Manpower use no-code strategically in staffing industry

Innovate to automate

In several industries, running your business depends on having a certain number of qualified employees on-site. Especially within HORECA (Hotels, Restaurants and Catering) and healthcare, filling up ad-hoc vacant positions as a result of short-term sickness or other uncontrollable circumstances is vital.

From Manpower’s perspective, this presented an opportunity for innovation and to establish themselves as a market leader. Using their expertise within staffing, they aimed to significantly improve the process of staffing ad-hoc vacant positions.

Previously, when an employee called in sick or otherwise could not come to work, Manpower would primarily use phone lists to manually call qualified candidates. The process of finding the right candidates was both highly manual and inefficient.

As a starting point, an off-the-shelf planner software was evaluated in cooperation with their largest customer. However, by subjecting it to real-life scenarios and everyday challenges, Manpower experienced that there were still too many manual processes not supported, as well as realizing it did not have all the functionality Manpower was seeking.

Based on their experiences, Manpower decided to make a brief specification of their business goals and of what they wished to accomplish with the new solution. Lessons learned from the preliminary off-the-shelf project were combined with ambitions on how to make a revolutionary new service for both customers and employees.

To implement this service, Manpower chose to go with Genus and no-code – as it allowed for an agile and highly iterative approach to build and test the software in a short period of time. The innovation project was a joint effort between business experts, no-code developers and customers, where each iteration added new functionality and adjusted previously implemented functionality according to feedback from test users.

“Based on our experience with the platform, we knew how quickly changes could be made with Genus and no-code development. This stands in contrast to our experiences with traditional programming. The ability to easily make changes was especially important, as we were sure decisions would be made and reverted during the project,” said Sissel Nyegaard-Larssen, Business Analyst at Manpower Norway.

The result was a solution tailored to Manpower’s work processes. In the new web-based solution, each customer has a calendar with all its assignments connected to the specific employee that will be working that shift. If an employee calls in sick, the solution allows the customer to announce a vacant spot – and the application will automatically send out a notification to a pool of qualified candidates.

For the candidates, available opportunities can quickly be accepted through a mobile app. From the same app, they can also view their planned shifts and declare their availability for the coming days and weeks – feeding important information into the system. As a result, Manpower has become an orchestrator of the process – automating almost all manual steps.

“When using the new solution, I can be on location at a customer and within five minutes have the software up and running for that client. The employees make themselves available in the app which makes it easy for the customer to staff assignments. To this day, I have not seen a better solution in the market,” said Lars Morten Windelstad, Business Service Center Manager at ManpowerGroup.

In 2019, there were approximately 78 000 assignments fulfilled through the solution. It has contributed to reduced workloads and costs for both Manpower and their customers, as well as improved the experience, work routines and terms for their employees.