Regional recruitment consultancy HRnet Group implements BYOD for more than 1,000 consultants with Microsoft Cloud and Mobility Services

 |   Singapore News Center

SINGAPORE, May 9, 2014 – Microsoft Singapore announced today that the HRnet Group, a leader in the human capital acquisition and management industry in the Asia Pacific region, has successfully deployed Office 365 and Microsoft Azure for its 1,000-strong force of highly-mobile recruitment professionals, enabling them to achieve higher productivity and collaboration across 10 Asia Pacific cities on any device of their choice, be it a notebook, tablet or smartphone.

The company is leveraging Microsoft Azure’s flexibility and scalability to host a custom-built application for screening job candidates that is accessed through a Windows 8 tablet. It has also deployed Office 365 to support seamless communications and sharing of documents across all country offices, ensuring that consultants were able to work from anywhere, anytime.

The IT team at HRnet Group had previously faced severe challenges in choosing the best device and service deploy across the 10 markets the company operates in, as technical support and availability are not ubiquitous across countries.

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 has allowed the HRnet Group to implement a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, in which consultants are able to use their preferred smartphones and tablets. This move has been warmly received by the company’s consultants, as they could immediately jump on board and get productive with Office 365 regardless of their choice of device.

“We chose Azure and Office 365 because of the ability of both platforms to integrate as one complete cloud deployment. We also believe that building our infrastructure on the Microsoft Cloud platform will support our current applications better than other cloud platforms in the market today,” said Tan Jun Wei, IT Manager, HRnet Group. “Our consultants can now access critical applications and information through any device they like, providing friction-free adoption of these new services and maximizing our IT investment.”

Enabling business agility and flexibility with Microsoft Azure
HRnet Group’s recruitment consultants are highly mobile and regularly meet with candidates outside of their offices. Additionally, with a growing database of resumes and reference materials, the company needed a solution that could store, manage and enable consultants to access these information in real-time.

To meet the needs of an increasingly-mobile workforce, HRnet Group has built a new career platform on Microsoft Azure that provides access to executive job listings, subscriptions and alerts. The ability to build and manage the application in an agile and flexible manner was a key factor for HRnet Group’s deployment of Microsoft Azure, and the company expects to achieve at least 30% cost savings from its yearly IT expenditure as there is no longer a need for upfront capital investments for hardware and servers.

HRnet Group’s IT department was also able to leverage on existing .NET programming skill sets and knowledge, as well as depend on Microsoft Azure’s high availability to drive value for the business through innovating and enhancing current processes, instead of spending time to manage and fix IT issues round-the-clock.

“With Microsoft Azure, the entry barrier to securing adequate hosting resources to scale as and when demand requires is removed,” added Tan. “Readily available services also follow faster deployment, and with guaranteed high-availability and secured access, the team is able to minimize any service hiccups that would have derailed projects or initiatives from the start.”

Enabling mobility for recruiters with Office 365
HRnet Group also deployed Office 365 to improve communications and collaboration for it’s mobile workforce across Asia. Office 365 enables consultants to work on candidate profile reports on-the-move, or even during the course of an interview.

HRnet Group’s various office locations across different cities are also now able to collaborate and stay updated on individual candidates in real-time, resulting in a more effective and efficient work process.

“With our previous on-premise email set-up, inboxes had a 1GB limit, and consultants kept running out of space,” said Tan.

With Office 365, HRnet Group consultants are now able to securely store up to 50GB of candidate information on the cloud, and easily access this data from both desktop and mobile platforms.

HRnet Group estimates at least 10% in time savings with the implementation of Office 365, which took only 6 weeks to implement internationally.

“BYOD is a movement that has become the norm in many modern companies, especially those with regional footprint like HRnet Group,” said Ngiam Foong Chee, Marketing & Operations Lead, Microsoft Singapore. “With Microsoft’s cloud products such as Office 365 and Microsoft Azure, IT departments can deploy solutions for its employees in a snap and focus on delivering value to the business, instead of getting caught up in complex and time-consuming operational tasks. Additionally, information workers can now be truly mobile and productive no matter where they are or which device they choose.”

To find out more about Office 365 for businesses, visit http://office.microsoft.com; and for Microsoft Azure, visit http://azure.microsoft.com/.

###

About HRnet Group
The HRnet Group has in excess of 1000 consultants in 10 cities across the Asia-Pacific actively engaged in the market on a daily basis. Whether you are in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok on a Sunday, Wednesday night or Public Holiday, through riots, snow storms and haze, we are right there with you. Nailing that talent who will make that difference in your company, or getting you that dream job.

Our deep and wide expertise in the fields of talent acquisition, talent management, contracting services, recruitment process outsourcing, and human capital consulting means we are uniquely positioned to meet your needs whether you are starting a new plant in Shanghai, managing a fast-growing conglomerate in Thailand or moving your headquarters to Singapore. The magic is, we work with passion. We sense and are able to advise our clients on shifts in the wind, we rapidly pool consultants across industrial and functional specializations spanning numerous cities in order to work out the best solutions, we have taken a sampan to secure a candidate when it was flooding, wooed another for a year because we knew he was The One. Though we have strengths that have kept us dominating the senior management and C Suite sphere, we will prioritize and fill a secretarial position tonight if that frees your mind and gives you peace to get your work done!

That is why we are one of the Top 50 Human Resource Providers globally, and have been consistently voted Top 10 Human Resource vendors in our respective local markets. Talk to us today at http://www.hrnetone.com/ourlocations.html.

About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,