Consumer finance company accelerates candidate screening and processing by 80% with OpenText AppWorks and OpenText Extended ECM, helping to rapidly deliver and retain the talent needed to drive growth
For more than two decades, Home Credit has offered consumer finance solutions that empower people to live the lives they want. Today, the company offers on-demand services through its responsive mobile app, bringing credit to millions of individuals under-served by traditional financial services institutions. In recent years, Home Credit has expanded its footprint far beyond its domestic market in the Czech Republic.
The company now offers its services in seven countries in Asia Pacific and Central Asia, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines and India. Renata Mrazova, Chief People Officer at Home Credit, shared: “To bring the benefits of accessible, affordable finance to a broader customer base, we are building a substantial presence in markets around the world. As a result, we are hiring tens of thousands of people each month, especially in Asia Pacific and Central Asia. Our goal is to be an employer of choice in all the countries we operate in, helping us attract and retain the top talent we need to drive our growth.” Like many leading enterprises, Home Credit’s hiring process involves several stages: advertising positions, inviting candidates for interview, screening for criminal records and convictions and issuing job offers and employment contracts. HR teams in each country are also responsible for onboarding new hires by entering new employees into the company’s HR system, arranging training and provisioning IT equipment and security passes. “Previously, recruitment and onboarding depended entirely on paper-based work,” said Mrazova. “In some regions, our HR teams onboard up to 20,000 people each month, and the sheer volume of documents—and the manual tasks surrounding them—made the process extremely time consuming. Long lead times for hiring were a significant cost driver that also threatened to slow down our business growth efforts.
And from the candidate perspective, slow, opaque processes caused frustration, which increases the risk of applicants dropping out.” To solve these challenges, Home Credit decided to take a fresh approach to recruitment and onboarding. The goal was to automate the processes from end to end, enhancing the experience for candidates and HR employees and enabling the business to bring talent on board faster. “Streamlining the recruitment and onboarding journey promised to deliver many benefits,” Mrazova confirmed. “As well as reducing our operational costs, the HR digitalization initiative would improve the experience both for candidates and HR personnel: building our brand and reducing attrition.”
By continuing our work with Sabris and OpenText, we're poised to make Home Credit an employer of choice across Asia Pacific and around the world.
Home Credit engaged an expert team from Sabris to design a global template for recruitment and onboarding, powered by OpenText™ AppWorks™. The new digital HR solution included an easy-to-use app that guides candidates through every stage of the process—from uploading documents to signing employment contracts. Candidates can check the status of their application at any time and receive fast answers to their questions from the company’s HR professionals, enhancing the experience and boosting satisfaction.
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After reviewing solutions from several leading IT vendors, Home Credit selected OpenText AppWorks with OpenText Extended ECM and OpenText Document Presentment for SAP Solutions as the foundation for its automated HR workflows.
“The OpenText solutions met all the key requirements we set during the evaluation stage,” recalled Mrazova. “One of our core global solutions is SAP ERP, and the close strategic partnership between OpenText and SAP gave us confidence that the new solutions would integrate effectively with our existing environment. We also wanted the flexibility to go beyond HR digitization in the future and streamline other transactional processes in functions such as legal, finance and IT. OpenText had strong references showing that AppWorks and Extended ECM could help automate these areas, too.”
Just as important as finding the right solution was finding the right partner to deploy it. Mrazova continued: “We wanted to work with consultants who had deep technical expertise in the OpenText solutions. We also wanted a partner with the industry experience to advise us on best practices as we designed the blueprint for our digital HR processes—and Sabris brought both to the table.”
Working closely with Sabris, Home Credit began with implementations for its Indonesia and Vietnam businesses. Štěpán Bouda, Head of Digital Advisory Services at Sabris, said: “One of our primary goals was to create a global template that was standardized enough to be repeatable across multiple countries, but also sufficiently flexible to allow for specific local regulatory requirements.
To accelerate the process, Sabris formed three dedicated teams: one focused on gathering requirements from each country and designing the solution, one focused on solution deployment and configuration, and one dedicated to user acceptance testing and support. Once a team has completed their work for one country, they start work on the next—and the lessons learned help to accelerate the subsequent projects.”
During the initial implementation projects, the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping around the world—making it impossible for Sabris and Home Credit personnel based in the Czech Republic to travel to Indonesia and Vietnam. Instead, the teams collaborated with leadership teams and HR groups in each country using digital collaboration tools.
Yaroslav Vassitskiy, Group HR Digitalization Manager at Home Credit, elaborated: “This is an extremely complex waterfall project with many moving parts. Sabris went the extra mile to help us keep moving forward despite the additional challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and time zone differences. The Sabris team was always willing to jump on early-morning calls to help resolve issues and their flexibility made a big contribution to the success of our first deployments in Indonesia and Vietnam.”
Today, Home Credit has switched to the new recruitment and onboarding solution in Indonesia and Vietnam, replacing time-consuming manual steps with automated workflows. Screening processes are now performed by the solution, which also generates employment contracts based on approved, standardized templates stored in OpenText Extended ECM and are delivered to prospective employees using OpenText Document Presentment. Once employees have signed the contract on their mobile device, OpenText AppWorks creates an employee record in SAP ERP and generates a Jira ticket to provision identity badges, desk space and IT equipment for new hires.
Our OpenText solutions are accelerating screening and processing activities by up to 80% - freeing our HR professionals from repetitive tasks and enhancing the candidate experience.
As the global rollout continues, the OpenText solution is already unlocking valuable efficiencies for Home Credit’s operations in Asia Pacific. Liberated from repetitive, manual tasks, the company’s HR teams are free to focus on higher-value activities, such as talent management and employee engagement, as well as brand perception and HR analytics. Crucially, the new approach dramatically accelerates the recruitment and onboarding journey—helping Home Credit to attract and retain talent in growth markets and build its reputation as an employer of choice.
One of the biggest time-savings for HR teams is the screening process. In the past, employees performed checks manually in up to nine separate systems—a significant drag on time and efficiency. Today, the OpenText solution performs the checks and captures the results automatically, eliminating hours of work.
Vassitskiy confirmed: “Although we’ve only been using the digital HR solutions in Indonesia and Vietnam for a short time, the results are striking. Our OpenText solutions are accelerating screening and processing activities by up to 80%—freeing our HR professionals from repetitive tasks and shrinking time-to-hire.”
Home Credit saw that improving the HR experience would make an important contribution to improving employee satisfaction, bringing with it other important benefits such as increased engagement, higher productivity and a reduced risk of attrition.
“Our focus groups show that the majority of candidates are happy with the new digital journey, and we are continuously looking for opportunities to simplify and improve the experience,” said Vassitskiy.
Ondrej Zizka, Group HR Systems and Data Manager at Home Credit, commented: “Being able to apply to Home Credit through a mobile app makes the whole process far more appealing to prospective employees, particularly Millennials and Gen-Z applicants. The mobile HR solution also offers a much more responsive and transparent experience for employees, which helps us foster greater satisfaction. In the long run, we anticipate that the OpenText solution will help us drive a 15% improvement in employee retention overall, and even higher levels of retention in our global HR functions.”
As Home Credit continues to roll out the digital HR solution across Asia Pacific, the company is strengthening its ability to recruit and retain talent—fueling international growth. At the same time, the organization is eliminating its dependency on paper, helping it to shrink its environmental footprint.
Vassitskiy commented: “Our ultimate goal is to transition to fully paperless operations. We’re just starting out on our digital transformation journey, but we’ve already cut the paper we use in one of our global HR functions by 90%. Thanks to OpenText and Sabris, we can now generate, sign and store all HR documents digitally.”
As its global HR solution deployment continues, Home Credit is already looking ahead. For example, the company plans to create a single, standardized source of operational HR data—enabling it to harness analytics to reveal opportunities to further improve metrics such as time-to-hire.
“We are enabling HR teams across our global business to devote more of their time and energy to meaningful work,” concluded Mrazova. “With the support of our CEOs and HR heads in Indonesia and Vietnam, we’ve shaped a fast, efficient onboarding and hiring process that is already having a powerful impact on employee satisfaction. By continuing our work with Sabris and OpenText, we’re poised to make Home Credit an employer of choice across Asia Pacific and around the world.”
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