Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Michael De Blauwe, project leader of the Innovation Lab at VDAB, the public employment bureau for Belgium’s Flanders region.
In the past, clients walked into one of our employment offices and waited to meet with one of our consultants. Today, they don’t have to leave home to get face-to-face feedback on their resumes or participate in mock interviews. Timing is critical for job seekers, and at VDAB – the public employment bureau for Flanders – we’re using Google Apps to more quickly and efficiently help people in need of job services and training. We’re also reaching more people while saving money by reducing the number of physical employment centers by nearly 30%.
What used to take a week for an in-person resume workshop followed by a practice interview, now happens in less than 24 hours. Our thousands of employment specialists use Google Hangouts and Google Docs to review customers’ resumes and coach them on interview skills. This digital transformation has been a hit with job seekers. In 2013, we had 4,920 people use our new e-coaching services, and 83% said they would recommend it to friends.
We’re not just using Apps to serve more people — we’re delivering better service. VDAB job coaches now use Google Drive to store resources and Docs to comment on clients’ resumes while speaking with them on Hangouts. All of a client’s job-related files are stored in one place, with all feedback contained within the document.
Our team also works together more efficiently. Because our coaches work from different locations throughout Flanders, it’s helpful to have a central repository that allows people to share information and work together from different locations. We use Google Drive to share information about job openings and Google Sheets to track customer queries in a single document that everyone can access. Before Google, we’d send thousands of emails back and forth to share resources, respond to customers, and schedule appointments.
When we made a company-wide push behind Apps in 2012, using our early Google adopters to inform others, we found that it was already taking hold. Now that all of VDAB has switched to Apps, we’re moving faster, helping more people build their job-seeking skills and matching more employers with qualified candidates.
We worked with Capgemini, a Google Apps Premier Partner in Belgium, who performed this successful migration.
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