Hays Accelerates CRM Adoption & Improves Employee Engagement With Whatfix

The Hays Story

Global Recruiting Leader Strives For More Efficient Communication and Workflows

Hays is a leading global recruiting group on a mission to match qualified professionals with their next role. A market leader in the UK, Asia Pacific, Continental Europe, and Latin America, Hays placed 77,000 people in permanent roles last year alone.

Recruiting agencies know the importance of finding quality talent and making informed decisions. At the same time, job seekers want an efficient process. If recruiters are slow to act, prospects could drop out or find a different placement.

Hays employs 11,000 people worldwide and strives to ensure efficient communication and workflow, so employees and companies are matched as quickly as possible. With 24 different internal applications, training employees on updates and addressing questions is time-consuming. Hays partnered with Whatfix to promote an efficient recruitment process, drive feature adoption, and employ in-application learning.

The Challenge

The Need for Faster, More Effective User Communication

In order to maintain strong relationships and streamline communication, Hays uses a customer relationship management (CRM) solution called IRIS in the Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark branches where users need to be virtually trained on IRIS’ constantly evolving features. The quicker employees learn how to navigate their systems, the quicker they can find quality talent.

New employees are trained on IRIS during onboarding, but Hays found it challenging to keep employees informed on every new development within the platform.

Hays created resources to communicate the updates to employees. Even if users did hear about the new features, some still had challenges figuring out how to use them in the best way. With over 1,500 IRIS users, fielding every question and troubleshooting every problem became time-consuming.

The Solution

Hays Streamlined CRM Training With Whatfix’s In-App Notifications and Support Resources

Hays began looking for a digital adoption solution to directly inform IRIS users about new functions, best practices, and essential sales processes. They sought a training solution where users could learn in the application — while using IRIS.

The Hays team chose to work with Whatfix over other competitors due to Whatfix’s easy content creation and multiple publishing formats. They were also impressed by Whatfix’s personalized approach.

With Whatfix, Hays has been able to streamline change management. Whatfix easily integrates with the IRIS platform and alerts users of updates using Beacons. Users can then learn how to use the feature without leaving the application.

Users can then learn how to use the feature without leaving the application. Previously, a confused IRIS user would contact their manager to find the correct SharePoint folder, read through the list of files that might contain the right help article, and then flip back and forth from the help article to IRIS to try and solve their problems. With Whatfix, users can engage Self Help and get guided help right away.

Hays even created a mascot from the Self Help feature to encourage feature stickiness. They named it ‘ERO,’ which comes from the Latin word ‘Erogito,’ meaning learn/explore.

ERO introduced itself to users with a pop-up saying, “I can help you carry out processes, give you important tips, draw your attention to new fields, or link you to other sources of knowledge. You can find me in the top right corner if you need my help.” This has been highly successful, with an average engagement of around 1,500 IRIS users.

Hays also takes advantage of other features to improve the user experience. Hays implemented:

• 34 Flows — interactive software walkthroughs that have been viewed over 400 times.
• 118 Smart Tips — information displayed to users while using an application to help them with everyday challenges.
• 34 Flows: Interactive walkthroughs with step-by-step guidance that have been viewed over 400 times.
• 118 Smart Tips: Tooltips and quick help info displayed to users while using an application to help them with everyday challenges.

The Results

Hays Reduced Support Queries By 75% with Whatfix

The partnership with Whatfix allows Hays to provide in-app training and support for their IRIS users. Hays takes advantage of several Whatfix features to make training more efficient.

With the addition of Self Help and the ERO mascot, Hays has seen 75% fewer support tickets. “We have received positive feedback about Whatfix,” Katja Marggraf, Business Owner ERO for GSC+DK at Hays, said. “Team leaders confirm it’s a fantastic opportunity for self-learning because it enables users to search in-application and find answers to their questions quickly.”

Hays also uses Whatfix to ask its employees what they want to learn and where they have problems. With their answers, Hays can build content to address those needs quickly. By using a Pop-up to get user feedback, Hays saw 5x higher employee engagement.

With such impressive results on just one of their recruiting tools for Hays in their Germany branch, the Whatfix team predicts continued success and is excited to help make Hays organizations’ recruiting process even more productive on several other applications.