lose a lot of time because there was no automation in the system that was used. The fact that we didn’t have a central overview of the status of all our candidates sometimes resulted in double processes and certainly didn’t help us to manage recruitment tasks efficiently. The time-saving factor has made it easier for our recruiters to do their tasks efficiently and effectively”.

Integration
“PeopleXS is linked with our vacancy website to allow for an integration between our recruitment system and candidates who apply through the internet. This allows us to optimize the communication between candidates, recruiters, line managers and HR officers. As soon as a candidate applies through our portal, a recruiter will receive a new task in PeopleXS and can proceed to start the selection process”.

Godfried summarizes the added value of PeopleXS for ProRail by stating that “PeopleXS gives control and direction to recruitment processes. And from 20 vacancies onwards, that starts to matter”.