Randstad: Demonstrating Success in Learning

International staffing firm Randstad Holding, which connects approximately 250,000 provisional personnel to businesses in 17 countries every day, touts the motto, “We put people to work.” A corollary of that […]

International staffing firm Randstad Holding, which connects approximately 250,000 provisional personnel to businesses in 17 countries every day, touts the motto, “We put people to work.” A corollary of that adage might be, “We prepare people for work.” The organization has provided professional learning programs for more than a million temporary employees, as well as 14,000 internal staff members. These externally focused educational offerings are a selling point for the more than 100,000 corporate clients in Randstad’s databases, said Vince Eugenio, Ph.D., chief learning officer of Randstad North America and global head of e-learning for the company.

“Our reach is phenomenal,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I came to Randstad. It’s not only for the internal challenge, but also working on the external challenge. It’s an interesting proposition: How do you provide services to the people you have working, as well as the clients who have these people working at their location? Many of these clients are Fortune 500 companies, but the bulk of them have 500 people or less. They don’t have training departments or the thought leadership around learning and development that the larger companies have, so the opportunity is absolutely huge.”

As a regional CLO and director of Randstad’s worldwide e-learning programs, Eugenio’s responsibilities are segmented into two areas. The first is internal learning and development for Randstad North America, which includes operations and sales training, leadership development, succession management and performance management. On the external side, he handles talent development—the people the company puts to work—and e-learning, which is offered as a value-add to the staffing services provided to corporate customers. “Even though we do make some money on that, it’s not the primary reason why we do it,” Eugenio said. “It’s really built to support a concrete differentiator between us and our competition by providing these learning services.”

Since he came to the company five years ago, Eugenio has worked to drive a more cost-effective and expedient learning and development function for Randstad. One of the things he accomplished was a staff reduction of more than 75 percent. “When I first came to Randstad, we had about 67 people in the training organization,” he said. “I was able to move that 67 down to 14, which is where we are right now. That’s approximately a $3 million savings on salaries, just in driving efficiencies and reduction of staff.”

Eugenio also has moved educational offerings online whenever possible by employing Cornerstone, CyberU’s integrated human capital management suite. This migration hasn’t always been smooth, as other organizational leaders—especially in Europe—are sometimes reluctant to adopt new technologies and methodologies. “When I first came to Randstad, I talked about e-learning and I remember seeing people cross their arms over their chest and say, ‘It sounds great, but how can we do a one-day course that we used to do face-to-face in 90 minutes using e-learning?’” Eugenio said. “There was all this stuff we had to get through. That’s kind of where we are right now, but they’re beginning to realize now that (classroom-based learning) is very expensive.”

The on-boarding program is one area in which Eugenio has demonstrated how e-learning can be used to reduce head count and cut costs in areas such as printed materials, travel and entertainment. “Even though the on-boarding process is 16 weeks, we were able to take a week out of that with the new approach that Cornerstone is helping us manage,” he said. “That is approximately a $900,000 savings. We took about $100,000 of printing expense out of that process. I was able to show them in a dollars-and-cents fashion how much we’re able to manage costs to the business while driving efficiencies and also deeply engaging managers in the process of owning the on-boarding process.”

Additionally, in 2003 and 2004, Eugenio and his team rolled out a new on-boarding model. They tested it by comparing the performance of members of a control group, which went through the old on-boarding process, against that of individuals in a treatment group that completed the new program. The comparison showed a dramatic difference: The control group’s revenues improved 24 percent year-over-year, while the treatment group posted gains of 108 percent. Also, the former had a 28 percent increase in gross margin percentages—an indicator of truly profitable revenues—versus a 125 percent rise in the same category for the latter. Finally, over the first five months of 2004, overall sales revenues surpassed the company’s projections by one-third, Eugenio said. “We were expecting to exceed last year’s sales by $60 million. It was over $80 million by the time the year closed out. Considering that we had brought on board between 700 and 800 people last year out of a field population of 1,500 to 1,800 people, I would say that there’s a pretty strong correlation between the effectiveness of the on-boarding and how aggressively we grew over the prior year.”

Eugenio selects certain sets of metrics to illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of these learning programs to Randstad’s senior leadership. “As (chief learning officers) think about how they frame their business to others within the company, they should always talk in terms of the business,” he said. “That’s what (executives) care about. I don’t typically talk to the executives about numbers of seats filled or how many classes we delivered. They don’t care about seats. Seats are an indication of consumption.”

–Brian Summerfield, brians@clomedia.com

June 2005 Table of Contents