Torque Success Story

Start-up recruiter builds success on FastTrack Enterprise suite.

Industry: Blue-collar labour hire and Professional placements.

Headquarters: Brisbane South, QLD

Locations: Brisbane North, QLD; Perth, WA; South Hedland (Pilbara region)

Annual revenue: $50 million+

Staff: 40+ internal; payroll 600+ weekly

They have a good, critical look at what you are trying to do...they will ask, 'Have you tried this way? Have you tried using this particular functionality?'...before walking down the path of talking dollars. I think that is such an honourable way to do business.

The value system that sits behind that is very important when you are talking about long-term partnership."

David Byrnes
Managing Director and CEO, Torque Recruitment Group

The Business Challenge

Torque was a start-up company looking to make its biggest purchase: an IT system that would be the bedrock of its success.

Company founder David Byrnes, who had extensive experience in the recruitment industry, knew exactly what he needed in a system to best serve his business: "I wanted a product that was well supported, robust, integrated, and that could grow with us.

"It was particularly important that the payroll-billing system must be integrated and it must be incredibly robust. I expected to put it under enormous pressure because we planned quick growth in the labour hire side of the business.

"I also wanted powerful search capabilities in the CRM side of the software."

The FastTrack Recruitment Management Solution

Torque was in the somewhat unusual position of being a start-up company, but planning quick and aggressive growth in booming industries (mining and construction). Byrnes knew from his industry experience that an entry-level solution would not meet his company's needs for long.

He said: "It would be easy to say we over-purchased by buying the Enterprise product, but we knew that we would grow into it and that it would carry us for a decade or more. As it turns out, if we had bought a smaller version we would have already had to migrate."

FastTrack's consulting and technical team worked with Byrnes and his senior managers to establish business requirements and to map their planned processes and procedures into standard operating processes/procedures using their FastTrack system's capabilities. This enabled Torque to contain costs because minimal customisations were required.

The Results

• Zero downtime in the two-and-a-half years the FastTrack system has been operational.
• Scalability and cost-effectiveness of the product licensing, giving low annual operating costs per staff member.
• High versatility and functionality of the payroll system to be able to handle complex on-hire and a multitude of awards, EBAs, allowances and deductions.
• Minimal customisations required to standard FastTrack products to achieve processes and functionalities required.

Why choose FastTrack?

FastTrack's suite ticked all Byrnes's technical requirements, but he also found the company's 'intangibles' compelling.

"Like anything in life, when looking for a long-term relationship, you want to be dealing with people who give you confidence," Byrnes said. "Ultimately, your leap of faith is only rewarded if people live up to what they have promised. And that's what FastTrack has done.

"The product has been in a competitive marketplace for a substantial period of time and FastTrack is a well-established company. Lots of different companies doing all different types of recruitment are using the product, at enterprise level and in smaller companies. That gives you confidence, too, because if you want to maintain clients you have got to have a very good product.

"So I had confidence in the longevity of product and the quality of how it was supported, which were both critical to me."

Professional services, customer support and product support

"We are meeting soon to look at installing an upgrade to parts of our system and I'm really looking forward to that, to catching up with people I haven't see for a while and also because it's a very exciting phase we're going into and it's going to add more value for our clients, our candidates, and our internal staff," Byrnes said.

Byrnes was also impressed by FastTrack's approach to requests for customisations. "They have a good, critical look at what you are trying to do. One of the first things they will do is ask, 'Have you tried using the system in this way? Have you tried using this particular functionality?'

"They say that before you start walking down the path of talking dollars with them. I think that is such an honourable way to do business. That's been a very pleasing aspect of the relationship.

"The value system that sits behind that is very important when you are talking about long-term partnership."

How has using FastTrack helped your business to grow?

"The speed and ease of FastTrack's search function has been important to our growth, because we rely on speed to market, but with the right candidate.

"We've put the front-end system under a huge amount of pressure. For example,for the Moreton Island oil spill in 2009, we had to find 350 people within four days. I'm talking mobilised, on the barge, on the island in four days from nothing. The system enabled us to find 2000 suitable candidates fast in our database. Yes, we had to make the phone calls, but if you can't extract the information you've got no one to call.

"The robustness of the integrated payroll-billing system has also been very important to us, because if you get the pay wrong you also get the invoicing wrong. If your payroll system is down for a day or the front-end crashes, you're in big trouble. You can't afford to disappoint or annoy candidates or clients, because there are plenty of our competitors they can turn to.

"And the fact is that we've not had one minute of downtime in more than two-and-a-half years; I wouldn't have expected that. I've been amazed; it's exceeded my expectations in that regard. It's been absolutely outstanding.

"The people behind FastTrack have recruitment experience and have clearly learnt a lot about recruitment and understand our needs and have built that into the software."

Featured article: ftp e-newsletter - November 2011