How Kallidus transformed Sykes’ people processes

Recently acquired by Sitel, Sykes is a pioneer in exceptional customer care and support, providing multichannel demand generation and customer engagement services. With recruitment and onboarding processes that exhausted their team and resources, Sykes needed a scalable solution to support their continued growth.

A change-up was needed

The main challenge? Sykes’ onboarding processes were pretty basic before. Everything in the recruiting and onboarding process had to be completed manually. We’re talking copy/paste templates in Outlook, signing and scanning paperwork with candidate’s details, and even gaining offer and acceptance information via phone or email (a perfect recipe for a human error disaster).

“With WFH, it’s so important to eliminate human error. If you put the wrong address in, equipment will go to the wrong house” – Stavros Patlakas, Programme Manager

To add to the confusion, many tasks required instant inter-departmental communication, creating never-ending bottlenecks and blockers. It became apparent to the team that sustainable growth required a single source of truth for all data.

With these manual processes, even without counting the risk of human error, the onboarding process would last 7 days, sometimes even more! And as they are ramping up for major recruitment, their current process was just not scalable.

Too much time was being spent (or even wasted) on manual admin, and the focus was too centred on processes, rather than people. With company values of being bold and doing more with less, Sykes needed more time to spend on the bigger matters at hand and focus on their teams.

What gave them that time? Our ATS, Recruit.

Paperwork? Never heard of it

Since implementing Recruit in 2021, Sykes’ recruitment team has seen major improvements, including the automation of many manual processes. And forget the paperwork: clunky manual sign-and-scan is replaced with slick automation.

Recruit’s automation has even enabled recruiters to ‘step back’ at job offer stage and allow HR to handle everything beyond that point. This means less back and forth between departments, reducing friction and mistakes, and actually allowing the recruiters more time to, well, recruit!

Historically, Sykes’ successful candidates received an offer letter that is specific to them. For a 34-page document of conditions, and each nuance of a contract needed to be inputted and checked, the process was time-consuming and clunky, to say the least. This is why Recruit’s ‘Merge fields’ was crucial to the success of the implementation because it can turn the 34 pages of conditions into just a 2-page offer!

Recruit even allows new users to be automatically created, saving the Operations team from manually adding new users to the teams. Even the equipment and software setups are all automated!

Better experience for the team

Sykes’ onboarding process has never looked better. Recruit has enabled the process to be more standardised, eliminating any risk of human error. With all information sent straight to HR systems and all departments via API, Sykes’ HR team has said goodbye to all bottlenecks.

And in a centralised location, the process can now be closely monitored by HR, preventing any issues as they’re flagged early. This means the HR team have more time due to smarter processes.

And it’s not just a better experience, they can actually track the amount of time they’re saving!

Sykes’ whole onboarding process is just faster! What used to take 7+ days is now just 2 days. Yes, that’s right. Just 2 days for agent details, all the tickets, literally everything. Just imagine all the hours the HR team has gained back…and the important people management they can do with this time. Game-changing.

So, by saving the 20 minutes per candidate for the recruitment process (464 hours/year), 7 minutes per candidate for HR (162 hours) and 2 minutes per candidate for the operations team (46 hours), Sykes has gained 672 hours per year back. That’s a whopping £24,397 per year saved!

Looking to the future

As Sykes becomes Sitel, they will expand Kallidus’ products to the full group, so that everybody will use the same platform across the global organisation. Doesn’t that just make life easier?

Can you really afford to keep wasting hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds each year on inefficient processes? It’s time to give your recruitment and onboarding an automation uplift. Look no further. Speak to one of our experts today to transform your process.