Belgian employment agency VDAB offers job services at the speed of Google Apps

Posted by Michael De Blauwe, Project Leader of the Innovation Lab at VDAB

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.

Read More..

Android Developers Backstage Episode 4 Google Play Services

Tor Norbye and Chet Haase are joined by Jeff Hamilton from the Google Play services team.

In this continuation of the mini-series with Tall Engineers Named Jeff (starting with episode #2 with Jeff Sharkey), this episode goes in-depth into the Google Play services library, which provides easier, Android-friendly access to various Google APIs, such as authentication and mapping.

Download the podcast at this link. 

Read More..

Googles interactive StarWars page

Visit google.com/starwars and choose your side.

Read More..

Polygon Group uses Google Apps to drive disaster response

Posted by Mats Randleff, IT Director for Stockholm, Sweden-based Polygon Group

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Mats Randleff, IT Director for Stockholm, Sweden-based Polygon Group, a global provider of property damage restoration, temporary humidity control and property performance services. 

When disaster strikes, Polygon Group is often the first call companies make to help restore their facilities and critical documents. We also provide services like humidity control to prevent property damage, and consult on business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Nearly two-thirds of our 2,800-employees are mobile, so we can be on the spot for our customers whenever we’re needed.

Every minute counts when companies are trying to get back to business after a fire or flood, so our field technicians need reliable communication tools. We used various email systems across our 300 offices, but they needed rigorous IT support to stay up and running. We looked to the cloud for a single system our entire workforce could use and considered Microsoft 365 and IBM SmartCloud (since we’d been using Lotus Notes), but Google Apps stood out as a single, secure system with all the functionality we needed.

We believed our employees would quickly embrace Google tools, since Android was already our most widely used platform for mobile devices. When we tested Google Apps with 50 managers throughout Polygon and saw a 95% satisfaction rate, we wasted no time rolling out Apps to more than 1,900 users worldwide. We worked with Avalon Solutions, a Google Apps Premier Partner in the Nordics, who performed the successful migration and roll-out to our global team.

Since moving to Apps in spring 2013, we’ve achieved significant cost savings. We’ve reduced travel expenses because our workers use video-conferencing on Hangouts to meet rather than coordinate costly and time-consuming in-person meetings. IT support costs are down, too. In fact, compared to our previous Lotus Notes environment, our cost per user is about 50% less – which translates to about $480,000 in annual savings.

Global cooperation has also improved, particularly because group managers have embraced Google Sites as a strategic tool. They’ve created sites for business systems used to report on each group’s operational performance. Managers can monitor financial metrics, key performance indicators, and other information in a single environment that’s easy to use and share. We plan to create sites for our country management teams to track business performance for each region.

Google Apps opens up new ways of working at all levels within Polygon, from managers to field technicians. What began as a search for a new email system has evolved into a complete overhaul of our communications. Today, thousands of Polygon employees across more than a dozen countries communicate and collaborate with ease using Google Apps. The greatest benefit for us is that we now can provide a faster, more effective response to businesses in the challenging and courageous position of overcoming natural disaster.

Read More..