Colleague Extends International Reach With Four European Client Wins

Colleague Extends International Reach With Four European Client Wins

Norwegian consultancy wanted software to be as easy as Å, Æ, Ø

Colleague, the recruitment software company, could already claim that their solutions were being used by recruiters in 23 different countries. However, since winning new clients in Norway, Switzerland, Spain and France they’re well on the way to notching up customers in 30 territories around the world.

In the last few months Colleague has beaten off competition to provide its recruitment software solutions to Beagle IT Services SL in Madrid, Helvetica Partners Sàrl in Geneva and Coemy Group in Paris. However, it was winning the contract to provide a software solution to Centerpoint AS which, according to Colleague Managing Director Will Minns, proved to be the most challenging to the Colleague team.

Centerpoint AS is an IT and Engineering consultancy based in Oslo, Norway. Having scoured the market for the right software solution they settled on Colleague because of the company’s typical ‘can-do’ approach to taking on new challenges.

The challenge was this. The Norwegian alphabet consists of 29 characters, the usual 26 of the A to Z plus three more characters: Æ, Ø and Å and their lower case equivalents. It was vital to Centerpoint AS that their software could read and manipulate data in CVs, emails and other documents which used the full Norwegian character set and that the database and customisable data fields would work perfectly with all 29 letters of their alphabet.

Colleague’s skilled developers set about tackling the problem and quickly came up with a solution.

Jon-Harald Gaarde, Centerpoint AS Financial Manager, said: “It was important to us that whatever system we chose was able to work with Norwegian as we didn’t want to have to adapt the way we worked just to suit the software. The whole point was to simplify our processes, not make them more complicated. Wherever we looked none of the systems matched our requirements. Then, we spoke to Colleague and they said ‘leave it with us and we’ll find a way’. They did and we’ve been running Colleague software successfully at Centerpoint AS ever since.”

Will Minns, Managing Director of Colleague, said: “We’re delighted to have taken on some new European clients. However, although we’re used to Colleague being used in places as far afield as Singapore and Saudi Arabia this was the first time we’d been given the problem of working with a different alphabet. Despite the team’s initial reaction being ‘What have you promised this time Will?’ they love a challenge really and they rose to overcome this one in typical Colleague style.”

Colleague is at the leading edge of the recruitment software industry offering a fully integrated recruitment management system operating with the Microsoft Office suite of products. Colleague has been certified Microsoft partners since 2004 and Microsoft Gold certified partners since 2006. In a recent Microsoft Partner Programme Customer Satisfaction Survey 100% of respondents said that they definitely would recommend Colleague products and services to a friend or associate.